Please give this site a once over

[pogy366]

... i'll be honest with you right off the bat, the HTML and CSS on this site is about as valid as a three dollar bill.:D But not to worry, i'm going back over the entire site in the near furute to make sure both the HTML and the CSS are five-by-five.

So the whole point behind me asking for your opinions on the site is not so much the validity of the code as it is right now, but the overall layout, including the navigation and visual impact or lack of impact, what ever the case may be.

My goal is to re-work the code and not so much the layout/theme, that is unless i find from your feedback that it might benefit from more work.

i'd really like your input before i roll up my sleeves because there is nothing worse than having to re-work your re-work. So having a punch list in hand would help me to figure out where to start my update.

Here's the website (http://www.silentvalor.info) and i'm looking forward to your opinions and/or suggestions.

[NogDog]

First comment that jumped out at me: I hope you don't expect any WW-II vets to use your site; the text is so small as to be almost unreadable to my 48-year-old eyes, and it's not resizable.

Second comment (and much more subjective): seems to me shades of blue, aqua, and gray would be more apropos to the subject matter than than beige/tan? (After all, we're talking "blue water Navy" here, not "brown water". :) )

On the plus side, I like the logo and I like the way you carried the button design over to the text boxes.

[pogy366]

NogDog - i've been thinking about the text size and how it matters to the people i've made the site for in the first place. So what's the best way to strike a balance between keeping the layout the way i want it to while giving the visually challenged the option to enlarge the lext?

i went with the tan because i had the idea of faded pictures in my head, you know with the sepia toning to it? My previous website was mono-chromatic with blue and grey and i think that was another reason i went with the current colors.

Thanks for the input!

[NogDog]

For scalable font sizes, if you assign them via CSS styling with either percent sizes or one of the size keywords (xx-small...xx-large), you can be pretty sure most modern browsers will resize them appropriately when the user requests it. As far as maintaining your design when they do so, that's a tougher question. You can keep text blocks and their containers the same relative size to the text by using em units instead of pixels, but then things that fit nice in a given screen resolution will likely either overflow the window or get repositioned, depending on how your page is laid out. (For instance, see how on my home page www.charles-reace.com the buttons resize if you change the font size, because I sized them with em units; but my right column is set to a fixed number of pixels, so it stays the same width. The proportions of things gets thrown off a bit as a result, but I can live with it.)

As far as the colors go, like I said, that's kind of subjective. Maybe you could just carry over some shade of the blue text you use in the headings onto the buttons to give them a touch of blue? :)

[rapid]

one quick thought: do you really want what look like bubbles in the header of your website about sunken sunbmarines? is that not a bit of bad-taste?

[Sir Jake]

I agree, the bubbles are a bit sad, like the last breathe of life...gone.

I also agree, navy (no pun intended) blue is really the best choice of colors. Yeah blue for water but navy blue is more dignified and serious. Officers wear it...hmm...if you made the color on the left side of the page wider (to center the buttons) the buttons may even appear to resemble the stripes on an Officer's uniform.

But the brown looks out of place, way out, really.

One thing that really looks bad to me is when the text in a link is too big for the button, can you shorten it? I found a button generator and couldn't use it because of that reason...I don't know why but it really bugs me.

As for the font being...too small? No, I had no problem with it at all.

Oh and shouldn't the 'current articals' be in the middle of the page? Maybe switch it with 'subs on eter-patrol'?

Looks cool though, not too cluttered, I like that.

[zingmatter]

Well I really like it. I like the colours too, makes me think of rust which is inescapably associated with shipping and the sea, and the subject is about the past so seems more appropriate.

As for the bubbles, I thought subs produced lots of bubbles when diving and doing operational stuff. Strikes me as odd to suggest it's in poor taste, bubbles, like sea water, a difficult to avoid references to it given that subs go underwater.

The text size will be important for vets but don't forget your site is also, especially over time, more for the younger generation to learn and understand about WWII and what it meant then and what it means now.

Nice site.

[pogy366]

... i hear what you're saying about the brown/tan colors. But in defense , officers and CPO's wear khaki uniforms. i'll burn some brain cells about the colors and see about coming up with a different scheme.

The bubbles were done to place some texture to the image and they do tie in with the whole submerging thing. :cool:

Thanks a lot for you comments and input, i really apreciate them!