Edit: skip to the second post.

Hello, I made this layout, what do you think? Any suggestion?

This is the main page: http://drp.ly/Kuqbi

This is the "photo mode": http://drp.ly/KuXfs

The user can enter the "photo mode" by clicking on the images (present in every page), and leave it by selecting another page on the left (and maybe I'll implement some sort of close button too).

 

I'm not sure of what style I'll apply, so the menu will likely change spacing depending on the style I choose.

Also, I plan on using lots of ajax to change the page "in place," much like Facebook.

 

This design will replace this: http://www.hotelteti.com

 

This is the first time I actually use a grid and start a project from this point, so I'd like to know if I'm doing well and what could be improved.

 

Thank you for reading!

Today I made the actual website: http://www.hotelteti.com/a/new/it/hotel/

 

It's not done yet, I'm not even sure if the design would be ok, and that's why I'm here to ask you!

What do you think? I like minimalism but have never gone so far.

 

I'll probably add some colored accents, where could I add them?

 

I've only tested it in Safari 4 and FF3.6, at the moment. Here's how it should look (unless I edit it in the meanwhile): http://drp.ly/M1v2T

On the whole, I thinks its quite nice. The site feels a bit tight & constricted...I'd suggest spacing it out a bit more. Also on the Listino link, the table isn't in line with the text - you should look at fixing that.

Thanks for your opinion! About the spacing, do you think that this would work? http://drp.ly/M8FdX

I increased all the margins from 20 to 30 pixels, did you mean that?

Will fix the table as soon as I put the actual content in place since most of it will be changed.

I quite like it

i would colour the links or underline them

 

there is too much line-height, and way too much letter or word spacing! also fully justified text is harder to read for people with visual/cognitive difficulties, and never looks good due to poor text justification on the web

Hey

 

I agree with davep absolutely about letter spacing and justified text; it's a bit too much. I also think there is quite a lot of space at the bottom of the page and very little at the top making it a bit unbalanced for me.

 

I also agree it looks squashed; you need more space between each element eg. navigation and text, text and images etc... accentuated by the big spaces at the sides and bottom I think.

 

Hope this helps

Old spacing:

 

New spacing:

And also on the website (unless I changed it in the meanwhile): http://www.hotelteti.com/a/new/it/ristorante/

 

I added more room between the heading and the body, between the <nav> and the <article>, reduced the line-height from 1.8em to 1.3em, and removed the justification.

 

I'm not sure, but the old line height looked less "tighter."

 

Thanks for the input, everyone, I really appreciate it!

if it still seems tight then add a little more space either side of the main text and /or add a little more space bewteen the paragraphs.

 

also have you consider using the complement of the orange bronze in the logo?

 

like this

Good point, I hadn't thought about it, but I'm not sure if the gain of using an exact complementary color is worth the loss in vividness and freshness (in my opinion) I get with the former blue.

Instead, I can probably make the logo's bronze closer to that blue's complementary.

 

(and thanks for the example!)

 

__

By the way, have you noticed that glitch when the footer is pushed down more than it's supposed to?

I opened a thread about it, in case you know why it happens: http://www.webdesignerforum.co.uk/topic/34265-showslow-doesnt-work-correctly/

Edited April 10, 201016 yr by bfred.it

It's looks better than it was. You are improving your work by suggestions. It's really great ideas to understand the consumer views and designer too. Anyway thanks for sharing your design. I learned something today too.

 

All the best for future project.

I want to make a couple of points. Firstly, have you thought of using a background - for example a slight gradient of a light beige-y colour maybe to white.. just to make it a little bit more exciting. I would also suggest having the site available in a variety of languages as Google Translate cannot automatically translate the pages other than the homepage because of the animations. Foreign languages I presume are pretty important for a hotel...

 

Hope that helps. Really nice site though but I think the animation will just create more trouble than good.

 

Good luck!

Thanks litmusonline and nuksies.

I'll think about the gradient, that would need a little testing to find the right tone, but it would mess up the "light" switch on top, that changes the color to a darker one to ease on the eyes.

The website is already set up to be multilingual, in fact the url contains /it/ part at the moment, it's likely going to be translated in EN and DE once it's done. The current content comes straight from the old website and is going to change completely.

 

You are right about the animations... I made the PHP page in 2 days, basically, and I've been working on animations and asynchronous load ever since I got past that... one of the owner insisted that the old website was boring because it was static, usually hotels' website have either sliding or crossfading pictures all over, so animations are a must to what would otherwise look like a boring website to many. After all it's plain black and white, animations are the spice.

 

//also I FINALLY fixed the glitch I described a couple posts above.