Please critique my design :) (which seem to become a fashion to do)

[Philip_T]

Im a better Designer than programer (if you are allowed to say that with out sounding like an as-hole).
And I hope people that visit the page understand what Im going for.

I’m using Coda-slider (not sure if thats the best one) and there is one thing that’s bothering me with it. That you can’t use the back button on the browser. Any suggestions?

Please check http://www.tragardh.me/

Cheers, and thanks
Philip

(ohooo.. I haven’t bothered to make it look good in IE and old browsers, maby I should look in to that)

[Arvid]

Hello Phillip, I think your site looks nice but there are a few things you should think about. First of all, your navigation isn’t really obvious as it took me sometime to find it, and even when I did it didn’t link to all of your pages so you still have to click the arrows to navigate without knowing what to expect, which is bad for usability. You could also work on some of the spacings in the design, for example the arrow is closer to the text than it is to the image. I also think there were a few spelling mistakes, and seeing how I’m swedish myself I wonder in what way being swedish makes you want to keep your designs clean. :p

Anyway, I’m not to experienced myself but good luck with the website.

[Brightonmike]

To be honest, visually I think it’s really poor, garish gradients and dashes of web 2.0. Additionally, I don’t think using Coda slider to store your main content is wise, it’s too clunky. Sorry, I’m not a fan.

[Philip_T]

Tack Arvid… that is, Thanks Arvid, for all you none Swedes out there :)

I kind of wanted the arrows to be the main navigation, and the upper navigation only to help you if you needed more information about me.

maybe I should hide the navigation till, you clicked the arrow at least once, and slowly fade it in… or maybe have it fade in when you are on the contact page.

Cause I do want people to go through the web-page, one page at a time. it’s only at that time, I don’t mind if they “jump” between the pages (and some of the pages I have are pure filling, thats not that important) there of, only 3 “buttons”

Any suggestions to make the page jumping (with the arrows) Clearer, so people understand what to klick?

True, being Swedish don’t make you do “Clean” design, but compared to where I live, and the Design they do here… my design is super clean. We Scandinavian have a repartition to make clean/funktional design, (IKEA, Bruno Mattson, can’t think of any other Scandinavian design now… ) and Im trying to use that to my advantage, its kind of one of my selling points here, and hoping that it makes me a little unique.

Cheers

[Philip_T]

Hi Brightonmike
I was hoping to get away with haveing everything on one page (in the coda slider), just because of the small content… not sure how to achieve the same effect any other way.

And sorry to say, I don’t really know what part are Web2.0, please let me know so I can remove it, and also learn not to do it again :)

About the Design, we can have a long discussions… I like it, you don’t…

Any how, thanks

[OniLinkCR]

The references of 2.0 that mike makes are the gradients, from White to gray, they are too old for today’s standards (at least amongst designers).

[Arvid]

Haha, tack själv. Anyway, I think you should have a main navigation with all your differnt pages in it, because naviagting with arrows isn’t obvious enough and people who browse your site will want to know where to go to find the information they need as quickly as possible, not seeing any obvious navigation will turn a lot of people away. I also think there’s a little to little content on some of the slides, for example why not mix the dreamweaver/flash section with the one before that one containing the other Adobe tools. I also recommend having somekind of services page. For inspiration, look at Stockholms leading design company, http://www.vektorgrafik.se/

[Philip_T]

ohoo…
I thought I done something in “web2.0 coding”, not an “old” design style.

In this case I think it works (to lazy to do anything about it now, in other words).

Maybe I should put more effort into making sure to keep up to date with the latest Web-design “trends”. So I don’t do the same mistake next time.

Thanks for explaining :)

[Johnnyb]

Hey Philip, I thought I’d return the favor as you gave me feedback on my website!

My primary suggestion is not so much about the design, but rather about who your target audience is. Are you hoping to use this website to gain freelance work? Or is it more or an online resume/portfolio to use for prospective employers?

