Jump to content

Looking for feedback on our new layout and design


jasonc

Recommended Posts

to be honest, im not a fan of the bold colors. Not many people like seeing scrolling text. Never-the-less you could have used a <marquee> tag to make things simpler.

 

Some of the images look like they have been resized using css, which is why they appear blurry (the credit card image in particular).

 

You have no rules for the body tag, yet you have created a div called bodyClass and added rules to that. Adding the rules to the <body> tag will remove the need for that extra div.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thank you for your quick response....

 

I have taken onboard what you say and I have updated the credit card image and resized the the content where the image slideshow is so the images are a little clearer.

 

Recoded all pages so it uses the body tag in css and not a new div.

 

Thank you again for your input.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Looks very amateurish and dated.  Colors are garish, you use serif-fonts, there's scrolling text, and hard to read/see images.  And, under the hood, inline CSS.

 

Geocities called, and they want their site back.

 

I say scrap it, look at Smashing Magazine for inspiration, and start again.  Aside from an okay structure (except the inline CSS), there's not much that I would consider to be of value in the design.  Especially since its for a business. 

 

Frankly, a site like this will not generate business.  Users aren't dumb.  They've been exposed to a variety of sites that are all more engaging, easier to use, and just plain better looking.  In a sea of better designed sites, do you think this will work?

 

I'm not trying to be harsh, but business is a cruel exercise.  Better to hear it now, before it goes live, than to launch the site and generate no business from it.  What you should do is:

 

1. Start with an actual design.  Based on what I see, you likely started with the HTML first, and then layered CSS on top of it.  You also likely took what the client wanted for color, and just decided to put it on the page without really knowing if it would all work.  That's the wrong way to go.

 

Start with a design in Photoshop, or some other graphic editor.  Make it look good there first.  Yeah, it takes some time and effort to transfer it to HTML/CSS, but it's worth starting from there.  Why?  Because you'll be thinking in terms of raw aesthetics and usability, and if the design sucks, you can easily start again.

 

2. Have an eye for color.  Gray with lime green, electric blue, and teal does not look good.  Read: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/28/color-theory-for-designers-part-1-the-meaning-of-color/  And play around with: http://www.colourlovers.com/copaso/ColorPaletteSoftware

 

3. Serif fonts are the devil.  They're not good to use unless you're writing a book.  Look at all of the sites you think are awesomely designed.  How many use serif fonts?  Exactly.

 

4. Scrolling text hardly ever works.  And it never works as bold, teal text scrolling on a boring blue background at fast speed.  If you can't do it right (which is hard), don't do it at all.

 

5. Do more with your images.  Your slide show is sloppy because:

 

A. The images are small.

B. The text is even smaller, and simply placed on top of the images in a white box.

 

If you have a slide show, it should be front and center, and, above all else, meaningful.  Larger images.  If you're going to have text on the images, figure out ways to make it dynamic.  Make it larger, so it's readable.  If you're going to put it in a box, give the box (not the text) color, and perhaps some transparency.

 

The pixelated chauffeur with the pixelated gray car?  Unless it's their logo, ditch it.  If it is their logo, you need to do a better job incorporating it into the site.  And why aren't you using the Express Cars graphic from the original index?  It looks far better than what you have now.

 

You need to spend more than an hour or two on this.  Good looking sites take time to develop.  What I see is a coder who doesn't like design trying to rush it, hoping that it will be 'good enough'.  It's not.  You have a responsibility to your client to make a better site than what they currently have.  I don't see it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

All valid points... but the boss did in fact design this himself with Serif WebPlus and I then converted it as much as I could to CSS from the mostly image based version that was generated by the so called great piece of designing software around.  Search Engines look for text to index not images so redone all the pages so the actual text could be seen and not just images that was created.

 

Point taken with inline css, this was just to get the site in a working-ish format and then have it all placed in a style sheet once it was acceptable.

 

This is what the site did look like...

http://alturl.com/8k37e

 

 

re Valid CSS, well before it does go live I shall check again to make sure it does validate and then keep the images that I can.  I am proud of the work I do even if it is not to everyones liking, we can not please everyone.  But if some like minded people take a look and see that someone has put a lot of time in to something then they too will appreciate it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I like the colors and the 'Express Cars' arrow logo of the old one, and the structure of the new one.  Blue, white, and gray seem to be the company's colors.  Stick with those, but use gray only as an accent color.  It should be used for borders, and for text link roll-overs.

 

I think that white should be the main content background color.  It's just a more natural fit if you're going to have more than a paragraph or two of text that you expect the user to read.  You can have the blue as the color of your <body> tag, and then white as the color of your content <div>, giving you the added color without sacrificing readability.

 

For your main navigation rollovers:

 

1. Get rid of the double | | around each button.  Have one | between each, and use padding to give space for the text.

2. Get rid of the underline.

3. Don't use gray.  Your buttons should either be blue or white (depending on how they look with the background color - play with it), with the rollover color as the opposite.  You want to reinforce the brand, and to do that, you use the brand's colors.

4. Don't use serif fonts.

5. Make them bigger.  10%-15% bigger.

6. Give them a top margin to move them away from the top of the browser window a bit.  Something like 5-10px.

 

You can make good looking links with just text and a background color/image.  The key is typography, to make them look both stylish and easily readable.  That's one of the reasons why serif fonts are generally frowned upon.  They add more stuff for the eye to dig through before it can decipher meaning.  Adding even more junk in the way of underlines and extra dividers only makes it worse.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's nice to see this project live, I programmed and developed the PHP and MySQL backend to this project.

 

I do agree with the comments made by KevinM1, you should try and make a fresh looking layout and not have too much going on at once [the scrolling text AND image changer]

You have too many different coloured fonts on the page, try to stick to 2 different colours for text, one for main headers and one for the content.

Most of the images looked scaled down and crushed up, as well as being surrounded by block of colour. In my experience work with no more than 3 colours in a design.

 

Regards, PaulRyan.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yes Paul, but for many months there has been dozens of changes to all of the code and then the whole lot was ripped to pieces and recoded so it would validate and also work with the new feature that were asked for, and then..... more changes to the changes again and recoded one more from scratch so it would not take so long due to all the patches added in!

 

I still like the original site, but for some time it was going to happen and the site would change again.

 

There are dozens of features that have been added to the backend and to the admin and customer areas, invoicing system, accounts...  the works.  and it does not stop there, there are still a load of other stuff that will be added in over the next few months due to customer feedback.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This thread is more than a year old. Please don't revive it unless you have something important to add.

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.