Preview Personal site!!

[Geforc3]

Here a preview of my personal Website that I'm making :D

what to you think what can i do better?!?!? :D

"Click here" (http://www.xs4all.nl/~thde/geforc3/index_geforc3.html)

[DCElliott]

As an example of rigid design it is fine, although the tabs are a little indistinct. Give your self a challenge and duplicate the site using liquid design. Then I'll brag you up :P.

[Geforc3]

Originally posted by DCElliott
Give your self a challenge and duplicate the site using liquid design. Then I'll brag you up :P. What do you mean with this ???

[DCElliott]

Flexible or "liquid" design allows the page elements to move a great deal more than conventional table-based pages. You can still use tables, but use tileable backgrounds or have areas that can expand and contract. If you use a three column layout with fixed widths for the side elements, use width="*" for the center to allow the content to expand and contract. Slice your wide horizontal elements and allow them to expand and contract. This has the added benefit of making for smaller image sizes in many cases as well.

I have attached a zipped mockup of your page using some liquid design principles but still using a table-based layout with a little CSS for the menu list effect that I like. If I were being serious, I would have used IDs or classes for a number of the elements but I was lazy. :p

Open this layout in a browser and then play with resizing the window and changing text sizes. Also, look at the kb - only 15K for the entire page (I know I don't have all the graphic elements in there, but still)

[Geforc3]

Thnx!! :D I gone try somethings with those "*" I already used them when i was still using frames!

With your test liquid site when i made the browser very small the header was bigger then the navigation, content table and info table.

I'm going to try some things

[DCElliott]

I didn't take time to properly slice up all the images and work out the proportions. I have attached an alternate that represents a bit more refinement and fills the whole window.

It works down to a width of ~500px.

[bosswana]

I come from a different position to many of those who write on this forum in that I look at the artistic components of the design not the technical aspects, so my comments will come from usability and form rather than structure.

that said..

I know grey is in but to much of it looks a bit poxy. There are plenty of browser safe colours that work together well and grey is better in small doses (particularly for the visually impaired (as opposed to blind). Blues (which you have on some parts) work well so you could try some blue contrasting. to get some ideas of contrasts try plugging the blue in the top of the site into the color picker at http://www.colorschemer.com/online/

Your tabs are not consistent with the menu's down the side. Both look good and work well so try one or the other.

Your menu's show good logic - i.e. you can see the groupings if you are into programming but think about other ways of putting it e.g. if you want to promote your designing ask yourself the question whether people give a rats about the technology (ie flash) or whether they want animated sites, product sites, promotion sites and maybe categorise them that way.

finally, your bars and stuff look good but the cost is a slow download. Another way of doing it that means more work for you but a faster load is to cut it into small pieces (you have some common fragments) and repeat the pieces which means the download is much smaller and terefore faster. I have built up a library of the bits I use all the time and just do the copy and paste but it makes for fast sites.

Lots of negative sounding stuff I know. The site is really fresh and looks good and i am sure you want to improve it not have someone piss in your pocket which is why i mainly focussed on what can improve

bye for now

:) :)

[DCElliott]

GeForc3

Check out what David Bindle did with the Bordeaux site - he has divs that size themselves both vertically and horizontally depending on the page size.

I have shamelessly ripped him off, er, learned from his technique so that I can now make my content fill exactly the depth of the page I want it to.

[DCElliott]

That's what I meant, hence the "learned from his technique" comment immediately following.

Must be my Canadian humor :D