Need some critiques on the new portfolio design I put together yesterday.

 

The design can be viewed at: rustyvalve.com

 

By the way, Im well aware that the contact form and the Resume link are none functional, im working on these tomorrow..

 

Thanks

Looks alright.

 

You need to validate your code.

 

Just because it looks pretty doesn't mean it'll perform if the code is not up to scratch.

 

Charlotte

Very fresh. I'd ditch that dark blue used in the footer, it clashes bad with the lighter blue.

 

Also, having "Portfolio" link to the homepage, and the logo link to nothing, is confusing and bad for usability.

 

If your portfolio is not on a separate page, you don't need a tab for it. Having the tab makes people think there's more work to see.

 

Other than that, very cool, clean, to the point. I like

Very nice. That's the extent of my critique

Thanks charlotte, I still need to clean it up.

 

Thanks mike, I thought that blue in the footer kinda looked wrong too, any ideas on what I can do to that bit to fix it up.

 

PS: I will take the rest of your critique into cosideration, you mentioned some good points on the navigation buttons.

Edited November 1, 201114 yr by mou5e

I reckon just have it white? Or the same blue as the other blue?

 

You could still have a portfolio page maybe - but have more work on it, and maybe less work on the home page, that way there's a distinction between the two?

 

You could still have a portfolio page maybe - but have more work on it, and maybe less work on the home page, that way there's a distinction between the two?

 

Yeah I was thinking about this idea too. ok cool im gonna give this a shot.

Pretty nice and very 'smooth and clean' feeling.

Wasn't what I expected when reading the name (incidentally surely a rusty valve is something completely different!?) as I expected a dark more grungy design.

Pretty nice and very 'smooth and clean' feeling.

Wasn't what I expected when reading the name (incidentally surely a rusty valve is something completely different!?) as I expected a dark more grungy design.

 

Well to be honest the funky name is just a catchy domain, couldnt think of anything better a year ago, the previous design was grungy like you expected, here is a preview: http://fc00.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2010/179/5/5/Rustyvalve_com_by_SilverButton.jpg

 

But anyway I thought I go for a less image heavy website this time.

Edited November 1, 201114 yr by mou5e

Design looks OK, however, code and optimization of the website are very poor.

 

- Homepage yields 32 errors in coding so it might not look the same on every platform.

- The form on contact page doesn't delete the description of input fields.

- Server tweaking, image optimization (on your homepage you could save 130kB only in image optimization) and script optimization needs to done.

 

Although you said you didn't want to make it image heavy look at the stats:

Image 625.2 kB (could be 490 kB)

Script 328.1 kB

CSS 20.4 kB

HTML 11.1 kB

 

Consider eliminating some of the scripts you don't actually need to lower the time needed for your site to display (from a standard DSL connection in US, your site takes an average of 4.5 to show it's alive and 9 seconds to fully load).

great post above +1

I like to know where you generated these statics from Rob Aid, It could help me for the future.

 

PS: Just fixed the contact form and the code validation, will deal with the images tomorrow, any ideas on how I can optimize them and make them load faster etc?

Edited November 2, 201114 yr by mou5e

PageSpeed was used for statistics and loads.in was used for load time measurement.

 

If you don't know the right parameters for web image optimization, try using smush.it for image optimization.

Edited November 5, 201114 yr by Rob Aid

Thank you!