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Critique of an iWeb site for my business!

T

thecritix

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 11, 2006
284
0
West London, England
Hi All

So I've spent several weeks building this site now..
The site is for a saturday school music group I'm creating.

The site will be aimed at parents/kids who don't know me so I'm interested to have some feedback from yourselves who also don't know me!

http://www.playlivemusic.net

Thanks in advance!

Nick
 
Too much green imho. Maybe try playing around, with the background color. Also i think you're using too many types of greens, maybe stick with 1 or 2, and use different colors.
 
@OP:

Only 3 errors during validation, all easily fixable regarding your frames setup. Visit this link to validate and see the report, please.

In terms of a review, I wish to say job well done. The choice of fonts, styling of the borders used around pictures and the overall layout are very well suited and complimentary to your target audience. For those following this, this site serves as a great example of a well married design GUI with content. The use of the large media at the top, the menu nav and other features are all clearly well designed and follow the theme. I really like how you described what the site is about, and the links are easy to find and follow. Great job.

Here are some of the changes I'd suggest, mostly informal/cosmetic:

  • I agree with the other respondent, the dark green is too much to often. I'd use a different and much lighter color in the content area and retain the dark green for your margins for nice contrast. Or pick a color combination that works if it's too much contrast.
  • I suggest the newsletter fields be put on it's own page, and instead have a button or easily identifiable link to "Subscribe to our newsletter". A form on the very first page, even if it's an important element for you, turns off alot of users as if the site is only there to collect information.
  • Do you need QuickTime for the top media part? Is this an iWeb thing? I only recommend QT for video, otherwise for pics that animate or rotate plenty of other methods not requiring a plugin from the client (Javascript, Flash, simple animated .gif).
  • Do not use the bold emphasis as often as you do - not even on sites involving children. It should always be used sparingly.
  • Keep the font size consistent, i.e. reduce the font size a little in the "By Learning..." content box to match what's just above, and so on throughout all the pages.
  • I know you don't want to hear this, but the glow effect of the menu items in your menu nav on mouseOver makes the text a little too blurry. Keep the glow and effect on the star to the left, change the color of the text or underline, but keep the text glow to a minumum.
  • Mirror the menu listing in your footer with simple text links, including a privacy policy link and create a page for that. Parents will want to see that and it's good web practice.
Beyond those recommendations, like I said, I love it! :cool:

-jim
 
Although the site is very green, I am finding it very slow to load and the menu bar seems hidden?
 
As others have said, a bit too many greens. Most sites only have three or four main colours at max. Apple 2 colours (white and grey) MR (white, blueish at top, grey), ebay (yellow blue white) etc

Also half of the submit button is missing. Also the images took a long time to load, might be because they are too big. Try and make them small file sizes, about 10kb max each so that way you are only loading about 100kb worth of images, 10kb of html and maybe 3 or 4kb css for this size site.
 
Thank you :)

Hi All

Wow thanks so much for your feedback, it can be difficult I think when you're working on something like this yourself, sometimes you convince yourself things look good when they look bad and the reverse!

It's really useful though to have your feedback, thanks especially Jim for such detail.

I've tried to implement all of everyones changes, what do you think now?
(I've only done the homepage so far)

http://web.me.com/nickraymond/Playlive/Home.html

How's that looking?

Nick

ps. when I validated the original url rather than the domain.. it came up with no errors.

It would seem the validation error is within the forwarding page from the hosting company? Which doesn't bother me as it does its job.
 
I'd change the Books color to less greenish and make menu a bit more stand out, maybe by changing fonts and color.
 
Lose the 'animated' PlayLive flash at the top of the site. It does nothing except draw peoples attention away from the important information.

I would replace it with a simple static image.
 
diemos said:
I'd change the Books color to less greenish and make menu a bit more stand out, maybe by changing fonts and color.
Click to expand...

I was just about to comment on that. The book covers look pretty bad (green). Why not use the actual color of the guitar on the books?
 
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