New Website Help :)

[LERsince1991]

Ok so I don't really wanna type out who I am and what I'm doing fully but I'm a student with a product. I've got some exhibitions and competitions coming up and want to have a new modern look so I've made some contact cards, made posters and stuff.

I have a website currently at http://Novanta.Design-Is.co.uk but I'm looking at getting my own domain soon and I want to re-design my website a bit to fit with my contact cards.

You can check out how my website looks atm from the link above and I've had a quick go tonight and started again from scratch as I messed all the pages up before by rasterizing everything...

6 hours work from start to finish including the photo realistic renders of the design. it will have some spelling errors in and needs improving in general.

I can't upload a 5mb PDF or any .swf so I've had to make 5 jpeg's. Not ideal but I think its the only way.

Please help me out with feedback + C & C

 

[LERsince1991]

...

 

[NXTMIKE]

I think that the idea of having the website strictly for the one product Novanta (is it?) a great idea as it concentrates the audience's attention on the product alone. The one recommendation about each page flip is that at some points, the text is too small, and having a zoom-in feature, or enlarging the type size and spreading the excess content through additional 'pages' would make it easier to read.

Also, are you aiming at people purchasing the product (if it's being manufactured)? Because you may want to include some 'Order Now' or other relevant purchase links.

That's my advice.

 

[paolo-]

I've been following your work for a while on macrumours. I'll start out by saying I'm amazed by the quality of the product, like the actual table. I'm no designer, I'm a mech engineering student actually , but I'd like to share my thoughts and am also currently working on a website.

I'll start by saying the exact opposite of NXTMIKE. A well made personal website should enable you to have a nice product section. Right now, you're marketing all of your work as Noventa, kind of a loss for stuff you'll make in the future. Is it a requirement for school ?

Now for the actual site. I think the brochure thing has some appeal, first time I see something like that. Mind you I had trouble finding out how to flip pages, could be just me. It's really well thought out for a brochure, the most important stuff is in the first pages. You're kind of intrigued on the first pages and since it's paper you'll probably flip it to the next page. But why have to flip pages on the web ?


I personally think it's an ill adapted for the web. :S I'll go with a classic http://www.apple.com/macbook/ . I know you probably want to differentiate yourself from it.

But when you first look at it, you get the big picture. I think that's very important for your table, it looks good and looking good is probably the most important factor in a table. But, we can't get a big shot in the format you have. It also forces you to go through all the stuff to get where you want. I also have doubts about the orange wavy thingies on all pages. There's nothing wavy about the table and it makes it harder to read at some places. Mind you it does seam ok on the 2 first pages of the brochure.

I'd personally go with a website that's more traditional. Enables you to quickly get the the key parts out to the potential customer and grab his attention and then go into detail. On top of putting much bigger renders or even real pictures. That would be a nice touch actually, considering you do photo. The aluminium and speaker would also look much much better. I don't know how you intended to market it. But I'm guessing you want to make a "for mac" product but step away a bit from the oversimplification.

Anyway you end up making it, be sure to have a huge link to your website and a really big buy buttons made out of neon tubes with a constant flow of confetti around it.


I hope I didn't sound harsh, you're doing good work,

Keep us posted and good luck, Louis.

 

[miles01110]

Sigh. A flash website. Strike 1...

It's a unique concept for a website, can't say I run across it much. My one complaint about the actual brochure (besides being flash ) is that all of the pictures of the desk look more or less the same.

For your first page, I find it distracting that half of it is blank. Same with the last. At the end, there's no link to go back to the beginning.

 

[Wheaty]

Hello.

I actually quite like what you have done with your web site, but I'm going to go 50:50 with the above opinions. Flash sights can be really good, as long as they dont take long to load (not everyone has a great Mac/Pc/Broadband) and while what you have done is a good 1st point of call to "walk people through the store" to check out your product, for others once they may simply want a few of the basic facts very quickly...

eg, If I am interested in your desk, before I get carried away with all its cool features, the first thing I want to know is the height under it.. I'm tall, and have long Legs, most of the desks around I can not sit at comfortably..So thats what I am interested in, but for others it might be the ipod dock features, or about he sound system etc..

So all in all, I like it. But I think you should have a easy to get to alternative for other visitors that want to get to the facts without just being told "its fab."

Keep at it, Keep us posted.

 

[LERsince1991]

Thanks for all the advice, critique and compliments people!

I sort of just stumbled upon the flash based thing as I wanted to do a brochure for people at school really to explain it to them because it was getting old for me to explain everything. I made it in ID and then stumbled upon the transitions for the pages and one said only for swf. So I just had to check it out. Then just got a message off someone on this forum offering to add it to a webpage and its gone from their.

