LebGeeks

Ayman

Member

Site Design Check and Critique

Hello everyone, I have designed a site as a first step into sort of professional freelance programming work. Actually I am not very good at designing visual stuff but I am trying my best, what I need from you is to check out my site's design and tell me your opinion whether you like it or not, and what should add/remove. I was thinking of redesigning everything into something much simpler, but I thought it would be nice to see what people and designers think about it. What you will see is just the index page as I have not made the rest of the pages until I agree 100% on the theme. I designed the site from scratch and I did not use any WYSIWYG editor, just my notepad++ and photohop. Here it is: http://www.devzilla.net/ . Thanks for your help and opinions, have a good day :)

EDIT: Oh and please mention which browser you were using when you viewed the page and any, especially Opera and Chrome.

Last edited by Ayman (December 13 2009)

samer

Admin

Re: Site Design Check and Critique

It looks broken in Firefox/3.5.5 on OSX 10.6
screenshot: http://qkpic.com/50115
Also, there's a typo "Pocket Freindly Fees" should be Friendly.
By the way, avoid using tables… They get re-rendered every time you load the page!

Ayman

Member

Re: Site Design Check and Critique

It looks broken in Firefox/3.5.5 on OSX 10.6
screenshot: http://qkpic.com/50115
Also, there's a typo "Pocket Freindly Fees" should be Friendly.
By the way, avoid using tables… They get re-rendered every time you load the page!

OMG, it looks so messed up in OSX,although is renders fine with Firefox/3.5.5 on windows and Ubuntu. As for the tables, yeah I will replace them with CSS and thanks for mentioning the typo. I am still not sure whether it looks good in the eyes of a designer

arithma

Member

Re: Site Design Check and Critique

Subjective Opinion:
- I liked the rolling the panning content
- I disliked the colors (the blue and the gray behind it are extremely unreadable)
- The second picture doesn't portray trust to the people viewing the website.. People don't want to work with people who seem convoluted and flimsy
- The captions under the pictures should be clickable

My recommendation for you: get a designer or partner up with someone who knows design altogether, and you handle the stuff that you really know. I know that I can't design, so I outsource it.

Hope you'll get through with thing you're making :)

Ayman

Member

Re: Site Design Check and Critique

My recommendation for you: get a designer or partner up with someone who knows design altogether, and you handle the stuff that you really know. I know that I can't design, so I outsource it.

Hope you'll get through with thing you're making :)

I agree with you, I think I may end up partnering with a designer but before that I will keep trying as long as I dont have anything really serious to do, maybe practice will make me better 

Anyways I will forget about this design and I have just started creating a new one again from scratch, it is going to be much more simple(I hope it won't be too simple) straight to the point and have brighter colors, when I finish maybe you would like check it out again for me , thank you very much for your input arithma, have a good day :)

rolf

Member

Re: Site Design Check and Critique

OSX + Firefox + Devzilla.net = Broken Website
So, I can't tell.

I think the design is cool, just redo it using tables instead of divs so that I can see it atleast!
Then maybe you can refine it.

Last edited by rolf (December 13 2009)

Ayman

Member

Re: Site Design Check and Critique

OSX + Firefox + Devzilla.net = Broken Website
So, I can't tell.

I think the design is cool, just redo it using tables instead of divs so that I can see it atleast!
Then maybe you can refine it.

You don't have any windows or Linux PC to check it out from? Btw, I don't understand why it is being rendered like that in OSX. :(

EDIT: For those who can't see it well under OSX here is a screenshot

http://yfrog.com/0dscrjj

Last edited by Ayman (December 13 2009)

samer

Admin

Re: Site Design Check and Critique

Ayman, here's a handy website: http://www.browsershots.org/

Ayman

Member

Re: Site Design Check and Critique

Ayman, here's a handy website: http://www.browsershots.org/

Oh Thanks, very useful indeed, here are the results in case anyone would like to see: http://browsershots.org/http://www.devzilla.net/

Ayman

Member

Re: Site Design Check and Critique

Okay, I have made a new design which is much more simpler than the one I have showed you, actually it is all I need currently from a site that is samples of the work, contact form, order forms, and links to my profile and a social network. I will be connecting it to my little CMS for constantly updating it. Please tell me what you think about it and if it is better than the previous one, here is the link: http://www.beta.devzilla.net/ Thanks in advance :)

Last edited by Ayman (December 17 2009)

arithma

Member

Re: Site Design Check and Critique

This one is much better. Though there's a little tip about the graphics: It's a little bit aliased. Try using Photoshop, to convert the graphic into a large scale bitmap, and resize it down turning antialias features on: Bi-linear or tri-linear (whatever..)
Am not a designer, but I think the font doesn't go well with the cubes. Perhaps you should try a Sans Serif font rather than Serif one. (Serifs are the little strokes that come at the edges of fonts).
Otherwise, as a user, I like the colors a lot. Concentrating and seperating. Sweet :)

samer

Admin

Re: Site Design Check and Critique

Much better!
give the description paragraph some line-height. Also, the Devzilla logo does not seem to be centered vis-a-vis the description on FF 3.5.5 / OS X 10.6

Ayman

Member

Re: Site Design Check and Critique

Thanks for you input guys, It is good now that you like it, looks like the simpler you do things the better. As for the logo I will be changing it's font as from the beginning it wasn't very  good looking but I didn't know what font to use when designing it  And thanks for the aliasing tip, I will see what I can do with it. Thanks for mentioning the line height samer, I didn't realize it at all, as for the centering of the logo it looks to me centered, do you mean not centered with respect to the page? I will try to check it out under OSX to see if there is something in the rendering of the page.