Thoughts on site for BPA competition

[bjett92]

I am working on my entry for the 2008 BPA web site design competition. I would appreciate any thoughts or suggestions. www.dallastop10.co.cc

Just so you know basically the only thing you can see is the layout. There isn't any content. Oh, and the thing breaks like crazy on IE6. Guessing it's the lack of good css support. I'll be working on that later. Thanks!

 

[SrWebDeveloper]

Glad you'll be working on that (layout/CSS) later, because any noteworthy design competition should take into considering cross browser compatibility in terms of layout rendering.

Um, what exactly is BPA? Only one I know is Business Professionals of America I found through Wikipedia and could find no web awards for them. Google didn't return anything obvious, but I admit I looked fast! heh

Anyway, based on how your prototype looks in FireFox, it's rather plain and ho hum to be honest. It reminds me of a standard template for a chamber of commerce site. Don't get me wrong, it has all the expected elements such as excellent placement of the search form field, the header explains the site nicely with a nice graphic, good complimentary graphic of the cityscape in quality resolution, great choice of color palette overall as the earthtone colors are well coordinated, easy to find and use navigation and well balanced content area with the smaller well on the left which will helps a potential client see the value of that space. Maybe the text is a tad too large in terms of font size in the content area, and you need to add in nav links in the bottom to match those at the top (even if placeholder for each). Do you need to conform to a certain overall width? Seems a little narrow to me for today's modern resolution of 1024x768. I could be wrong.

But I don't get a feeling alot of work was put into it. This is not to say you didn't, it just comes across as "seen it a million times". Now if you designed by hand the cityscape artwork, I will be impressed. It's a really nice image and I noticed the soft and elegant shadow effect running up and down the sides - extremely well done for that. Overall? Pleasing, clean, un-inspiring.

-jim

 

[angelwatt]

Does seem to be from the BPA SrWebDeveloper found, see here, down a ways, item 51. Does seem anything too fancy.

• The site has a decent start.
• I'd get rid of the table layout and use CSS to do the layout.
• I find the header area way too large. You have to scroll down a page just to see any content.
• I find the text to be rather large, and I'm usually one to tell people there text is too small.
• You should find some type of content to put in there (not just lorem ipsum) to give the page more of a purpose. You can make up the content, could even be creative.
• So far, it has a pretty basic feel to it.

 

[bjett92]

Um, what exactly is BPA? Only one I know is Business Professionals of America I found through Wikipedia and could find no web awards for them. Google didn't return anything obvious, but I admit I looked fast! heh

BPA is Business Professionals of America and this site was designed for the website design team contest.

Anyway, based on how your prototype looks in FireFox, it's rather plain and ho hum to be honest. It reminds me of a standard template for a chamber of commerce site. Don't get me wrong, it has all the expected elements such as excellent placement of the search form field, the header explains the site nicely with a nice graphic, good complimentary graphic of the cityscape in quality resolution, great choice of color palette overall as the earthtone colors are well coordinated, easy to find and use navigation and well balanced content area with the smaller well on the left which will helps a potential client see the value of that space. Maybe the text is a tad too large in terms of font size in the content area, and you need to add in nav links in the bottom to match those at the top (even if placeholder for each). Do you need to conform to a certain overall width? Seems a little narrow to me for today's modern resolution of 1024x768. I could be wrong.

But I don't get a feeling alot of work was put into it. This is not to say you didn't, it just comes across as "seen it a million times". Now if you designed by hand the cityscape artwork, I will be impressed. It's a really nice image and I noticed the soft and elegant shadow effect running up and down the sides - extremely well done for that. Overall? Pleasing, clean, un-inspiring.

-jim

I understand what you're saying about the basic design of the site, but I wanted something really simple and basic. However, I do see that there could be some more work done to make it a little better. http://www.livegreen-savetheplanet.com won me second place in the state last year.

Thanks for your help.