Look At This Piece Of Cow Dung Of Work
<div class="IPBDescription">My how they screwed up my school webpage</div> One of my friends is part of the web page designing group for our school, which has a population around 2,500 plus.
If you look at the first webpage (edited and made worse), it is very clean, professional, and to the point. But if you look at the second page, which basically looks like something you would find on geocities, it is very unprofessional. It does injustice to our school.
I really don't know what the hell the guys in this group are thinking of. I would just expand on the first page and make it better, not clutter it with stupid scroll bars, and fade away background. As for my friend, he tries to make them agree with him, but he has no power over the similiar minds of the group.
<a href='http://www.ainlay.ca' target='_blank'>http://www.ainlay.ca</a>
<a href='http://www.ainlay.ca/test/' target='_blank'>http://www.ainlay.ca/test/</a>
If you look at the first webpage (edited and made worse), it is very clean, professional, and to the point. But if you look at the second page, which basically looks like something you would find on geocities, it is very unprofessional. It does injustice to our school.
I really don't know what the hell the guys in this group are thinking of. I would just expand on the first page and make it better, not clutter it with stupid scroll bars, and fade away background. As for my friend, he tries to make them agree with him, but he has no power over the similiar minds of the group.
<a href='http://www.ainlay.ca' target='_blank'>http://www.ainlay.ca</a>
<a href='http://www.ainlay.ca/test/' target='_blank'>http://www.ainlay.ca/test/</a>
Comments
The first one needs a major rework and a graphic designer to beat the living cr*p out of it.
The red rectangle needs to be more of a square. This would allow the (tiny) logo smacked inside to be sized up. Alternately, size it up and practice creative cropping! As well, hit the inner table-cells with a slightly lighter shade. This keeps focus, and promotes readability on a black on mid-tone based medium (as this is).
Add dynamism. A couple of dots (or an ellipse) in the little up-cut notch in the lower-right would help this a lot. The rest of the page is all about horizontal and vertical. A graph. VERY boring. Not something you want to look at for long, after which you can completely forget ever having seen it. I normally don't suggest this, but a little bit of animation *could* help. <u>VERY</u> little animation. Just enough to get someone's eye to catch it, and for them to look and wait for it to do it again, but without having to wait frustratingly long.
Continuing the three yellow bars with a diagonal break in the middle (or better yet, a semicircle 'bulge' toward the main page) would provide an excellent opportunity for this, allowing a 'glow' to run down along, hit the turn, sweep around, and then go straight down again. Or reverse it (though I wouldn't recommend doing so... people are used to seeing things falling of their own volition.. looks 'wrong' if they go upward without intervention) to have the glow 'feed' the logo. Looking again, the bulge might be better used in filling the left hand 'gutter' of the page... so have the bulge go outward.
The second one is slow-loading but has 'lickable' navigation bars (good for personal pages, BAD for professional pages unless it's a unified theme... which that is NOT).
<li>It is disorganized and VERY plain. It's like a vending machine with a cheaply-painted fiberglass facade, with a few buttons poking out at random angles and an LCD display smacked in as an afterthought.
<li>The buttons NEED to be made smaller in filesize. The current state is EXTREMELY modem-unfriendly. I'd suggest medium/low-quality PNGs with an alpha channel. Not much will be lost, it looks like a whole thirty seconds was spent on the first one, and the rest are copy/paste/text tool.
<li>Create a background. Heck, even a light gray grid (tiled to conserve filesize, of course). Solid colors may be pretty on BMWs, Hummers and $750 suits. But mostly THAT just looks like someone took a particularly ugly shade of nail polish to my screen.
<li>UNIFY AND CONTAIN. The web page is floating apart! Quick, catch the navbars and lash them together before we lose one! Continuity is INCREDIBLY important. It gives a feeling of solidarity. Even if only on one side, have a bar coming down to 'link' the navbars together, preferably with some tasteful combination art. (cornerpieces, rivets, rope, weld-marks, stitching, origami, couplers.. even just a simple colored bend or T-juncture. I don't care.) You want the eyes focussed on the 'corral' you've made (have the blank ugly background outside to keep the eyes bored there, and interested in the content). Put the LIGHTLY PATTERNED/TEXTURED background here. It makes it more interesting than the ugly-smooth, and will have people watching your words. Alternately, reverse this so the text-window is the pool of clarity, for easier reading. One or the other, but make defined 'zones', and utilize dynamic direction to keep the eyes on the good stuff.
In short, I'd have to agree that I like the first one more as it stands now. But the second one has the *potential* to be a much more compelling page than the first one does, with less work.
I hate them both.
The color scheme does not work. They both burn the eyes!
and a lot of what Tal said.
What school isn't "Home of the Titans" ?
I'd really suggest changing the colors. Despite the fact I have no idea what the stuff on that webpage means, It seems so bland...It looks like a giant blue piece of paper with text, lots of bland uneventful text. The descriptions don't seem to be enough for the main titles...I see lots of "Click here for more information"s ....I'd suggest a little description, but that'd be at the schools discretion.
I know smaller resolutions don't have this, but the right hand of the screen is....a barren desert....of blue.
...uhh, yea...have them remake the second one.
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btw, i live across the street from ainlay
edit: hmm that didnt work, but i guess i shouldnt dodge the swear filters..
Most of my site designs consist of 2-3 graphics at most, and unless I get a crazy awsome idea I keep it simple. <a href='http://www.deviantart.com' target='_blank'>Stock</a> <a href='http://www.sxc.hu' target='_blank'>art</a> is always a good thing too.