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Redesigning website. Need critiques


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**EDITED AS OF 4:25pm EST 04/19/2003**

I'm the webmaster for a website, http://www.threecircleplan.org.

The site is a purely informational site, as it describes the plans of the organization, "Center for Internet-Based Public Education".

I'm working on a redesign for the site, mainly to make it more readable for smaller resolutions (800x600 and the like), but also to make it more professional looking.

The working design is here (updated 04/19/2003):

http://threecircleplan.org/CIBE2.1/index.htm

Basically, I'm looking for critiques on what I can do to improve the new design, whether there are elements of the old design I should retain, and what problems might crop up for people on various OS'es and browsers.

If you visit either site and run into a problem, let me know what it is along w/ your OS/Browser.

Oh, and one more thing, the links on the new design don't work yet, you'll get 404 errors if you click on them.

Looking forward to your comments and critiques. Thanks.

Edited by Jack31081
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Looks good, what did you use to build it

and change the defult colors for the hyperlinks to match the site... the bright blue doesnt look good.

Opera 7.10

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Using Dreamweaver MX...absolutely fantastic program. Making the images took up the bulk of my time in creating this redesign.

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I'm probably going to recolor the nav bar to blue before long.

The trouble I'm having right now is finding a decent background color. I don't want white becuase then it'd be blinding.

Any you guys recommend a decent color scheme that might work?

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Well for one, I can't learn anything all the whitepapers are missing. ;)

I'm not suggesting using a ticker tape - which is annoying - but you might want to put the important annoucements separately so they catch more attention.

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Oh, I have the white paper, it's just being witheld at the author's request for the time being. :)

I like the idea of having a separate section for the announcements.

The question is, should I make it a fixed size and have the announcements be scrollable, or should I let the announcements take up as much room as they need?

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Threw together another possible redesign in Photoshop.

Not going to waste the time making it into a site if it sucks, so here's the JPG of what it would look like.

redesign.jpg

Let me know how this color scheme compares to the others.

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Perhaps I'm slow, but I don't see a huge need for change. The original site looks very clean and is pleasant to my eye :) Perhaps you could round off the buttons and tweak the logo, but other than that, it looks clever :cool:

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As I said earlier, I started to change it by only making the rounded corners smaller along with the main logo, so that people w/ 800x600 wouldn't freak out. I know, you say, "Who's got 800x600 these days", well the main audience for this is people in their mid 30-40s, at universities w/ computers that are probably at least a few years old, so there's guaranteed to be a number of 15" monitors out there running 800x600.

Anyway, after changing the sizes of some things, I started playing with new colors and button types, and eventually got to what you see above in that pic.

I don't think there's a NEED for change, but I'm a webmaster who's really a web designer at heart...I just can't help from fiddlin'...

:D :D

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Ok, well I've made my picture into a real website:

http://www.threecircleplan.org/new_concept/index.htm

Just remember, none of the links work yet...

But I've hit two large problems.

First, the transparent PNGs I used look like crap in IE6. They all have grey backgrounds. In Opera 7 they look fine.

Also, the DHTML scroller box I have works fine in IE6 but makes the page jump around in Opera 7.

Does anyone else have these issues when viewing the above page?

Can anyone think of a way to fix these problems, besides not using PNGS or not using the scroll box??

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Internet Explorer is terrible with PNG files. I guess Microsoft decided that PNG files with transparency were not important. Opera, Mozilla, and Konqueror all support PNG files. However, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. A List Apart has a nice article on the issue and gives a nice 'hack' for IE. Hope this help :)

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Nice article, but a bit too much work for me at the moment. I realized that most of the transparent PNGs I have don't need to be transparent, for one reason or another, so I'm just gonna do that.

I may still use this for the title logo, so I can still change the background color at will.

Thanks.

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it looks good but if you want people to stay there to learn you might want to make the area around it look more interesting because nobody really likes public education sites because it is preyt boring to read things like that... So make the layout really nice, colorful , interesting .... things like that... When I was first learing I tried sites like that and I could not do it because nothing was interesting to me... Just some ideas...

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I completely agree that the site doesn't have "oomph", but like I said earlier (I think), this site itself is purely an site for deliving information about the organization.

We (the organization) is just starting, so there's nothing to put on the site, really. However, we just made deals with CWRU (Case Western Reserve University) and NASA to develop e-Learning sites. That's where the real meat of the project is, building the actual sites that hold the educational content.

My only goal for this site is to make this site look professional (as many companies and organizations with a lot of money will soon be browsing it...and we want their money), clean, and not too boring.

If you have any ideas about "jazzin' up" the site design w/o making it unprofessional looking, I'd be glad to hear them.

Even if you just know of other sites that have a layout you think would be more suited to this site.

Edited by Jack31081
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Looks good to me. Clean and effective. I'm using Mozilla 1.4a under Gentoo Linux and I'm not seeing any DHTML menus though--just standard static image and text links.

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Yeah, I'm dumping the DHTML. Too non-standard.

What's the most standard way to have a content box on your page that's scrollable? I'm clueless on this one, sorry.

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Yeah, I'm dumping the DHTML. Too non-standard.

What's the most standard way to have a content box on your page that's scrollable? I'm clueless on this one, sorry.

The most "standard" way would be to have a div styled using CSS, where the height was set to a specific value and the overflow set to "auto". For example,

div { height: 300px; overflow: auto; }

In all honesty the whole design could be done using CSS without any messy tables, resulting in a page that would not only load fast but would indeed serve its purpose, to present information.

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Hmm...your comment about the tables.

Right now I'm using a few tables. One 3x3 table for the "sheet" effect, with the logo, nav bar and content in the center cell.

The nav bar is in its own table, and two 1x1 tables are used for the information and announcements.

What aspects of CSS would I use instead of tables to put everything into their own little "boxes"??

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What aspects of CSS would I use instead of tables to put everything into their own little "boxes"??

You've employed the use of one of the simpler table-based layouts, however through the use of DIVs and CSS you can replicate much of what you've done. With that said, I would recommend making sure the page validates to a standard such as HTML 1.0 or XHTML 1.0 Transitional, before anything else.

However, here are some good sites that show how to use DIVs for layouts:

In addition, here are some sites that exemplify well done layouts using CSS:

There are plenty more I could list, however I think you can get a good idea from these. Like I said though, make your page validate before anything else, and good luck!

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