Looking for critisim of the site I am *still working on* for my mother.

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[City Builder]

Hi,

As some of you know I've been contracted by my mother to design a website for her.

I've decided to use a Windows Vista window as the sites main distrubtion system for not only simplicity but also to make it appear more like she is "on" your computer.

I've still got a lot of work to do with regards to the photogallery, (still have about another 100+ photos to put up there and some links are still broken) and Im really having a difficult time trying to make my mother appear glamerous in the site.  (Nothing is ever good enough for our own family I think), and Im not sure how to make someone appear glamerous to begin with on the web.

Anyway, please give me some constructive critisim if you have the time.

Site Location: http://www.toniholtkramer.com

[Lengo]

Well, I hope I don't step on your toes, but you asked.

First and foremost: Your page is offset to the right. Ack. Thats-a-no-good. Set it left or centered. Allow rfor 800x600 resolution (there's still people using it, and many of them are in your mother's generation).

On design, the colors are pleasing. You did well with this. However, I'd choose a serif font. Its much more graceful and feminine. If you want to go all out, there are code snips of how to install a font on the end-user's machine to get that perfect look.  This probably isn't necessary, but there are some very nice serif fonts to choose from. With the san-serif that you have, the site looks very masculine. Sweeten it.

On page two you have the Bio. The text overflow appears to be 'scroll-bars'. Set it to auto. It just looks nicer.

Page 3, Photo Gallery, again. Do away with the scroll bars. They's just plain ugly. It''ll look much more pleasing (and feminine) if you just set overflow to auto.

In the photo gallery, abandon 'all images the same size'. Just make them the same height. The distortion is distracting.

On the Now Playing page, keep your sans-serif font. This is very appropriate here.

On your contact page, put the titles above the input boxes. The from will format much nicer.  Use smaller san-serif for the tites (easy on the eyes for following instructions).

I like the colors! Good choices! But I'd do whatever I could to make it look feminine. Add flowers and graceful lines. Off the container graphics -- they just don't work for ladies. Make it flowing and feminininine.  Look to old-school designs.

And lastly.... I know how much work this is! It's too much! And you're much braver than I to put up pages that you're not sure about. So, you have my admiration for the hard work and the courage to ask. You're on the right track!  Keep at it..... and at it..... and at it...... and at it..... and SHEESH! 

p.s. When I get my site up (erm, IF i get my site up 'cause I just might die trying) I DON'T WANT NO CRITICISM!    I am an arteest! I'm very sensitive.  

[City Builder]

Interesting observations.

I've changed the font on just the main index page to serif font, but Im really really (did I say really ) not fond of the serif font.  Im rather torn on it but don't want to change the entire sites font to serif till Im sure that's what I really want.

The alignment is another one of those things that has been the problems on the web when using a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) editor (Im using Adobes GoLive CS2) because on my screen if anything the content of the site is offset ever so slightly to the left.

I'll have to skip trying to make it for 800x600 because the container box itself is 975pixels wide so I'd have to redo the entire site to change that.  My mother uses a LCD monitor set to 1280x1024 so thats why I chose that resolution knowing that what I see at this res *should* be what she will see.

Im still messing with the contact page, for some reason in IE 7.0 you can't really select the fields in the form unless you put the mouse cursor slightly higher than the form boxes.

She want's glamerous, Im pretty sure that I didn't give her glamerous at all but utilitarian (hey, thats me), but she's going to view it tommorrow she said so Im *sure* she'll let me know what she thinks of it.

I've still got a ton of photos and movies that have to be scanned and or converted to real format to show up and now she wants me to cut out single frames from the DVD's that she gave me today so that I can use the individual frames from the movies as individual photos since there is a ton of photos with more recent celebrities doing interviews with her that she would like to include in the photo gallery.

Plus I've got a bunch of articles that she's wriiten for numerous publications that need to be scanned and converted to pdf documents to put up there as well.

Im not too worried about how her friends view the site since she's not using it for that, but rather as a publicity kind of thing to give to producers when she's hitting the pavement to find producers for her next upcoming tv stuff.  So I think Im pretty safe in saying that most of them will have higher resolution screens than 800x600

I actually kind of gave up designing for 800x600 about 5 years ago and jumped up to 1024x768, but due to the way that golive renders it's pages with layers and what not, it's near impossible to get something to render right at 1024x768 unless you design smaller than that.  Oh well, I'll keep plugging away at it, it's still got a long way to completion I think.

Thanks again.

[MaxBeta]

   Confucius say: Those who throw dirt lose ground

CB You know your mother best.. If I were in your shoes..I'd follow my instincts ..my mom was my most vocal critic, so that was the least of my worries.   

A finished product is hardly ever the first draft.  Hang in there, I'm sure it will turn out just fine.

If there's anything you want to impliment..there may be some of us who can assist your efforts.  Just make it known...

