Feeback Request: Website Redesign

[eppskevin]

I've put my new design up, but currently making component(Forum, Newsletter, structure) changes.

What do you think of how this design looks, and what would how would you handle making those component changes?

[barrygamer]

Looks good to me.
BTW I'm on Mac, and it looks fine in Firefox but there are some fairly noticeable layout issues on safari 2.0.4 and Opera 9.21.
[Edit: I'm no web guru, but do you think the screenshots should have a border/effect of some kind, not just plain images? ]

[eppskevin]

Well, borders around images are starting to come back in style I guess. I wasn't at one point. That was frowned upon.

What differences do you see on Safari and Opera on a Mac?

If it's the border around the search area, then I'm finding a fix for that. adding CSS to form objects are different in Safari because safari pretty much writes it's own style to those objects. That's why you see the blue border and glass button and all. So, I'm trying to figure out a workaround.

[barrygamer]

(have uploaded Opera9 screenshot into previous post, hit reload if its not there. Edit: it looks almost the same in safari 2.0.4)

[eppskevin]

Alright, let me download Opera on my Mac.

To be honest, I didn't think people used it as much as Firefox, IE, and Safari. So I didn't even try to write CSS to support it.

When I looked at my hit stats, I did not see ONE Opera hit, so I left it alone.

I'll try to get that fixed.

[eppskevin]

I see....

The Mac shows spaces for all <form> and <input type="hidden"> tags. Making a tight area expand. I'm going to have to do some Javascript to get that Search working.

Thanks for the heads up. It should appear intact at the moment. Just have to get it working.

[eppskevin]

Issues fixed!

Thanks again for the heads up!

[Qitsune]

I, for one, use Opera but I'm not sure it shows as Opera in stats. I clicked on your site so you should see it now if it does!

[eppskevin]

Ok.

I see it.

I recant that past statement as well. I saw quite a few hits from Opera last year when Space Renegades came out.

How does the design look to you?

[LanceSB]

Hi Kevin, it's nice to see that you finally completed redesign of your website. As far as I know, you've used Joomla! CMS so was it hard to stick the new design to CMS?

I would recommend you to setup one of those search engine friendly URLs (http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,listcats/cat_id,1803/Itemid,35/) in order to increase your search engines positions.

[eppskevin]

Actually, It's set up like that and has been since the site opened last year. We're climbing the charts with Google and Yahoo.

I pretty much had to make my own slices as the ones you sent where meant for more of a static site than CMS driven. But I was able to finally get it. It was a challenge, and I like challenges.

One thing to think about when designing for CMS's is the fact that the pages are going to be dynamic so the design should be able to handle any height. That gradient in the middle and lines on the top and bottom were pretty much what held me up, but I figrured out a work around.

Thanks for the design!

Yeah, I've been working with Joomla for around two years now.I use it for all of our clients at my day job(head Web Developer for a company) and they seem to love it.

[VaderSB]

Kevin, congratulations with the release! :)

I have to say that although you didn't use all the elements we've sent to you your alternative usage of some elements looks cool! Glad you've managed to assemble the site correctly, actually there were a lot of slices indeed, we've tried to keep the maximum ''eye-candiness'' and keep most of gradients and other effects in final design. Actually, making the default slices took me a whole work day.

Anyway, congratulations again and best of luck with your projects!

[eppskevin]

Yeah, I didn't every one because it kept causing the design to break in the CMS, IE, and obviously Mac browser(per the first post). The main thing was that medium gradient and figuring out a way to have the top and bottom bars go the width of the screen. Figured out a nice CSS hack for that.

Yeah, I'm not actually "finished" just yet. I still have to add the Newsletter and some other components. Just haven't had the time this week.

[ChrisP]

Little technical note: You have a number of background image slices that are just a solid plain colour. These could be easily replaced with a background colour instead, saving a small amount of bandwidth, and (more importantly) making it so that you can read the text as soon as it loads. I had to wait about 10 seconds before the text on the page was readable (since Firefox waited until almost every other image on the page was loaded before loading that one), which is not good especially when it's so easy to prevent.

Other than that it's looking pretty good!

[eppskevin]

Well, I kept the background image because browser display color style a little differently, and they don't match the color in the image, even though I gave it the right HEX value. I meant to make those images 1x1 to conserve load time, though. Thanks for bring that up! I'll make that change now.

Thanks for the feedback on the design as well.

Do you mind doing a test for me again, once I make those changes?

[eppskevin]

Just said the heck with it and added a background color. Does the color look the same to you and does it load a bit faster?

[Sysiphus]

sorry, didnt read all thread, but...

I heard u have probs with colors matching what you really did...if they're pngs, remember Photoshop and others tend to save some chunks that browsers don't treat well...Use Tweak PNG (better if go to options, 'integrate in Windows explorer') , to right click over em, and remove chunks saying somthing bout chromaticities, gamma, ICC color. That'd allow 1:1 in colors/darkness : http://entropymine.com/jason/tweakpng/

[eppskevin]

sorry, didnt read all thread, but...

I heard u have probs with colors matching what you really did...if they're pngs, remember Photoshop and others tend to save some chunks that browsers don't treat well...Use Tweak PNG (better if go to options, 'integrate in Windows explorer') , to right click over em, and remove chunks saying somthing bout chromaticities, gamma, ICC color. That'd allow 1:1 in colors/darkness : http://entropymine.com/jason/tweakpng/

Thanks, Sysiphus. This will help me a lot!

[ChrisP]

Much better, now I can read the content area as soon as the text loads. :)

You do stlll have lot of itty-bitty images, presumably resulting from the way the website design was sliced up. That's not ideal. It's better to have a few larger images than dozens of smaller ones, since you avoid TCP connection overhead - in theory browsers can pipeline the HTTP requests into the one TCP connection to avoid such overheads, but in practice they tend not to. I wouldn't worry about that too much at this stage, though, since it's "done".