General Constructive Critisism Please

[DVW86]

I was just looking for some helpful pointers to improve my pages with and possibly learn something new. I know you guys generally don't like frames so please don't dwell on them too much. When designing a site I try to make them easy to maintain and give them a nice feel without too many graphics. Rower's organicallydigital, is ideal to me. It looks nice, is clean and not too busy, easy to navigate, and loads quickly.

First off is a site that I did for a local church. Nothing fancy, I just wanted something easy to maintain.
http://www.moseslakechristianchurch.com/

Secondly, was an update to my old home page that was just terrible. Some of the old site is still there and I know that is hurting it.
http://www.lakesidevilla.gotdns.com/welcome/

Last but not least is a test site I did for SilentPanda. If he likes it he may use it (or part of it) in his xcodetutor.com site. So far I think I like this one the best.
http://www.lakesidevilla.gotdns.com/xcode/

Thanks for the input.

 

[Rower_CPU]

First off, thanks for the props! I'm glad people enjoy the design.

On a quick glance through the links you posted a couple of things jump out at me:
graphics quality - Your tabs cry out "I was overcompressed!"
Your navigation should look clean and work well to not distract the user from the content or finding their way around easily.
load time - It might just be the dyndns service, but some of the pages load very slowly on my cable connection. If your visitors have to wait real long (8 seconds, plus or minus 2, is the rule of thumb) and aren't heavily motivated to check out the site, they'll go elsewhere.

Design-wise, Apple's tabs are a little long in the tooth and overdone. Push the envelope and see what you can come up with.

You've put up a lot of content for people to go through, so you might want to break down one site, or a section of one site and get specific feedback on that.

 

[Benjamin]

First the gotdns site has a 300+ k jpeg that is loading, is why it is slow first, plus the server seems to be slow anyway. you should take the image and not shrink it in the image tags but the actual image in say photoshop, then of course web ready it. Probably drop the image to.. 60k at most.

Second yes the tabs are overdone, but somewhat classic now, but yes the images should and need to be redone so they don't pixelate.

imho you should redesign your first two sites like the xcode one, that is a great looking site so far. and much more like rower's imo. oh one more thing personally i would take off the made by mac stuff, granted i know you wanna show mac pride but that also has been over used imho.

Anyway the sites are pretty clean, lots of empty space and they look good and flow pretty well, just some touch ups and they would be great.

 

[DVW86]

Thanks

Hey thanks guys. It's nice to get advice from people who know what they are talking about.

I would take off the made by mac stuff, granted I know you wanna show mac pride but that also has been over used imho.

Your right, it is over used. My dilemma with the xcode site was that the white field is supposed to expand as SilentPanda adds content, but right now it just looked silly to have it so small. I was just trying to fill the space so the grey boarder wasn't taking up half the screen.

load time - It might just be the dyndns service, but some of the pages load very slowly on my cable connection. If your visitors have to wait real long (8 seconds, plus or minus 2, is the rule of thumb) and aren't heavily motivated to check out the site, they'll go elsewhere.

The load time is probably due to my cable service. I am hosting these pages out over my 512KB cable connection. One of these days I will up it to 1MB, but for now I guess I should take your advice and try to "optimize" my pages to load as fast as possible.

You've put up a lot of content for people to go through, so you might want to break down one site, or a section of one site and get specific feedback on that.

I guess I would like to focus on the xcode site. I already had an idea as to what some of the problems were with the other two. So how do I dump the "Made on a Mac" and still fill the page without it looking like I just inserted a bunch of spaces? Thanks again guys. I really appreciate it.

 

[SilentPanda]

*ahem*

I dig how the XCodeTutor site is coming along... it's simple (which I love) yet... sophisticated (like all the girls that won't date me... ) j/k

I do like it though.