Criticize my design

[Ambroos]

Hello guys!

For my school's webdesign project I've been messing around with some HTML5 and CSS3.

I'm redesigning my uncle's company website (fruit farm, site focuses on tourism). His old site: http://www.hellingenfort.be - it was sort of the first thing I did, and it's quite some years old now (and I just turned 20 so I was quite happy with it at the time :p)

The wonderful new design:

https://538337.webon...uven.be/design/

It's just something I've been messing with, so the code could look cleaner and it probably doesn't do everything it should in all browsers, but that's not my major concern right now. What do you guys think? I really want to know every single pixel you think looks out of place, every single colour you think should be adjusted :p

Thanks ^^

Ambroos

(PS: It should look okay in Chrome, FF, Safari, Opera and IE9+ )

(PPS: Our teacher doesn't require an identical look on all sites, but we do need to make sure everything is readable and looks acceptable in all listed browsers and ... IE8. I really don't see how I'm supposed to get this to work in IE8. Just to give you a bit of background, we were supposed to use XHTML1.0 Strict and CSS2, and it all has to validate.

Because she saw what I was doing in class (basically being extremely bored with the exercise stuff we got and pimping everything we had to do, and restyling all error pages on my home directory and making the automatic index generating look pretty) she 'invited' me to try use HTML5 and CSS3, on the condition that I could make it work. I was happy to take the challenge, but am stuck with that now. Would adding another CSS sheet to fix it all up a little be a wise idea?)

[primexx]

honestly, not a big fan of either the old or the new design. it's too busy, most of which comes from the giant background image, and distracts me to no end.

with respect to html5, IE8 simply doesn't recognize it, so you're not going to be able to make it work in a valid way. you can, however, hack together something that makes it at least render, but i bet it'll still be a heck of a lot of work. if you want to do it go ahead and try, but otherwise XHTML1.0 Strict and CSS2 are still decent, especially if you have to support IE8.

[PyX]

Feels slow when it loads, and it?s heavy on my Mac when I scroll.

But it?s not bad, I like it. Maybe the Copyright at the bottom needs some work, it looks out of place. And I would change the background picture to something a little more subtle.

I believe you can shrink the background image a bit and make it so that if the browser window is larger than say 1440 pixels, the background enlarges itself to fit the window, and if the browser window is smaller, the background is displayed as is. I don?t know how it can be achieved, but I know it can.

[Ambroos]

The background image is temporary, that's something I'm working on.

The website will be focused on tourists looking for something to do.

I agree with the old one being too busy, but the new one? I thought it is rather clean?

The biggest issue with IE seems to be that it doesn't support rgba, aside that it actually looks ok.

The slowness seems to be caused partially because of the fixed background and partially because of the fixed menu bar, causing the browser to have to re-render everything when you scroll...

[Seahorsepip Veteran]

Header looked more colorful and nice on the old design, the new design is kinda square and empty.

The language is alright for me ^^

The biggest issue with IE seems to be that it doesn't support rgba, aside that it actually looks ok.

Use a png image or hex gradient with transparancy...

[Ambroos]

Thanks for the feedback ^^

On second thought (and noticing that web development isn't as easy as it looked :p) I'll be reworking everything using something from www.initializr.com to make sure it works well on all browsers and all display sizes. It's going to be a challenge, but I think it's a skill that might always be valuable.