If it’s the first then I feel like the message of the site is off point. I feel like you talk a lot about yourself and not much about how you can help clients. Take a look at this link: http://freelancefolder.com/7-reasons-your-website-doesnt-bring-in-new-clients/ and scroll down to point #4 – try not just to list your skills, but rather what you can do for them.
I would also argue that it is unlikely that a prospective freelance client will know or really care about InDesign, Dreamweaver, CSS, they’re likely to be more interested in what you can create than which tools you use to create it.

I also agree with previous points about needing more information in there. I find myself scrolling through the slider wanting to find out more about what services you can provide etc, but it’s all a bit vague.

If you are instead using the site to appeal to prospective employers then I think it’s not clear, concise, or informative enough for that. An employer doesn’t want to be scrolling through slides of short sentences and icons, they want clear, quick ways to access the information and portfolio pieces they want to, and then a way to find out more if they desire.

At the moment it feels like the site doesn’t really appeal to either of those audiences, it doesn’t really seem to have a clear message.

Hope this is helpful :)

PS. I like what you’ve done with the logo text. Looks really nice.

[ChrisBull]

You need to fix your grammatical errors…
Page ‘Me’ –
‘I am an Designer’ -> ‘I am a Designer’ (designer shouldn’t really be capitalised but i guess your trying to emphasis it).
‘that worked in’ -> ‘that has worked in’.
‘My work has a wide bandwidth’ -> Not sure if that is possible… bandwidth is, from Wikipedia, ‘a measure of the width of a range of frequencies’.
3rd Page –
‘meny’ -> is spelt ‘many’.
Page ‘Ideas’
‘sells it self’ -> ‘sells itself’.
Page ‘Logos’ –
‘Communicates a company’s profile and transmit an emotional feeling instantly’ -> You start in plural then move to singular. -> ‘transmits’.
Page ‘Web’ –
‘To day’ -> ‘Today’.
Last Page –
‘sending a e-mail’ -> ‘sending an e-mail’. Most people use ’email’.
A minor problem – ‘Sincerely’ is used when you know the persons name, in letters for example. Should use ‘Yours faithfully’ when you don’t know their name

[Philip_T]

Thank you, thank you, thank you… Johnnyb… you are so right…
Now when I look at it again I see that I, totally missed the mark. I got “blinded” of what I wanted to do, and forgot about who it was for.

Thanks Arvid, I missed your second post before, with Johnnyb’s feed back I understand what you are saying.
It’s easy to say “kill your darling” but damn hard doing it :)

I do admit Im a horrible copy, which is kind of obvious from ChrisBull’s post *blush* (thank you ChrisBull to take time correcting me).

Again thanks for the Professional feed back :)
Philip

[mshort1985]

I have to agree with the other posters Philip. The Navigation is far to small to be seen. I know you want people to use the arrows to navigate the site, but I don’t think this is a very user friendly way of doing it.

I would make the navigation bigger and more eye catching and either do away with the arrows or just keep them as a secondary way of navigating the site.

Don’t mean to sound mean or anything, but it looks like the website of someone who was a programmer not a designer so I would take the advice others have given you and perhaps update it a little bit so that it doesn’t look so dated.

All that being said, I can sympathise, it’s often hard to decide what to do with sites that have very little content to display, a few months ago I did a make over of a website for a company, their original page had 5 pages each with only a paragraph of text and 1 image on it. All I really did to improve it was condense it into a one page site, no fancy sliders or anything, just doing that made it a lot better.

Being a designer your site should show off your skills as a designer and not purely be an informational site about you.

[salimos]

Hi Philip,
I have to agree with previous posted comment that the navigation is not really clear and you don’t know what to expect when you click next, in addition you are forcing the user to keep on clicking and passing through several section in order to see the last section for example, i suggest the you use a different approach to do this.
You can take a look at Tabs Tool in the JQuery Tools – The missing UI library for the web at the following Link http://flowplayer.org/tools/demos/index.html.
What i recommend to use is “Loading tab contents with AJAX” (Check the Sample)
You can put the content in different HTML Pages and Load them dynamically using AJAX.

Hope this will Help :D
SaLiMoS

[Author]

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