I agree. Being flash based has good and bad points.
It can't be picked up by google.
It looks cool first time.
Not THAT practical.
It's small and bad quality
It's not scalable to the monitor size of the viewer.
not everyone has flash or good comps and internet.

So I would like to make a proper website... except I don't know where to start. I haven't used dreamweaver before but I have it. I also have iWeb but possibly a bit advanced for it or iWeb is restrictive.

I would love to have a website thats for all my designs and who I am really but its just so much work learning everything from scratch. Not just like I can quickly put one together from no knowledge.

I'll try to find a website I saw ages ago, which is what I would like... In my dreams (although its really simple)

 

[LERsince1991]

Would anyone be interested in making a small website for me, obviously I would supply all the images etc...

You could have a link at the bottom to your own website and put something like designed by ....

I expect about 10,000 hits in a couple of months once everything is up and running, probably more. This would be a site dedicated to me and my designs.
I will be attending and showing at some exhibitions. When i go uni i will use to to display my uni work and expect more people to visit it. My half-arsed article on yanko design (written by someone else obviously) got over 10000 hits in under 20 days and about 30 other articles were written on other blogs because of it. Good publicity for you?

I would love to design a website but its just too much time and skill to do from scratch with no knowledge...

Luke.

 

[mr.steevo]

Hi,

I like what you've done. It sounds like you are giving in, but don't. The site looks good and just needs a bit of work. In my non-webmaster opinion, increasing the font size would make it much more readable.

Keep it up.

s.

 

[NXTMIKE]

So I would like to make a proper website... except I don't know where to start. I haven't used dreamweaver before but I have it. I also have iWeb but possibly a bit advanced for it or iWeb is restrictive.

iWeb can be really unique if you decide to tear apart a template, and re-build it. Sort of like starting from a simple template and deleting all content and content styles, changing the colour schemes, excetera. Thats what I do when working on iWeb, i don't like creating sites directly from templates, feels too cheap for me in a way.

But I really like using iWeb because it has great potential in a WYSIWYG editor.

 

[LERsince1991]

Thanks for the input guys.

It's not that I'm giving in, I've realized I don't have the time to learn another trade of programs and virtual languages just yet.

I have decided to have it made professional in his spare time. I will be having this website for a long time and would like to use it for more than just Novanta so it's worth the extra effort.

It will be used as an online portfolio and blog so I will use the site to display all of my work, ideas and thoughts. Colour scheme is grey, orange, black and white. I've seen the first mock-up of the site and it looks amazing to me. I'm so happy with it. Can't wait for it to be made properly and fully ready!

Cheers,
Luke.

 

[kastenbrust]

1) Flash can be spidered and picked up by Google if you do your metatags properly, but its not advised if your a noob web designer because you'll end up wasting a lot of time

2) Your pictures look good, but the pictures of the desk specifically seem to be an incredibly low resolution and therefore blurry, you should use a better format.

 

[MacLadybug]

I liked it...

I think your website is great and if I was in the market for furniture, I'd definitely want to know more about your product. I do agree that your photos should be crisper if you can change them to higher resolution.

Great job.

 

[LERsince1991]

Thanks but I had someone make it for/with me and it was just completed yesterday actually

www.LukeRiggall.co.uk

It's for my online portfolio instead of just novanta but it has its own page

 

[LeviG]

Can I make a couple of observations/suggestions then
Make the Novanta image under your photo clickable as I wanted to click it. Also your choice of 'lightbox' may not have been the best choice, its juddery during zoom etc in firefox 3 on my rig.

 

[design-is]

Make the Novanta image under your photo clickable as I wanted to click it. Also your choice of 'lightbox' may not have been the best choice, its juddery during zoom etc in firefox 3 on my rig.

Ah yes, I was thinking about the images under the photo clicking through to the Novanta page too.

Can't replicate a problem on the lightbox side of things though...

 

[LERsince1991]

Oh yes and Design-Is did it with/for me

(click on his link in the bottom left )

 

[ReedMercado]

novanta web

very nice website.. its very intriguing ..

makes me want to read more.. but it takes minutes to load the pages..

 

[design-is]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20)

Minutes?

The background image is a little heftier than I'd hoped and it's running through wordpess on shared hosting, so I've waited a second or two in the past - but never minutes... Can you provide more details?

The photo page takes some time to connect to flickr mind you.

 

[LERsince1991]

It loaded in seconds for me

 

[jsyingling]

Yeah, not too slow for me either.

Very slick. I think maybe you could benefit from some slightly less noticeable gradients. Other than that, well done.

 

[diemos]

slick