design/layout review please

[markbrown4]

Still a work in progress..
I'm quite happy with my first CSS based XHTML website.
http://www.yellowshoe.com.au/alistair_temp

I couldn't pass up the opportunity to use existing professional photographs (banner images), the only problem was that they were only 500px wide.
That's why I first put built the page as fixed width of 500px,
but now I've grown quite fond of the size.

What are your thoughts on the overall design / layout ?


Thanks,

[Varelse]

Beautiful site

I don't have any problem with 500px width - it doesn't make your pages too high and works very well with the contents (CV, thin column "articles")
There is something wrong though - some pages have slightly different width which results in unpleasant width "jumping" when switching the pages. Try to make the width constants for all sub-pages.

I like the alternative approach to header images - no logo, no text. Maybe (but not necessarilly) I'd think about faded, watermark like signature of the artist added.

[AnDo_abtoons]

Sweet design, nice and clean. Nothing wrong with the width apart from is suites your site and its design.
I don't seem to get the width jumping, however I agree that a that a watermark would spice up up that bit more!

[Perry63]

It's beautiful! I do think all the white space on the sides makes it look a little "squished", but it still works aesthetically. The colors are calm and fit with the content of the site, porcelain brings to mind serene, fragile art.So the pale yellow and white that you used is fitting. All the information flows, (the text content)and you provide enough information to know what the site is and the images are great, the way the image pop-ups give a better view of the items in the galleries is really nice.

The only problem I had with it was it was a little slow loading at first, but that resolved once it loaded.

Very nice!

[markbrown4]

Thanks guys,

I think the width jumping is actually on the longer pages because it adds the width of the scroll bar. Only in large height windows will that happen.. I can't think of a way around that at the moment.. I'll get a signature from the artist and see how it goes, thanks for the feedback.

[stickycarrots]

I like it. I don't really see where the green in the menu fits in with the rest of your design though.

I also think you might want to put the same orange border you have deviding the main picture and your content on the right and left hand sides (scretched all the way down the page). Just to see how it looks

[MoeBids]

I like the site alot. its easy to navigate. The pictures are good quiality and that adds to the professionalism of the site. Good luck!

[creativeartist]

I think it is better to increase the width of the site .Site looks pretty enough and nice.But have you done any w3c checks for this?

[XraySierra]

The positive - Very professional imagery. Your use of content vs. images is very good and it is a clean layout.

The negative - Very Narrow. Are most of your customers using Blackberries and PALMs? Didn't think so. That site looks it was designed for the old 600 type resolution. I personally know design for 1024 x 768 despite how many people on this site will yell at me for it. Just my two cents, sorry dude

[markbrown4]

Hi creativeartrist,
Can you suggest a way to increase the width? The banner images are at that size only. I know I could fade it out into nothingness but I think I'd lose a little of power of the images. Any suggestions?
I just use the tidy validator inside Firefox during development. Once i'm completely happy with the design i'll make it perfectly valid through the w3c checker.

XraySierra,
don't apologise - opinions are what i was looking for at this stage. When I become precious about it then i'll tell you to get stuffed
I'm looking at it through a 1440x900 and a 1024x768. I actually quite like the look of it on the 1024x768. Granted, on the widescreen it does look very narrow..

[chrisOBrien]

Since this is an artist's site, i think the width is fine. If it were my design, I would simply crop the header images about 1/3, thus making the site appear wider. The height of the header is about as wide as the whole site which causes it to look even narrower.

On a tech note, your page 2 gallery images when rolled over appear off to the right side of the page when viewed in IE6

Great job though! Again another site that was designed instead of just coded or programmed and it definitely has an individual flair, instead of the boring square blog looking sites that sitepoint users tend to create.

keep up the good work!

[WebCrawler]

someone said for a artist site, this is okay, but being a artist site we can not sketch anything we want? why we will not utilize modern days monitor resolutions fully? being a portfolio site where content is generally less, but I found that in compare to the height of the header images, height and width of font is much smaller. Before we design a website our purpose and target audience should be absolutely clear. Are you targetting your website to be viewed in Mobile Devices ? Even in Opera browser mobile view doesnt show header images?

Why you are using textual images for "Pricing", "Gallery" instead of using H1 HTML Tag. it will save bandwith as well as make it perfect SEO website.

Artistic website should be reflected not through big header images but from the creative part of it, which I found is missing in the website, but not in the images which you have created.

Its a hard work, every pages is being colorized according to its image colors. Looks sleak. Take it as a constructive criticism.

[nocturnix]

Not bad. A fewthings I noticed...

I got a little lost in the navigation. At first I was on a CMS page with some BBcode stuff(the code font seems way too small to even read btw), then I tried finding your board index. There were a number of links. Home, Board Index, and Portal. This got me pretty confused as to which was the actual landing page for the site. I assume its portal. You should make this page home, and the others should just be called Board, or Forums and all link to the board index to minimize confusion.

Also the symbol you have in your header is a little strange and at first reminded me of some kind of religious symbol. Could turn people off, if even subconciously.

[givemeplain]

Beautiful site. Beautiful. The only thing that kind of irks me is the orange footer at the bottom. Other than that, the site is looking awesome and your art is as well keep it up.

[justin-gray]

Really nice, Clean and Simple, beautiful imagery.

I liked the width, color scheme and the simplicity.
I think the width works very well for the style of site and content.

My only negative comment is that I agree with givemeplain in that the footer could be improved.

But other than that...... very nice. Fantastic Work.

[markbrown4]

chrisOBrien, yep the gallery 2 page needs some more work.
nocturnix, i think you must be looking at a different page..

WebCrawler, The header images are actually using repective H tags - see for yourself - disable styles..

givemeplain / justin-gray, I agree, my own add in the footer is too distracting. I'll try to make it more subtle so it doesn't detract from the overall.

Thankyou everyone for your comments, they are all really appreciated.

[Omer]

Simple design, but looks nice. Love the mouseovers on the menu. Good use of CSS, and fast loading.

[monotest]

Everything is fine, but I think you should add higher resolution photo of your works. In addition when you click on any photo thumbnails, you could redirect your visitor to an inner html page (or preview it in a popup)