Designer Falls

 

Honest opinion folks, I've just launched Designer Falls, the design is done and everything is in place except a few pages and other things I need to do, but I want to know your honest opinions on what you rate the design and what you think is good, but also what you think could be improved, I really am open to any constructive criticism.

 

Thanks in advance, and I look forward to hearing your replies!

Your coding is suffereing a little from div-itis, and put your stylings in a seperate css stylesheet to clean up the code. I'm a little worried that your website "wobbles" when you roll over the homepage button. Your menu navigation feels a bit fragmented, maybe its because everything is a bit boxed up. You need to bring it all together a little

I think it's best to ask 'what do you think?' when the sites fully finished...

Not very professional seeing 'Coming Soon/Under construction/Lorem Ipsum' pages.

 

Not a bad start though!

I like it, cept it's buggy. That slider doesn't work properly and the nav breaks when hovering on the active element.

 

The content on the gradients from light blue to white loos quite poor (in comparance to the suber promising logo).

 

Needs some polish!

I think it's mostly good, structually well laid out, and good functionality par a few bugs, but i really hate the shades of blue that have been chosen.

 

Not looked at the code though.

Right in response to JMCDesigner: Divitis, yep maybe your right, thats something I can improve over time, but with it being my first official wordpress website I think thats more then acceptable, and my styles are in separate stylesheets, layout, typography and reset.css not quite sure what your looking at. The code will be cleaned up but I wanted to get the site up and then work on it, because otherwise its not going anywhere, as theres always something to do.

 

The website wobbles thing is easy to fix I just need to set the active pages correctly so the hover state isn't applied to an active page, again something I'm going to do. I'm not quite sure what you mean by the navigation being fragmented, I think its important for it to be separate to a certain extent as otherwise you lose it, and once again I think the boxed up is a personal thing, it depends very much on the kinda thing your designing, with a site like that its going to get pretty messy without some proper structure. Thanks for your views though.

 

 

In response to Jamesicon: Your right with that, and this is all stuff that will be done, but again i'm not plastering the website over the news and in magazines, I just wanted to officially get it out there, see what people think, improve certain areas and see what happens, the pages will be added to soon, but again I haven't had floods of visitors but with a full time very tiring job its something I have to find the time to do, and not that I don't want to, but its something that needs to be done properly. But again thanks for your comments.

 

In response to MolotovRuss: Thanks, I do agree its a little bit buggy, the slider worked perfectly before I integrated it with Wordpress, I'm waiting for an email back from a guy who managed to integrate the same slider perfectly and get all the backend stuff working, so thats just something that I'm not overly happy about but am living with for now, but the main stuff is there you just have to wait or scroll down to see the posts, instead of clicking them!

 

I think your maybe right about the gradient, I tried a lot of different one's but found it hard to strike a balance between blending in and standing out, I want it to stand out, so people read what Designer Falls is about but again I want it to look good. All in all I do agree it does need some polish but this is something that can be done, and compared to a number of websites on the internet and certain members on this forum I don't think its bad at all! But I agree I've got to get the polish out on certain areas!

 

 

In response to bocaj: Thanks for that, nice to hear it, I think its important that a site like this is well structured and as you say I think it is, to be honest I think that for a website to function properly it has got to have a certain "boxiness" to it, again it depends on how you do that, but anything other then that and its going to be a mess. Again yeah I know theres a few bugs, but how many products are launched, or websites made that don't have some bugs, you find out from good people like yourself kindly letting me know, so we can fix them! Finally I think the blue is a matter of personal opinion, which by all means your welcome to, but on the same hand I can't go changing things like that, as you most definitely understand because otherwise I'd be changing it all the time!!

 

 

Thanks all for your comments.

There is obviously some small kinks that needs to be ironed out, but I really like your design. Looks very nice and clean.

Looks nice enough, maybe a bit too much blue. My biggest problem is with the navigation, something that should have a lot of time spent getting right. It's one of the most important parts of any site in my opinion.

 

The issue with yours is that there are two navigation bars. There's the one at the top with 'Home, about and contact' and then the categories bar with all the main buttons. On the home page its worse as the two are separated by the welcome sliding pics.

 

There's also no obvious separation between the buttons, a simple border in-between would visually define each button.

 

What I would do is get rid of the descriptive 'categories' box and replace it with a home tab. Then move the whole bar to the top where the current 'home, about, contact' bar is. Then move the about and contact buttons to the footer or reduce the size and stick them in the top right of the header.

Looks nice enough, maybe a bit too much blue. use this color code to make more beautiful "00b7e5".

Cheers guys, nice comments, just responding about the navigation, the 'category's navigation' isn't a navigation menu, I've done it like that instead of a list of category's down the sidebar, I thought I'd do something different, I'll take a look at how I can improve it, but its where it is so people can quickly click one of the category's and find every bit of design inspiration posted under it.

 

Oh and yeah I'm thinking about how I can add some more colour, besides blue into it, but as I said all this stuff will evolve over time!

 

Thanks for the comments!

You clearly have a good eye for design, and the design is great, it does fall down in a few places. Might seem a bit nit picky and I am sorry if some of the stuff has been mentioned before I have looked through the other posts and not seen the below.

 

1. The area labelled panel 1 is great, however when you try and select a piece of work it just start again, instead of highlighting the work clicked
   
2. When you visit a "View all posts under..." the colour remains on the first link, which is misleading
   
3. Code wise it seems good and the home page at least validates which is always a nice surprise haha
   
4. I noticed that someone else did mention your pixel-shift when the main menu at the top is hovered on
   

 

Just a few bits I noticed, I haven't rated it yet as I think the design and the work when finished will be great, but at the moment you are let down by a few small details.

Thanks a lot for that, encouraging stuff, yeah the stuff you've mentioned I'm aware off, so I'm working on ways to fix it, which a couple of them (as is often the case in wordpress) don't have a clear solution, but its definitely stuff I want to sort (especially the slider) as I've said, this is all stuff that I'm glad to hear because often you miss stuff that others notice, and over the next few days I hope to sort these things out.

 

Thanks again for your post!