Webpage advice

Chunks

could you take a look at this webpage and let me know what you think......

here

...please be brutally honest as I need criticism to improve. Its just the bare bones of an index page (a few gifs)the buttons dont work yet, but i want to get it right before i advance. its my first attempt at web design so i need you to be brutal.

Cheers

seamus

I like the buttons in the menu. Are you going to have them push in like a button when you click them? Cos that would be cool. Don't do rollovers. That's passé.

The top bar is crap. If you're going to use an image with text in it, at least make sure it's smooth. You get a better effect in the top bar using just plain HTML.

There's nothing else to go on really, as you say it's bare bones. It'll definitely need a non-intrusive background though, and something to fill in the top left-hand corner.

Chunks

seamus wrote:

The top bar is crap. If you're going to use an image with text in it, at least make sure it's smooth. You get a better effect in the top bar using just plain HTML.

There's nothing else to go on really, as you say it's bare bones. It'll definitely need a non-intrusive background though, and something to fill in the top left-hand corner.

Do you mean the grey divider? or the animated gif?
non-intrusive background? could you elaborate?

Thanks for the help mate

seamus

Chunks wrote:

Do you mean the grey divider? or the animated gif?
non-intrusive background? could you elaborate?

Thanks for the help mate

I mean this image:
http://www.mdal.ie/images/onetime.gif

By non-intrusive background, I mean a light shading or picture behind the rest of the page. Basically, you don't want your page to be some boring black Roman font, with widely spaced images and loads of whitespace.

There are different ways of doing this
Take
http://www.365.ie/
As an example. All the content is nicely housed together in a white box in the middle, while all the excess has a fairly plain, yet not boring background. It's not cluttered, and it looks neat.
Look at
http://www.boards.ie/
This uses much more space, and pretty takes up as much room as you can, but has borders at the side, and the background for the middle bit complements the colour used in the middle bit.

All you're trying to do is make your site look neat and tidy really. Large white spaces between elements on the page, and unused screen space is boring and untidy looking. Even if you just fill it in with nothing, like 365 do, you're improving it. Human nature means we like to have things with well-defined borders, and neatly laid out.

Purely a suggestion, as I've no idea what your plans are for the rest of the page.

Chunks

ok thaks for the help seamus, much appreciated.

I changed the buttons so that they look like they're pushed in when pressed, cool suggestion, thanks.

seamus

Well actually what I was thinking was you press it, and it goes down and back up, but what you have there looks pretty good.

Seth Brundle

Not helpful really but I prefer the idea behind the colour scheme, etc. on www.mdal.ie rather than on the new pages.

cgarvey

Just agreeing with everyone else really .. the old blue is much easier on the eye, than your harsh blue/yellow combination. The grid on the main webpage might also fill some very big/ugly whitespace for you when you get to populating the design.

You could also toy with making the buttons more the same size, and the current page/button is a little bigger.. and/or moving the buttons bit up to top left to clear the god awful whitespace there.. unless you have other plans for it.

.cg

Chunks

taking all this on board........
.....thanks for all the advice so far lads, keep it coming!

much appreciated