Thoughts on my website

[lilcam]

So how does the front page look like now?

link

[Andy]

Hey I like that!

Very nice style.

[lilcam]

Hey I like that!

Very nice style.

hi - thanks, now what should i do with the background color. i'm not feeling the grey, but then i can't use white unless i make the body of the website with borders or something.

[Andy]

I dont mind the grey. Have you tried a lighter grey or different shades of grey, or even silver?

[-Oz-]

very nice, i like the pastel type blues and greens, etc. They go very very well with the design that you have created. the header design with the cutouts for the navigation is very cool and rather unique IMO, very well done.

[lilcam]

i love the cut-out graphics at the top, and yea i think they're unique. Someone on another site stated the layout was very generic and looks like many other sites. Well, you can only have so many layouts to choose from, but you have to be unique in the way you position certain things such as navigation and graphics.

thanks everyone!

[-Oz-]

For the background you may want to try #E4E4E4. I use it on http://www.gamersmark.com just a little lighter, enough to make a difference.

[nefadol]

I agree on a lighter gray. Very clean, I like it.

[LeftBrainStudio]

Well done. Great use of photography. My only very nitpicky items are:

1. Yes, a lighter shade of gray would be nice.
2. The home photo just doesn't appear to fit in. The rest of the header photo series has this low, somewhat upclose perspective.

Cheers!
Gilbert

[lilcam]

hmmmm ... just noticed that the pic really didnt fit in like you said.
I'm going to look for another pic, but I wanted pictures that fit the theme of the links/pages.

[Andy]

Nice eye there Gilbert.

I never noticed it either until you said. Now it stands out.

But regardless, it's nice looking site. I love it.

[ceeb]

Very nice design.

The only thing I'd suggest is that it would be worth using CSS rather than table layouts. That should allow you to:

• use actual text rather than text within JPG images
• reduce the total page download size, and
• easily update the site in future.

It's a bit of a radical step, but well worth it assuming you have the time. There are plenty of sites (eg. www.sitepoint.com) explaining how it can be done.

Don't forget your ALT/TITLE descriptions too!

[lilcam]

The only thing I'd suggest is that it would be worth using CSS rather than table layouts. That should allow you to:

Wow, read briefly about this feature on the site you suggested and I went to one of the example sites utilizing CSS rather than tables and the site loads much much quicker! Maybe once the company launch I'll start converting it. The images up top do take a while to load. I have to figure out how to reduce the load time.

Any suggestions? Users on 56k should feel frustrated.

[ceeb]

Any suggestions? Users on 56k should feel frustrated.

Your main graphics are fairly large - the home page has a 90KB JPG. Unfortunately, the text on that graphic means that you can't reduce the quality too much.

Using CSS, you could have "BREAKTHROUGH IT SOLUTIONS" text positioned above the graphic, with white borders making the lines. The JPG could then be optimised further (less than 20KB is possible), but the text would remain crisp on top, e.g.

<style>
#maingraphic
{
position: relative;
width: 700px;
height: 100px;
background: #c90 background.jpg no-repeat;
}
#maintext
{
position: absolute;
width: 100%;
bottom: 0px;
left: 0px;
font: bold x-small sans-serif;
color: #fff;
padding: 2px;
border-top: 1px solid #fff;
border-bottom: 1px solid #fff;
}
</style>
<div id="maingraphic">
<div id="maintext">BREAKTHROUGH IT SOLUTIONS</div>

Keeping text as text also means that it's resizable and can be indexed by search engines.

[lilcam]

Your main graphics are fairly large - the home page has a 90KB JPG. Unfortunately, the text on that graphic means that you can't reduce the quality too much.

Hmmm ... SEO ... totally forgot about that.

Regarding the main graphic, I take it there's not much I can do to lower the size since the cutout links up top are graphics themselves. I wasn't sure how to divide the piece up in order to minimize loading time. Would it help if I broke the images down some more? Slice it up a little more?

I take I got the feel for CSS now, so I'll play around with it a little more. I basically have three section to work with. The header, body, and footer. Coding this in CSS like you suggested would be much much easier. I'm so confused right now with all the freaking <table> tags in the code.