bumfluff

ok, that hurt

I get what you're saying, headcoat, and agree with a lot of it. I think the practical solution lies between the two extremes. Regarding the art analogy, the difference is that an artist generally presents a view or opinion of something. That's a different function to that of a designer. As far as website design goes, I see our job more in terms of helping the viewer to easily access the information they want. Another consideration is that the aesthetics will appeal to the people the site is targetted at. If someone comes across a site that looks nice, but can't get the information they want from it, the site is useless to them. At the other extreme, if the information is accessible to them but the site looks like crap, it's still useful. So I'd say the aesthetics are secondary to accessibility. I don't think that's necessarily a problem as far as design goes. Design is a problem-solving discipline, there are always limitations of some sort that affect what you can do. The most common one may be budgetary, but there's plenty of other common ones... it must print out on A4, it must use a particular server type or language, etc etc.. a design brief is essentially a list of limitations imposed by the client. I think good design is a solution that gets around all the problems, or comes to the best compromise. Also, I don't think accessibility and aesthetics are polar opposites. There's no reason they shouldn't be able to work together, but it takes a bit of a shift away from the traditional view of what a designer does. I think we're moving away from the old view where creating a design was about controlling exactly what the public sees. I think that's kind of a hangup from the days of designing for print. Fluidity and flexibility capitalise on the strengths of computer-based information. If you think about it, why shouldn't the public have more control over how they view the information they want? If they want to override settings, like text size or colour, they should be able to.. making the information available in forms that's convenient to the public is kind've our job. If anything, designing with flexibility in mind should make our jobs easier because one layout can be suitable for more people than if everything were fixed.. the client wins (more people can access the info they're giving out), the designer wins (no more multiple stylesheets and trying to cater for everyone's taste) and obviously the public wins 'cos they have more info available to them. Sorry, didn't realise how long this was getting - I'll stop banging on about it now

There's a bunch of examples of different types at the bottom of this page. What was the problem with the ones you tried? Could you not get them working, or were they working in a different way than what you wanted?

Good reading

Not necessarily.. a lot of it hinges around legal terminology (definitions of private information etc), but that's purely legal. If it's found that some aspect is definitely against the law, changing terms of service won't make it legal again. That's the real sticker there. I'm thinking, though.. if the system has to be opt-in, then that's on the grounds of personal privacy and so on - because of the traffic interception. Presumably the system would have to be changed so that only opted-in users would have their traffic interfered with. I doubt many people are going to choose to opt in, so would they bother to change the system (I'd guess that'd cost a fair amount) for a limited number of users? Would it make the whole project unfeasible? Although, thinking about it, they'd probably make the opt in screen like a EULA... one of those long documents you agree to cos you can't be arsed reading it all..

I bet there'll be a lot of people with kids wondering why they're getting so many porn ads

Same here. But I figure I don't need much energy as long as I stay on the computer, so it works out quite nicely.

I quite like the logo, but not the chosen font. The mark is quite loose in feel, but the text is kind've awkward and unbalanced. They don't go together. The shadow effect under the logo also kills it because it makes the mark feel way too solid which is at odds with the flowy feel of the signed W. Being picky, the linework of the mark could do with a bit of variation to enhance the sense of movement. Not keen on the rest of the index design for a few reasons. The picture appears quite drab.. the colours are muted, with a slight magenta cast (with monitor calibrated). I'm guessing the monitor it was created on is uncalibrated? The Welcome text placement and styling is a bit boring. It could potentially have really lifted the rest of the design had it been done in a more interesting way. I quite like the bottom part with the name and job title. It's strong and clear, plus the font is interesting without being overpowering (although it doesn't work in the logo). Having said that, I don't think this area fits in with the rest of the design. The colour choice is very cold, which kills the appeal of a sandy beach. I'd lose the :: seperators. They used to be popular a few years back, but look a little dated now. Bumping up the text size a couple of notches buggers up the layout. Going on to the other pages... Like notbanksy said, it's a bit jarring because the design is quite different to the index. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing in itself, but I think the problem comes in because of the large white content area. The index has no flat white areas, so this is introducing something totally new. If you changed this for a sandy background, it may work better, although you'd have to be careful that the sand texture didn't make the text hard to read. The section titles look out of place. Horizontally, there's no alignment, and although it's vertically aligned with the middle of the W, that doesn't work well because the W is uneven (not a bad thing in itself).. it's not a natural line for the eye to draw. Aligning the top of the text with the top right of the W or aligning the bottom of the text with the bottom left or right of the W would probably work a lot better. Seems to be a lot of extra code in the pages (including the index). Fairly certain that could be optimised, as the layout isn't complicated.

There's a good resource here. It has links to sample contracts as well as articles about different aspects of contracts/terms of business etc.

