Re: Website mockup – would love some serious critique

[gno]

Hi Spearfrost! I feel like saying welcome, but I’m as new as you, so I’ll leave that to the guys who are more frequent on this forum ;-)

Dark layouts are alot harder to pull off, in my opinion, but yours is quite nice. The colors fit eachother well and the orange one is not too bright – so we’ll leave them…

There are a few places where I would recommend you to do some changes;

1) The “Featured Submission” box seems odd, when its the only box on the page without the lighter grey background. I have no idea why you chose to use the same heading as you do for the other boxes, but leave the background out? It leaves the header hanging in the same way that you do not want to be left hanging, when attempting a high-five with one of your bro’s ;-)

2) The text on the profile tab is far too wide. I have to turn my neck to read a line in its full length. You seem to using a 11 or 12px font-size on the text. I believe Chris covered this in a previous article – but best practice for paragraph widths is to be about 35-50 ems. An em is a relative measure (originally its the length of the lower case letter m) – its the same size as your font size in css at least. So, if we say 11px font size, your max width would be 550pixels, and minimum 385 pixels. I measured yours to be about 750px.

After your disclaimer in the end, I obviously headed straight to your site, and I noticed one other thing there, besides the awesome drawings – no kidding, I think you are an amazing artist (drawer – whatever its called :-)). Your site took quite some time to load – because of all those images.

I’m from Copenhagen, Denmark, and you are most likely from the US, like most of this community seems to be, but even most american sites load in an instant. You should look into the images and other external elements on your page. A few ideas/key words: Better compression of images, stylesheets and what not. Figuring out where you can avoid the use of images. Using repeated patterns instead of full size images on backgrounds.

You said you were new to web design so I couldn’t help mentioning this :-)

I hope that you can make use the feedback – and that you are able to understand me. If I were to throw a disclaimer as an ending for my post it would have to be something like: Please keep in mind that english is not my native language ;-)