Looking for design feedbacks

[Gee.B]

hello,

I am looking for feedbacks on a personal website

I currently own a small personal at

www.guillaumeb.com

It bears a wood texture and makes use of drop/text shadows

Though it has nothing to do with skeumorphism, for some reason, the hate around this trend is making me feel like the site can look a bit dated.

So I am currently playing around with something more minimalist at :

http://guillaumeb.com/beta/a/

My question is simple : Which of the two do you prefer and why ?

I know i'm asking this question in some Microsoft related forums, so i would not be surpised if many of you vote for n?2 which is closer to the Modern UI principles but i thought i would see how things turn out anyway.

Do not hesitate to tell me really what you think :)

Thank you very much

[Seahorsepip Veteran]

You make a very big mistake with buttons :/

Add the padding and line-height to <a> and not to it's parent, otherwise the text of the buttons and not the button as whole will only function as a link/button...

Edit: This seems not the problem at your more minimalistic site ^^

Also .htm in your urlbar is really bad lol, try hiding it trough htacces ;)

And in the minimalistic version I suggest to speed up the fade in transition, it's way too slow.

If you're able to make everything into 1 html file for a way faster website, using hastags for navigation is a solution to get multiple pages in 1 html file.

As example you can look at http://seapip.com

And I hate the over use of skeumorphism, it's making sites messy and most of the time even ugly, yes apple uses it but they use it atleast correctly (in most cases).

[+Nik Louch Subscriber²]

If you're able to make everything into 1 html file for a way faster website, using hastags for navigation is a solution to get multiple pages in 1 html file.

As example you can look at http://seapip.com

Off topic: His site loaded faster than yours (for me)?

[LUTZIFER]

Very nice! Love the wood look. You don't see that often.

Actually, I really like how your title/logo and navigation stay on the side like they do, and the other part scrolls, nice setup.

[LaP]

I'm not a fan of the font to be honest. It's a little bit thin and it makes it somewhat hard to read.

The wood design will get old really fast. It also looks 1995 to me.

The minimalist design is better imo. A problem with your minimalist design is the text does highlight when you mouse over it but you need to click the button under it to acces the section. The text should be clickable to acces the section or it should not highlight when you mouse over it.

You don't have a better quality picture of you ? It looks like an old 40% jpeg saved for 56k ... might as well put a 36k warning to go with it.

The minimalist design lack some colors/life/theressomethingaboutmary imo. I'm not saying you should put a rainbow in the middle of it but while i might be wrong in my personal opinion metro/minimalist design will get old really really fast. It's also sort of a design trend and following it doesn't set you apart. There's a reason people dropped the black text over white background design of the early 90ies. Maybe adding a color picture instead of a black and white one? Colored titles? Different font for titles than paragraphs? I don't know it's your call you can leave it like it is right now too i just think it looks a little boring and conservative. It's okay for a cv but for a portfolio i dunno. This said it is my personal preference only if you like it this way then keep it this way.

Looks like the responsive design works great. I quickly tested it on many resolutions and it looked good on all of them.

[Sandor]

Also .htm in your urlbar is really bad lol, try hiding it trough htacces ;)

what's "bad" about having the file extension?

[Seahorsepip Veteran]

Off topic: His site loaded faster than yours (for me)?

My hosting sucks lol, if you use spider or any other tool you will see that most of the waiting time is the file request time of my hosting :/

what's "bad" about having the file extension?

It's better for seo and makes your webpage look more professional(and complex) then just a simple htm file :p

[MikeChipshop Member]

what's "bad" about having the file extension?

It's just not 'pretty' i guess.

Not bad attempt at minimalism but it lacks something, even if i can't quite put my foot on what that something is.

I think it may be the font, or possibly the line height.

[_neutrino Veteran]

i like the design and it works well for the most part, there are some elements that look strange due to the wood grain not matching up.

[MikeChipshop Member]

It's better for seo

Doesn't make the slightest difference if you remove the extension (.php, .html etc) via .htaccess on SEO.

However, using .htaccess to rewrite URL's so they are humanly readable and clean (prettyfying) will make a good amount of difference..

[Seahorsepip Veteran]

Doesn't make the slightest difference if you remove the extension (.php, .html etc) via .htaccess on SEO.

However, using .htaccess to rewrite URL's so they are humanly readable and clean (prettyfying) will make a good amount of difference..

I thought it did :/ seems I was wrong there :p

[MikeChipshop Member]

I thought it did :/ seems I was wrong there :p

You know what Google are like, that could change tomorrow :D

Even if you were aiming for the keyword "php", having .php extensions wouldn't do anything. They're not taken into consideration, in the same way that the type of image isn't taken into consideration for SEO.

Also, you can use .htaccess to create your own file extensions, hours of fun ;)

[Sandor]

It's better for seo and makes your webpage look more professional(and complex) then just a simple htm file :p

Nonsense.

[Tom]

Just an FYI, having any style in your HTML is extremely bad practice. Make everything in <style> an external stylesheet.

[hckngrtfakt]

Style feels outdated, some text is hard to read, and code is inconsistent (your favicon uses a relative path, while your background image is on absolute)

Also, what Tom said about your CSS (Y)

[Gee.B]

Thanks for all your replay I do appreciate

I guess i'll go with the more minimalist style and refine it then. it's always hard to have a timeless design but I guess the simpler, the better

Again thanks a lot

[primexx]

get rid of the fade-in. and get a much better picture if you're going to have a picture. make the text on top of the buttons clickable. and use a baseline grid for goodness' sake. i like the rest.

edit: illustration