purple-cow.net - Review

[thepurplecow]

Hi,

Any suggestions on my site, www.purple-cow.net? What's good, bad etc.

Thanks!

 

[Jonny]

Well I haven't had a big rant for a while so here goes.
By no way am I trying to put you down with what im about to say, learning to design just takes a matter of time and effort.

To start off with I have to say there isn't a single thing I like about this website but ill explain why as I go through the different sections.

The basic layout of the website is too simple, it's simply a series of poorly aligned tables with no graphics just background fills and it doesn't stretch to fit the screen on 800x600. There's no reason why it shouldn't you have plenty of empty grey space at the top which you could shrink it by.

The purple cow on the top left is very low quality and doesn't look right at all, its sitting in the middle of nowhere not even aligned to the corners of the other tables. The header and logo needs to be changed - bevels have never been in style. Bevels should be used as few and far apart as possible because unless you pull it off right it just looks horrible.
Also, the background colour of the logo isn't even the same as the fill used in the cell it's sitting on top of.

The text uses throughout the site is too big, you really don't need to make it that large. Whether you were trying to appeal to an audience with accessibility issues I don't know, but there's a text enlargement feature built in to pretty much all browsers so scale down the text. I always feel its best to go with black font throughout the site, however you might want to change the colours of links to something that fits your site (i.e. purple). It was quite odd to see a site called "The Purple Cow" with lots of blues used instead of purples.
Blues, purples, greys and blacks just don't blend.

Also, scrolling text messages are just plain annoying, they can be hard to read and it is unnecessary, if you want to catch a users attention use bold, italic or unline because it will work. Scrolling messages can sometimes do the exact opposite of what you're trying to achieve and put people off reading them if they can't be bothered to follow it around the screen.

I really do feel you need to take some basic photoshop lessons and do your homework on a few tutorials before you try make any changes. There is simplicity and cutting down on graphics and there is sites with not enough graphics; and yours is one of those sites.
You may also want to read up your colour theory, look at what colours go well together and what doesn't. There are several programs out there that can help you with this, such as ColourSchemer (I recommend it).

Improving on your coding is something I would also suggest, I mean talk about lack of standards you don't even close your HTML file with </html>.

A few sites you might want to look at are pixel2life.com and good-tutorials.com. Read up, do your homework, go away for a few weeks and learn learn learn until you design and or code again!
There's no point jumping in at the deep end and trying to design a corporate website when you simply can't pull it off.

I'm sorry if I have been quite blunt, but at the moment the site is poorly designed and poorly coded, and I might also suggest that you don't rip off PayPal with your website www.lobsterpay.com , it couldn't get any more obvious.

Regards,
Jonny.

 

[Janine]

First Impression: Not really really bad.
You need to work on the design though.

You need to work hard on your website. you need a forum / discussion board.

 

[LeetPCUser]

The site is way too boxy and lacking in color. I would recommend making it a little more colorful.

 

[Jonny]

You need a forum / discussion board.

How would a forum improve on a bad design and terrible coding?

 

[thepurplecow]

Ok then. I simply do not have the time to learn code in full - I can only get to work on my site(s) for around 1-2 hours a day. This website is simply designed to round up all my other websites and so perhaps I haven't taken enough time over it. I only want a simple design though - I'm not keen on changing the site completely.

PS: LobsterPay.com is a PHP template - I didn't design it that way :o :td: :td:

 

[Jonny]

This website is simply designed to round up all my other websites and so perhaps I haven't taken enough time over it. I only want a simple design though - I'm not keen on changing the site completely.

At the moment I fail to see anything you have actually designed on this website.
You chose a layout, coded the tables, inserted a southpark image and on your page it says you had a new logo designed for you implying you didn't do it.
There was no designing involved, it's just badly coded HTML with 2 images.

In my honest opinion there is almost nothing there to review for the reasons explained in my above post, and I wouldn't call it a "simple" design either, it's poor quality, not simple.

Regards.

 

[ephex']

Just use a bit more colors, and It'll be fine!

 

[Jonny]

Just use a bit more colors, and It'll be fine!

I honestly get confused half the time I look through this forum as to what people are seeing. How you can say this website will be fine with simply a little more colour is just beyond me.

Half the critiques in this section of the forums are terrible, giving good remakrs to absolutely tremendously poorly designed and coded websites, and maybe I have just chosen purple cow to have my rant and rave about.

It just honestly needs to be chucked away and you need to go learn how to design and how to code because right now you simply do not.

And the people who keep reviewing these sites as fine obviously are either high, drunk or have extremely low standards of what they expect from a website.

It is about time we raised the standards of websites these days on a design, coding and content level. This would have been amazing back in 1996 but we're in 2006, it's time to pick up the pace a little.

Regards.

 

[Janine]

How would a forum improve on a bad design and terrible coding?

I already said that he need to change the Design on PurpleCow.
That would surely improve the site, and I said that he needs a little discussion board.

 

[monty]

I have to agree with Jonny. I am stunned when I am reading through this thread and reading stuff as

Just use a bit more colors, and It'll be fine!

How the hell is any color do anything for this piece of work. I really don't want to offend anybody, but this is just simply a very bad design. There's not more to it. And ofcourse there's nothing wrong, with that; we all need to learn skills and we improve along the way.

For this site I suggest to just start again from scratch, I don't see anything on this site I would keep on it. Get handy with Photoshop and it will get quite easy to come up with something that looks better then the original one.

Again, I don't want to bash anybody, but anybody who sees any potential in this design, has quite a lot to learn themselves. Please come up with constructive comments so thepurplecow might actually get something usefull out of all this.

-monty

 

[fmauniverse]

Site review

Hi. First of all, the design needs to be redone I think. The logo I think needs to be redesigned a bit too. Second of all, there needs a bit more content need to be done. Third of all, I think you need a forum for your site.

Overall Rating: 7,5/10

Keep working on your site and good luck!

If you liked my review and comments, please add rep for me.

Regards.

 

[hell-knight]

realy unnorganised layout, you need to put more work into it, man!

 

[thepurplecow]

Hi,

I've had a go at changing the design. I'd like to know how the new design could be improved and general comments etc.

Thanks.

Click here to see the new design.

 

[monty]

Hi there,

Sorry but really see much of a difference with the previous one. I would just forget this whole thing and start all over. Just mess around a little in fotoshop, IMO this is the first step of any decent design. Then, transform your PSD design into some nice HTML, forget about tables and go the <div>/<span> way, this will give you a faster website with cleaner code.

Furthermore, move all layout markup from your HTML doc to a stylesheet; seperate your markup and layout/design elements, this will give you an easy adjustable website.

Best of luck!

-monty

[EDIT]
My apologies; I didn't have a look at the new design but the old one. The new one actually looks a website, well done. However, there is still room for improvement. The graphcis in the header could be of higher quality, back to photoshop. Also, I would adjust the colors a bit, I really like the combination of pink/purple and grey; to maintain good usability I would pick a darker grey and a brighter pink/purple. Also, try another shade of grey for the header background and see what looks good. I would also change the font for the navigation.

But again, very good improvement when compared to the old one!
[/EDIT]

 

[fmauniverse]

Second design

The second design is better than the first one. Just need to improve your banner a bit I think.

Regards.

 

[NeeJam]

your second design wouldn't load so i cant review it.

 

[thepurplecow]

Sorry about that, I deleted that page as I was changing the whole design of the site. You can now review the whole site as I've uploaded the new design.

Thanks for your comments so far, they've helped me see the problems with my old design. Any comments on the new design are appreciated as I want the new site to be as good as possible.