Review: my personal site...

[Leyen]

Hey guys,

Just finished the major designs of my personal website, JonLing.Com.

It's a personal site containing a blog, poetry section, image gallery, guestbook and a link section. I will add more features in the future.

I am also well aware of the amount of graphics on the site and understand that viewers may face downloading problems as well as strains on my hosting bandwidth. In view of these problems, I have introduced frames which are hell irritating...

Anyways, if you are using Mozilla Firefox, the filters get screwed so you'll see this horribly blue background, which doesn't fit in with my site at all. I will change in to black soon... But I recommend that you use MS Internet Explorer to view the site.

That's all from me, now I wanna here from you. Leave a little note on this thread or on my guestbook and let me know what you think.

Thanks...

 

[Rajo]

very good graphic works but the left links text should b united

 

[adam_uk]

come back to me when its multi browser compatible

only time i use ie is when i need to use ftp

 

[jayl]

Ok let me give you a critical review of your website:

1. The "Welcome" page is completely unnecessary. It's a nice graphic but unless its a flash intro or some important notice, it doesn't need to be there. It makes the visitor have to unnecessarily click on an extra button, not to mention find the "ENTER" link, which should be more central and clicking anywhere on the image should bring you to the site.

2. The IE and 1024x768 requirements. A website should be viewable on any browser and on any platform and if you're restricting by resolution, 800x600 should be the minimum.

3. The colour scheme of your site makes it very hard to read. You have a dark background with lots of tiny white text. Dark text colour on a light background is essential for a website that contains a lot of text.

4. Your navigation system sucks. I don't mean to be harsh but it needs a complete revamp. Firstly, I didn't even know they were links. Secondly, they are nowhere near consistent. Thirdly, they run into the main body of the page, which is a big no-no, it impairs visibility and readability, not to mention that the part of the link that is under the main body is not clickable. I would put the navigation system into the huge space you have on the right. I would also invest in some better fonts for the nav bar items. If you're going to use different styles for them, they should at least reflect the artistic look you're trying to get across. And finally, the navigation text doesn't describe the content of that section very well. Broken Mirror and Screams instead of Images and Guestbook? Being different is good but only in the right areas. Navigation is not one of them.

5. The crosshair instead of the hand on links is a bad idea. I know it might seem cool, but people are used to the hand coming up when you hover over a link, it identifies to them that this indeed is a link, so don't upset them by changing it.

6. Edit the colour scheme of your guestbook. The blue looks awful with the dark colour scheme of the site.

I hope you are not offended by this review, there are good elements to your site (the background image and "enter site" images are very nice), but if you ask me for a review I'm going to review your site and give you constructive criticism. I hope you take some of the above points on board and that they help you to improve your site!

Best of luck,

Joe.

 

[rustypaulin]

the navigation on the left doesn't work well at all in firefox some of the titles of the links are partially covered so it makes it hard to read what it says

 

[GJ]

Nice graphics but the blue doesn't fit.

 

[Leyen]

The blue comes if you're using Firefox... I am trying my best to make it compatible on all browsers.

@Jayl - Thanks for the assesment, I'll look into it..

 

[sufi]

Nice graphics. WOrks good with IE

 

[deet]

Did you do the graphics your-self?

Nice Site!

 

[Zubair1]

nice graphics, ok layout. I had a little trouble see the second scrollbar after I entered
the site they were almost attached and made seem like they were actually One
Im using IE with a resolution of 800x600

 

[brandonlanglois]

Its ok. Not the best design, but for a personal site its preety good.

 

[ammo]

Nice graphics, good for a personal site!

 

[Red Eyes Arena]

really nicely designed! ^^ I like it!

 

[Fowl]

Why do you stop ppl from right clicking it is really annoying!
(I'm trying to press "View in IE" from FireFox)

If u must have "Welcome" page make sure there is a *text* link at the bottom also;
having to scroll in 2 differnet frames is confusing. So is hortzontal scrolling.


Overall this site looks good but is hard too use

 

[def1]

change the navigation or make it more noticable

 

[Leyen]

Hey there guys!

Thanks for all your comments. I've redesigned the site.

Got rid of the front page intro, centralised all the individual scripts and redesigned the template.

What do you guys think of it now?

 

[rcep]

woo
cool site
i like to top scene
But i think u should make the main page shorter and make more links its much better
Goodluck

 

[aaronfalloon]

I like it, looks good, thumps up from me!

 

[StudioWorks]

Hey,

The image in the header looks good.. but kinda scary The left area ( navigation ) needs a little improvement. Also, the images in the content area are kinda big.. they should be a little smaller.

Overall i think it looks decent enough even if it's too dark.

All the best,

SW

 

[Damo-Online]

its pretty good i must say!