[Unitedcat]

I think color balance is very good on the first side (only I can access now).
It's very pleasing with that Vista Theme , And that picture is glamorous.....

Well Glamour : just my opinion 

Think mini skirts , high heels and such. Maybe that will please her.

I'm not doing any web-design myself so it's hard for me to say
anything about that.

Good Luck CB !!

[City Builder]

I am now reminded why I don't like working for family members.  They are truly a pain in the butt.  I did my brothers company website early last year and it was truly a nightmare that just kept on going and going and going.  This is what happens when you deal with people that are just getting into the internet.

Apparently my mother said that the site didn't look right on her computer.  After 30 minutes on the phone we finally diagnosed the problem.....  She was using AOL to view the website.  When I walked her through using Internet Explorer I then found out (I guess I was wrong) that she's got her LCD monitor set to 1024x768 so she has the gawd awful bottom scroll bar on her screen and it's now become confusing to her because she not only has the sidebar scroller, but the bottom scroller and the iframe scrollers too.

So Im now having to redo the entire site to make it smaller so that it fits into 1024x768, if I didn't use iframes for the content then I wouldnt bother to redo everything but 3 scrollbars would drive me insane if I had to view it like that.

On top of that she's now added more content that she didnt have prior, and altered a great deal of textual content and is now sending over 4 or 5 more DVD's that Im supposed to watch and capture each different person that she interviews and use all of them on the site as well amongst other things.

Why is it that nobody can come up with textual content till the designer does and then wants to alter it all and move this word here and change that word there.  Aaaahhhhhhh!

My biggest problem is that Im a bit of a perfectionist (at least in my own mind) and I want the vista container box to be centered on everybodys screen.  But the vista container is an image that is also an image map, so Im using layers to overlap everything so that it all works together without any duplication of the image (like a background image would do), but can't for the life of me figure out how to make a layer center in the page dependant on the browser width.  All that I've been able to find on the net tells me that layers have to have an absolute position, which is not what I need it to do, so now I've got to figure out how to make the main containers layer center or redesign the site by possibly doing all tables and slicing and dicing the image up which I really don't want to do at this point because I've found in the past that it causes more trouble with different browsers and the way that they display tables.

This would be a good week for my girly to take all the kids and go away for a week to leave me to screaming and cursing at my monitor.

Im quite frustrate at something that should be so simple yet is eluding me (making the main layer center in the screen) and all layers on top of that stay within the main layer of the container.

[City Builder]

Okay, I've spent the last couple hours slicing and dicing up the container image, actually I had to make a completely new one  due to some issues with the old one, and made it (hopefully) 1024x768 friendlier.

I've checked it on my computer and it views fine (just the index page has changed) at 1024x768 but if someone else could try it and tell me if there is a main browser side scroll bar on the left or not.  On mine the only scroll bar is the textual content inside of the container which is what Im after.  I know it depends on the peoples browsers and how many toolbars they have open at the top of IE but thats beyond my control.

Regardless of what some software developers want to say, the internet is still not ready for pixel precise layouts and never will be as long as people have control over their own browser and multiple browsers to choose from.  But of course I wouldnt want it any other way as I don't want any company telling me how I have to view the web through their browsers layouts.

Anyway, if someone would check at 1024x768 and let me know if things line up properly I'd appreciate it.

Oh and FORGET anything about 800x600    because when I design for that low of a screen resolution that leaves people at higher res's squinting trying to read whats on the page.

[MaxBeta]

   Hope this helps CB... I know what you are going through... I bopped over on my backup PC and took this screen at 1024x768 ..its using the ATI 1300

Mmm?...I saved this as a jpg..I think?



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[MaxBeta]

This is kinda weird CB..when I viewed the Screen..I had to "enlarge" to read the text.. I'm not sure if this is from the jpg compression or what.  When I took the screen it was readeable..I saved as..normally this isn't an issue.

Is there anything I can do to double check.. the current pages on your Mom's site you've redone are easy for me to view.  I use 1280x768 most of the time...this card and monitor max out at 1920x1200, I rarely run the 1300 at that setting because it "overheats"  as you probably already know. 

Hope you are taking time to relax now and then..stepping back can help rejuv the desire to press on through the task at hand.  

[City Builder]

This is just so strange, heres what I see when i view the site at 1024x768

My guess is the difference between IE 7.0 and earlier versions of IE.  I presume you are running version 6.x of Internet Explorer

You can see in my screenshot that I don't have a normal right side scroll bar nor the bottom scroll bar.

I dare not make it any smaller else it's gonna be really hard to read at higher res's, plus everytime I make it smaller I lose more space for the actual content.  Of course you can chock this up to perhaps just poor web design overall and that maybe I shouldnt have chosen to try to contain it in the content frame in the first place, but Im thinking Im too far along now to change the whole thing around again.

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