Feedback on my redesigned site

[Koopa]

Hey guys,
I would be really happy, if you could help me out an give me some feedback on my new site. Suggestions on performance improvments and reduces in loading time are also very much appreciated.

Many Thanks in advance

Koopa

[chrisburton]

Sure. Just add a link.

[Koopa]

Omg, how could I forget that :S

http://www.cookie-games.com

[Koopa]

Wow, thanks a lot for your extensive feedback :)

I will try out some new fonts.
About the menu bar you are right as well, it doesn’t really fit the rest.
I will change the footer too, it looks much better, when you increase its height to reduce the number of columns

Thanks you very much !

[chrisburton]

I don’t really like the font face.

Care to explain why?

Web fonts are trendy now.

“trendy”? Fonts designed for the web serve a real purpose. I wouldn’t call them a ‘trend’.

Have a browse through Google Web Fonts (perhaps Open Sans), if you’re looking for free fonts;

Professionals should really adjust their thought process on free services. Quality is what matters. Because there will probably be a reply to that previous sentence, there are a number of quality faces at the same price as a week worth of coffee at Starbucks. I’ve highly recommended Webtype around these forums because they seem to do the best work when it comes to webfonts. Especially with their RE series webfonts. Typekit is all right but I’m not liking their use of auto-hinting algorithms, placing those webfonts on their site without even checking the quality on different platforms. That shows they don’t care or are inexperienced and I’ve had to email them on this matter twice, based on my selections. I’m sure there’s issues with others if I took the time to check.

or Typekit (Proxima Nova is always gorgeous) if you’ve got room in your budget to shell out for the service.

And ubiquitous. I find Proxima Nova is better suited for headlines than body text (even though Typekit recommends this). Being a typographer and selecting your choices is technical. Over time you get better at it but it’s not as easy as randomly calling out popular webfonts to put on your site.

[chrisburton]

Might I suggest adding a load screen? Ideally you wouldn’t need one but you do.

Or simply cache the site, reduce http requests, use icon fonts and code rather than sprites or single small images (if possible).

[Koopa]

@Joe_Temp Yes I know that the site is quite slow, when you load it for the first time. I already had in mind to include a loading screen. However I’m working on increasing my bandwith (the site is hosted on my private server). At the moment, my upload is limited to 16MBit down and 1 Mbit up. However I’m building an better server and increasing the bandwidth to 50 down and 15 up. I hope this will improve the loading time a lot.

@chrisburton The site is being cached already and it is using icon fonts. When you reload the start page, there will be only 5.1kb transferred and 14 http requests. But I just noticed that I can reduce those to 10.

[chrisburton]

I don’t like Tahoma. A personal thing, I concede, but this is a design forum and fonts constitute design.

I mean, I’m with you on the basis of better alternatives but type is not just about design. In fact, that’s the least important factor you should consider when selecting.

And to be quite honest, I was going off of a site I opened from a previous thread. Oops.

I’m not trying to attack you in any way. I hope you know that.

@Koopa

What about a CDN? Are you sure that’s all you can reduce your requests to? Do you absolutely NEED jQuery? Can it be done with Javascript instead, eliminating the jQuery library plus the jQuery script? Can you reduce the file size of your larger images?

Edit: I just noticed that after the initial page load, everything runs smoothly after being cached.

[Koopa]

@chrisburton

I could go without jQuery on the homepage but there are other pages that required it too. Actually it’s working and I am happy with it. I will keep jQuery, but I will only load the jquery.min.js separatley and put the rest into a script tag. And yes I could load jQuery from a CDN.

To decrease the size of the images, I will have to reduce their quality. However I think I could load different sizes for lower and higher ppi

Yes I know that the loading trouble is only once, when the images are loading. I’m pretty sure the increased bandwidth will fix that.

[chrisburton]

I would use Google’s jQuery if you are not already.

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