Website too simple?

[Daniel Klann]

Hi folks,

I haven't posted much on here but I've spent plenty of time reading some of the threads and have learnt a lot :-)

Anyway, I've created a draft website for a friend of mine that he's going to use to promote his business. It's here : http://www.danielklann.com/ftse/

I'd just like to know what people think of it (the layout/design, not the content). I've ensured that the pages validate correctly against the W3C's validator. I like websites that are clean and quick to load but not too bland. I think this site may be a bit on the bland side. What do YOU guys do to liven things up, without adding unnecessary crap to the blend? I don't want to design any Flash animations or anything - I just want to give him a site that he'll like and that his customers will find functional, yet attractive. Any comments are gratefully received. I'm not a web developer by trade and my payment for doing this is a crate of beer :) - that is presuming he likes it.

Regards,
Dan

[buntine]

I'm not a web developer by trade and my payment for doing this is a crate of beer

True australian style;) But shouldnt you say "A slab o' tinnies, mate"?

I think the site looks good, although, it is definetely a tad bland..

I think the best thing to do is stick an image down the right-hand side of each page. An actual photo.

Regards,
Andrew Buntine.

[buntine]

Furthermore, for a crate of beer, i think hes got himself a pretty good deal.

[Webfreak]

I think that the page looks great. But for my opinion is that it is too empty.

I can't tell you what you should add to the site, because it looks pretty OK but I don't like so much of white space. But it is also true that this is the page which will be loaded much more quickly :)

So if you are without ideas try to look at CSS zengarden (http://www.csszengarden.com/) and you will probobly get some. This is only my opinion and you don't have to chane anything if you don't want but I will if I were you.

PS Pretty good work! ;)

[toicontien]

Originally posted by buntine
Furthermore, for a crate of beer, i think hes got himself a pretty good deal.
Depends on the beer. Maybe ask for another crate :D

I'd fly to Australia to share some brewskies!

To Daniel Klann: the logo would look much better as a GIF image. JPEGs don't reproduce graphics very well when they have large swaths of one color and text.

I've attached a GIF image of just something I played around with to spice it up a bit. Nothing major. But you'll get the idea. Do you have Photoshop available to you, or Paint Shop Pro? You could also download The Gimp from www.gimp.org - It's a freeware graphics and photo editor. It has about the same functionality as Photoshop, it's just not as user friendly.

[buntine]

If its australian; its good;) He probably would hav done it for one can. :p

[Daniel Klann]

Hello guys, and thanks for your replies.

CSS Zen Garden looks like a cool site with some very nice looking designs. I will play later today.

I didn't know that about GIFs and you're right - it does look much better. The image I used was taken from his existing site, changed to an orangey colour with PSP. I like the look of what you did Greg and I think using that type of design would help the whitespace problem (i.e. having too much of it).

I'm going to meet with my mate tonight and see what he reckons as an idea for an image down the side or something. When I've made some changes I'll post back.

Cheers, and have a good day!
Dan

[Webfreak]

You can also find some good ideas for design on ALA (http://www.alistapart.com/)
:D:p

[Daniel T]

Also, you should have a layout scheme. I mean, you don't use tables( :mad: ), frames( :mad: ), or CSS( :D ), meaning you don't have a proper layout:(. It may be fine now, but you may run into problems later on if you are looking to make changes in the design of your site. You can check out W3 Schools (http://www.w3schools.org/) for some help on this. Just a thought,
-Dan

[ray326]

I like the design; nice and to the point. All I'd offer would be some minor tips. The menu doesn't deserve an H3. I'd redo that making it a list and giving the items a little CSS hovering eye candy. It makes it a little more obvious it's a navigation point. If you think of your layout in terms of a div for the heading, div for the menu and div for the content then you'll be able to change the whole site's look by changing the external style sheet ala Zen Garden.

[Hurstool]

I'm on a Mac, and your site looks fine in IE, but in Netscape it does funky things. See attached screensnap. The header and the text move around as I make the page larger and smaller. At no time does it appear correctly onscreen.

Also the navigation links come up way too tiny.

[gizmo]

I'd just like to know what people think of it (the layout/design, not the content). The content is the most important part. maybe we should invite comment on that and ignore the bells & whistles.

[Daniel Klann]

Hi,

I should have posted that I deleted what I had their originally - sorry. What you see now is me experimenting with layout as per Daniel Thomas' post. That's something that I'm having a hard time figuring out and the incompatabilities between browsers makes it even harder! I guess that some of you pros spend a lot of your time trying to get things working on different browsers and setups?

Anyway, I will continue to play and come back when I get stuck. Thanks for everyone's help so far.

Regards,
Dan

[spufi]

Originally posted by Daniel Klann
Hi,

I should have posted that I deleted what I had their originally - sorry. What you see now is me experimenting with layout as per Daniel Thomas' post. That's something that I'm having a hard time figuring out and the incompatabilities between browsers makes it even harder! I guess that some of you pros spend a lot of your time trying to get things working on different browsers and setups?

Anyway, I will continue to play and come back when I get stuck. Thanks for everyone's help so far.

Regards,
Dan

What do you get when you have something defined as 100% width and positioned 2% to the right of where it normally would be? A section that takes up 102% of the screen and thus a horizontal scroll bar. If I get a horizontal scrollbar with 1400X1050 resolution, I'm 99.999% certain there's a design error. 0.001% being you have an actual horizontal design.

You will also want to see what happens when you resize the browser to smaller resolutions. Why it looks ok on my resolution, but then isn't correct in smaller resolutions is beyond at this moment. I have a half baked version of the layout you are doing. I can go and upload it, so you can take a look at it.

[nshiell]

I think it is a bit bland, you can use some CSS to liven things up without making it too big or tacky.

the links wmay look better if you add this
<style>
a:hover {color:#2200FF}
</style>

it hte document head off the left pane and put an orange BG image to the left pane to break up the orange slab have a go

[spufi]

Like I said, it's half-baked, but here's (http://www.matts-website.net/sandbox/index2.html) basic idea I was using. If I had time today, I could hammer out something more official. If you want the left column area to go all the way down, check out the Faux Columns (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fauxcolumns/) article out at ALA.

[Daniel Klann]

Spufi, that looks great mate, thanks :-)

I do want the column to go all the way down the page so I'll take a look at the article you referred to.

I also wanted to put a logo on the top left of the screen, on top of the header, so I added an img element into the header's element e.g.:-


<div id="header">
<img src="ftse_logo.gif" height="80" width="160">

<h1><a href="#">FTSE Investments Home Page</a></h1>
<h2>"Planning your future today."</h2>
</div>


I then amended the #header img part of the CSS file to this:-


#header img {position: absolute; left: 0px;padding:0; }


and it works like a beauty! Is this the right way of doing this?

Thanks again!

Dan

[spufi]

Take a look at the site in Firefox. :) Nothing stands out as to what the problem is, but if I get two seconds, I might take a further peek. I don't see why you need a <br /> in your header. If you really need the spacing, then define it via CSS. I would take out the <img> tag and just define the logo in your CSS as a background image.

[spufi]

"position: fixed; top: 0px;"

Get rid of that code that's defined for #nav. Floating it should be all that you need.