Website Design Critique

[zbirdboy]

Hey all,

I’m new to these parts, but figured it’d be a good spot to post my new web design. It is going to be a template available on ThemeForest, but before i submit it, i wanted some feedback.

Here’s a little background…

This template is designed for a modern, sophisticated restaurant, one that wants an online presence that reflects the restaurant well. It’s designed with a clean and elegant look using a color scheme of red, gray, and white.

The back-end is also designed for a non-coder because it uses simple to edit XML files as menus which then dynamically update the menu page and the featured item on the homepage. PHP and jQuery to create the menu and image gallery type thing on the home page.

Please be completely honest about anything, design, code, whatever. I know that it may not validate, that, and the contact page doesn’t send an email because my free host im using temporarily doesn’t allow contact forms to send an email. So those are two known issues, and im just so sick of staring at this thing that I could use some fresh perspective.

http://chivalrie2.vndv.com/index.php

Thanks in advance,
Zach

[chazzwick]

i agree with everything written above. Also, i notice you are using the non-compressed version of Jquery. You could save quite a few kB by using the min or pack version (http://code.google.com/p/jqueryjs/). Also make the logo image a link back to the hompage,and decrease the letter spacing in the footer.

[ScottMacD]

Hmm unless the page has changed, im look at the site on my laptop which has a 13.3 inch screen and a 1280×800 pixel resolution, and there is no horizontal scrolling.

but i have to agree about the white space above the logo and the contrast of the main text, maybe change the grey to black and i would maybe make the title and image slighly smaller to create a better balance with the main content text.

Just a personal opinion

Well done

[zbirdboy]

thaks guys. im working on some improvements now, so i’ll update the link when it’s ready.

@ScottMacD – i did fix it, I meant to have the width set at 960px, but for some reason it was set to 1000px, so I changed and updated that. glad to see it solved the horizontal scrolling issue. ;)

[zbirdboy]

hey all,

new changes. start the critiques. ;) http://zlbstudios.zxq.net/index.php

[zbirdboy]

@ikthius – thanks for the heads up on the persitant issue of horizontal scrolling. i fixed it for sure now.

[CupidsToejam]

Okay, I have not read any of the above posts, i just dont have time. here it goes..

1. The very first thing you should always do, is construct nice clean meaningful XHTML. Then get it to validate. All this should be done before you style anything. This site doesnt validate. The errors are minor excempt one. You have two wrapper ID’s. You can only have one ID name. The others were alt text for images.

2. You need more meta data

3. in my opinion, you are using too many divs. You dont need divs for eveything. Divs are used to group common elements.

4. I love white space. but you have too much above header.

5. I’m confused. You have two menus on the home page? The first is your main nav, the second just swapped out images and doesnt go anywhere? If this is true, you have much more focus on meaningless image swap nav. It outshines the main naigation. Maybe these usless nav item should be something else besides text. Maybe small square images that line up bottom right of the image. This way the user is not so confused by whats my navigation.

6. I love the layout with whitespace!

7. I love the color scheme! But, red is sooo bright. It actually gave me a headache looking at the bottom red box. Then you have white and light grey text ontop of bright red surrounded with white. OUCH!! too much contrast. I would use red not for box backgrounds, but more for accenting things, borders, soft gradients and type.

8. You should do something about the form. It looks washed away. Its hard to notice it.

9. I think you should see how things look with red text and accents, rather then background colors.

thats it. good start. get validated!

[zbirdboy]

@ikthius – thanks so much for your awesome critique and great input. i’m going to try this again.

thanks to everyone for the help. the more i look at this, the more i think it could be soooo much better. im going to take some time, think it through, and start over from the design perspective.

this has been a great learning experience, and ill be sure to come back and post my new version.

thanks again,

Zach LeBar

[Author]

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