Second-pass review requested
Chris Beall
Most of the content is bogus or obsolete; new stuff should arrive in
pieces this week.
I'm interested in ease of navigation, readability, general impressions,
and, of course, technical issues of any sort.
Chris Beall
Nik Coughlin
Mostly fairly nice. Didn't look at HTML and CSS but:
Please set a max width so that the line lengths aren't quite so
sprawling on my wide-screen monitor.
The text "Major funding for Ulster Literacy is provided through the
generosity of:" would look better with some white space around it.
The scaled images look bad. I have a site where I do this, but I use
JavaScript to detect if the image size should change, and if it does ask
a server side resource to return a new image and swap it out. Don't know
if something like that would be an option for you.
Also, where images are in the blue left hand nav bar, it would look
better if they didn't fill the entire width of the nav bar.
The photo captions would look better if they were always the same width
as the photo.
dorayme
Chris Beall <Chris...@prodigy.net> wrote:
The bordered box with the caption for the picture of Tutor and student
looks a bit inelegant to me. Best probably to leav it out altogether and
the story in green will make it obvious what it is and if it is not
simply obvious and deducible, a simple reference to the pic when you are
mentioning them in the text would be fine. After all, it not as if
anyone knows who Bill and Robert are without reading the story anyway.
And the green text looks wrong to me on this page. There are mainly
blues, the red 'coming march' is a fine enough bold stroke. But that is
where playig too much with colours should, imo, end. It would be OK to
choose an elegant dark blue for all the text if you prefer not black.
less colours, more elegance.
I will mention something a bit more esoteric. If styles are off, there
is a particularly tall vertical image that causes a considerable gap at
the importabnt top of the page as read 'in the flow'. Try it to see what
I mean. It is not of the utmost importance I guess.
Another minor nicety perhaps: I get the feeling that the nice image
'Scrabble Tournament' drops a little too early than it needs on
narrowing the browser window.
We have talked before about the alternative of including the footer
logos of sponsors under the left nav. I still think it would be neater
and apt considering you already refer to them in the nav col.
--
dorayme
Chris Beall
> In article <hhueg0$4rd$1...@news.eternal-september.org>,
> Chris Beall <Chris...@prodigy.net> wrote:
>
>> URL: http://ulsterliteracy.org/sandbox/index.html
>>
>> Most of the content is bogus or obsolete; new stuff should arrive in
>> pieces this week.
>>
>> I'm interested in ease of navigation, readability, general impressions,
>> and, of course, technical issues of any sort.
>>
>
> The bordered box with the caption for the picture of Tutor and student
> looks a bit inelegant to me. Best probably to leav it out altogether and
> the story in green will make it obvious what it is and if it is not
> simply obvious and deducible, a simple reference to the pic when you are
> mentioning them in the text would be fine. After all, it not as if
> anyone knows who Bill and Robert are without reading the story anyway.
I'm inclined to agree. We have a real graphic designer and a print
publisher on the team, so I'll run that by them. I think I originally
included the little border as a visual aid to where boundaries were
during early development. The caption font is slightly smaller than
body text; that may be enough to distinguish it.
> And the green text looks wrong to me on this page. There are mainly
> blues, the red 'coming march' is a fine enough bold stroke. But that is
> where playig too much with colours should, imo, end. It would be OK to
> choose an elegant dark blue for all the text if you prefer not black.
> less colours, more elegance.
My bad. I should have explained that green was being used for
meta-text, i.e. to show intent for the final text, which will be in
black. The same is true for boldfaced text, which simply indicates
areas of content question.
> I will mention something a bit more esoteric. If styles are off, there
> is a particularly tall vertical image that causes a considerable gap at
> the importabnt top of the page as read 'in the flow'. Try it to see what
> I mean. It is not of the utmost importance I guess.
Yes, I noticed that. I decided that the probability of a sighted
visitor turning off CSS was low, so I didn't worry about it. Should I?
The image is a pseudo-background (to allow scaling) for the
navigation. About all I could do (perhaps) is reduce its vertical
height (since it gets scaled anyway), but it would still look pretty
strange.
> Another minor nicety perhaps: I get the feeling that the nice image
> 'Scrabble Tournament' drops a little too early than it needs on
> narrowing the browser window.
You have a good eye. The image is 377 wide, but the paragraph that
contains it is fixed at 387. I have a note that I did that
intentionally, but, alas, I can't recall why. I think it had something
to do with the order in which things stack as the width is narrowed. In
any case, this central 'banner' will be constantly changing and there is
much discussion about whether it should be image-only, text-only, or, as
this one is, image-plus-text. I'm waiting for that discussion to
subside a bit before changing it.
> We have talked before about the alternative of including the footer
> logos of sponsors under the left nav. I still think it would be neater
> and apt considering you already refer to them in the nav col.
Not quite. The folks at the bottom are 'major funders' (they provide
over half the budget). The 'sponsors' referred to in the left column
are local businesses and individuals who have made donations, small by
comparison. It's important, I'm told, to keep them separate.
Thanks for your comments,
Chris Beall
Chris Beall
> On 5/01/2010 5:15 pm, Chris Beall wrote:
>> URL: http://ulsterliteracy.org/sandbox/index.html
>>
>> Most of the content is bogus or obsolete; new stuff should arrive in
>> pieces this week.
>>
>> I'm interested in ease of navigation, readability, general impressions,
>> and, of course, technical issues of any sort.
>
> Mostly fairly nice. Didn't look at HTML and CSS but:
>
> Please set a max width so that the line lengths aren't quite so
> sprawling on my wide-screen monitor.
Done. Set to 40em, a bit longer than I like, but avoids a big
right-side gap at 1024 wide. I think this is going to make some other
things look odd at 1600 x 900 or wider, but readability is more
important to me. (And you can always narrow the window...)
> The text "Major funding for Ulster Literacy is provided through the
> generosity of:" would look better with some white space around it.
Done. The stingy space was left over from a time when this footer was
(ugh!) nailed to the viewport.
> The scaled images look bad. I have a site where I do this, but I use
> JavaScript to detect if the image size should change, and if it does ask
> a server side resource to return a new image and swap it out. Don't know
> if something like that would be an option for you.
The only scaled image should be the one sometimes in the left column,
below the navigation. It will probably always be a 1-2
head-and-shoulder shot, as is the current sample. The current image is
sized to closely match the scaling at 1024 wide; as wider displays come
along (the most popular resolution in local stores is 1920 x 1080), I
would raise that, so most folks see it minimally scaled. I'll consider
an image selector, as you suggest, but there always has to be something
for the folks with JavaScript off.
> Also, where images are in the blue left hand nav bar, it would look
> better if they didn't fill the entire width of the nav bar.
That characteristic came from a sample provided by our graphic designer.
I think he was trying to keep the strong vertical line of the
navigation plus photo plus photo story. I have to agree with him on
this one.
> The photo captions would look better if they were always the same width
> as the photo.
They were max-width: 30em, which caused one to be narrower than the
image. I raised it to 40em, which should cover all cases.
Nik, thanks for the comments,
Chris Beall