Need a little clarification as to what you're trying to do here. Generally, you shouldn't need to set values for things like margins so high.. it'd suggest that whatever you're trying to do, you're using the wrong approach. If you give a bit more detail about what you're after, someone may be able to point you in the right direction.

<-- impressed Nice to see accessibility being thought about so much. I'm involved with a group of teenagers that have various physical and learning disabilities, and it's amazing how many sites are inaccessible in some way to them. The great part is that the site design hasn't suffered as a result of the accessibility angle. I think a lot of designers feel that making a site accessible means compromises have to be made to accomodate it. There are a couple of things you might want to adjust. One is the contact form. The input areas are only defined by a light grey border, so they're easily missed by someone who hasn't got great vision. Changing the fill colour of the input area would make a huge difference, and I'd also think about making the labels clearer.. maybe a size larger and bold. Also, when clicking on the CV section, you have a list of quick links. The last link (conferences) gets slightly obscured with the white/grey background pattern. Good to see all your styling totally seperated from the content. All looks good in terms of semantics and stuff too. :: just noticed :: Some of your layout breaks when increasing text sizes. Having a fixed width layout probably limits you a bit much here. If you changed it to a fluid layout, as that would be better from an accessiblility angle. Hell, if you changed that and the other two little bits above, I'd give you top marks :: last edit :: Don't worry, another minor one.. you've used two different conventions for showing links (apart from the menu, which I don't think really counts). One is the mid-blue colour, the other is in your quick links. From an accessibility standpoint, it'd be better to have either one convention, or add a common factor to them - preferably an underscore, as that's a widely used convention already.

I was expecting something revolutionary.. hate to say it, but it wasn't as cutting edge (sometimes I crack me up) as I was expecting. The flash intro didn't add anything for me.. I mean, I reckon most people know what a cutting board is for already, and it wasn't that interesting to watch. The site layout itself is quite nice. The curves make a refreshing change from the usual boxiness. Not keen on all the animation, it makes a clean design look too busy. The top animation is a little distracting, and again, there doesn't seem to be a need for it. I'm not sure about the changing board displays.. I can imagine clicking to add one to the cart and it changing just as I click. While I could go back and change it, it's an extra step. I'd either change to static images or change the display time to once a minute or something. Not keen on the header menu animating on every page change.. I wanted to change page after clicking the Retail button and had to wait. I don't really like the way that after the index, you've got a boxy header and content area. It kills the strengths of the layout, which is the open, flowing feel. One of your product images doesn't fit in the display space. It overlaps the boundaries.

I was going to reply with "are you taking the p***?" 'til I saw your links were wrong Website 1 Website 2

Far as I know, you couldn't do it as an automated process. You could get the basic layout, but would have to make changes yourself to allow for dynamic content. Even if you could do it as a one-click process, you wouldn't end up with a very optimised site. Photoshop isn't designed with site integration in mind (that functionality is pretty much an afterthought), and Dreamweaver's code isn't too well optimised either. If you have the site designed in Photoshop, you'd better off slicing and dicing it manually and then hand-coding for Wordpress.

Last I heard, the Information Commissioner was saying it should be an opt-in system. I've been sort of following this for a month or so now, and it's great how much publicity it's gotten in that time.

Sorry.. hope that didn't get on your wick...

um...

The simpleviewer one allows for more images than are displayed at one time. Arrows appear that let you "scroll" left or right through the thumbnails as required.

At a guess, the style is being overridden by the CSS for the bit you're trying to edit. Styling stuff should be done in CSS rather than in the HTML, so you'd need to edit the stylesheet.

Looks quite smart as it is, but it's really going to depend on the logo and images.. they could affect the appearance quite a lot.

That one was Flash. You can purchase it from here. I've used it for my own portfolio here. You can either use it as is (you just edit an XML file and drop your images into directories - one for thumbnails, one for full-size), or you can edit the appearance with Flash if you have it (they supply the original file).

*waves to Dan*

My opinion would be that it's using a lot of trendy effects that really have nothing to do with the subject matter. Because of that, it looks templatey. It could be a site for anything if you just changed the pics and text.. there's nothing about the site design or styling that relates to bearings, or gives any clue as to what the company's about (not just in terms of what they do, but their 'character' etc) The new heading is an improvement in that it gets rid of the distracting reflections, but it's still so generic that it could be for anything. It also reads awkwardly because of the placement of the "& transmission co.ltd" part. It looks like "acornbearings.co.uk & transmission co.ltd", which doesn't make much sense unless there's a seperate company called "transmission co.ltd" A proper logo would probably help a lot. People tend to see a logo as an indicator of a professional company.

The logged-in one is better. Did you do the illustration yourself?

That totally looks like a template. Also not sure the blog layout is appropriate considering the audience for ringtones.