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Hey, another site critique!

wheezy

wheezy

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Apr 7, 2005
1,280
1
Alpine, UT
Well, I redid my website again, but this is my first time seeking critique and feedback. I'm pretty sure it's all good and valid except the blog (Wordpress is a pain to customize! At least for me.) I used some CSS3 features so I know they won't carry over to anything else really, but that's okay; this site is just my own personal so IE be damned. Literally. I've customized my own HTML, wordpress and pixelpost to all be consistent. Or it should be.

I do have a quick question though; I've used Edwardian Script (Don't shoot me, I think it looks nice this time, better than comic sans ;)) and in OS X it's 'Edwardian Script ITC' but on Windows it's called something a little different, no ITC or something. But, according to browsershots.org I'm still missing it as the titles show in the secondary fonts. So, what's the windows font-name for Edwardian Script? No PC here (woohoo!) to look it up.

Sooo, yeah, in my critique I'm basically just looking for feedback on whether it looks right on your computer, or if I really botched some alignment. I used .png transparencies, so I know IE6 is gonna screw up there and I'm okay with that. Once again, IE be damned.

Okay fine, here's the link: http://www.unculturedswine.net

PS - I like the argyle. I don't care if you do or don't :p
 
My Windows machine (XP) doesn't have anything called Edwardian Script, or even close to it. My Mac doesn't have it either though.
 
I like it.

Not much else I need to say - easy on the eye, non-complex layout and navigation. It has all the features a well laid out site should have (simple, pretty and easy).

:)
 
You've got a nice website here! ;)

Just one thing is that the banner seems to stop to the right and the links are on the background.

But overall everything looks good :)

... Oh yes... and I am running Windows XP at the moment under Internet Explorer 7.
 
Design is nice. Couple thoughts on the usability. I didn't like how it moved from left justified to center justified for the blog. And I didn't like how I had to find browse to browse your photos. For a minute, I thought you only had one photo. Maybe send the user to the thumbnails, let them chose, then they can easily hit back our browse. Just threw me for a minute. PS> I like argyle toO!
 
Fonts can be tricky to implement across all browsers. Right now the best method for embedding, meaning the font is downloaded and used in the browser sesson, is the EOT format -- but this only works on MSIE. Font linking is the other type that links locally or remotely font files (usually TTF) via the CSS @font-face command -- but the standard is not widely implemented in its current form, combined with the fact two CSS2 standards exist (2 and 2.1) and the best fonts are usually embedded via strict licensing or fee based.

The best hope for cross platform font support is to wait for the CSS3 working draft to be standardized, but that won't be anytime soon (the current version of the draft supports EOT, TT and others making embedding and/or linking both easy and secure).

Most "hacked" solutions now are MSIE proprietary or Windows only, i.e. they involve WEFT or plugins for insertion in Mozilla browsers.

-jim
 
I checked one of the slideshow images: "hoover_dam_monument.jpg".
it's 354KB(!) according to the Safari Web Inspector.
That's at least 10x what the filesize should be.
Some of the other navigation and interface graphics are similarly bloated.

The Edwardian Script elements should be converted to images in gif or PNG format.
Very few users will have this font in their system.
AFAIK, only Flash can embed fonts reliably across all platforms and browsers.

The page navigation is very abrupt, and the UI elements shift left/right slightly when some of the pages are loaded.x

BTW, I read Dracula for the first time when I was 6 years old, and whole-heartedly agree with your sentiments regarding attempts to create a movie that is faithful to the unique and wonderful writing style of this book.
 
I really like your site so far. I just have a few comments:

IMO, I think there needs to be more alignment going on. The objects that are aligned on the left should all be aligned, and the objects on the right should all be aligned. It seems as if too many objects have varying alignment, making the pages seems staggared.

In your blog, the paragraphs are lumped together, giving the effect of one large jumble. People don't read jumbles. Spaces between the paragraphs are needed. Maybe you could also add a date selection for your blog entries?

As others have stated, the pictures are just too large.

Have fun designing and good luck!
 
Trajectory said:
Well, the title of the site is appropriate.
Click to expand...

Hmmm, not sure if I'm catching sarcasm or not. If you're referring to my opinions on certain people in the media, you can take your comment and leave. If I'm mistaken, please accept my apology :confused:

Everyone else... Thanks for the input! I do plan on working more on the blog, I was struggling with the right column so I just took it out for now, and instead of having it hang far left I centered it and made it a little wider; I do plan to implement a fuller wordpress this week.

FONTS - I know the 6 or so standard fonts you're to stick to in web design, but I kinda said screw it for this round, I'm going to branch out a little. I believe I've chosen some good secondary's.

The page navigation is very abrupt, and the UI elements shift left/right slightly when some of the pages are loaded.

I think I know what you're talking about, and this took me awhile to figure out. It's the scroll bar. On a short page where there is no need to scroll, there is no scroll bar. When you navigate to a larger page which has scroll, the browser kicks in the scroll bar and pushes everything left. (I'm not trying to explain this like you're stupid, I'm just guessing that's what you meant and I was stupid and it took me months to figure it out)

I'll go over the other comments a little deeper and fix what I need to. As for the images... the file size is what it is. Oh, and I'll make the pixelpost (photoblog) nav a little more obvious. (Thanks Chico!)
 
Here's the hoover dam image reduced to 64k.
You can use the image processing script in PhotoshopCS3 to reduce the file size of a folder full of images in a single operation.
 

Attachments

  • hoover_dam_monument_smaller.jpg
    hoover_dam_monument_smaller.jpg
    61.1 KB · Views: 104
While I appreciate the solution, the artifacting on the smaller file-size isn't acceptable for me, I don't like pixelation for my photoblog. I probably could spend a minute and come up with a solution for a smaller size that makes me happy, I just prefer to save out the .jpg files at 12 Maximum Quality. I could do a Save-for-web option which produces good quality pictures but strips the meta-data (EXIF) which I like to display below the picture.

I could probably take the images down to an 8 or 9 on the quality meter and be fine, but I'm really not that concerned about the file size for that.
 
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