Critique of UphamGo template please

I would appreciate a critique of this template:

http://www.uphamgo.co.nz/concept/

TIA!

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Nik Coughin schreef:

I would appreciate a critique of this template:

http://www.uphamgo.co.nz/concept/

TIA!



Does not validate

Peter

"Nik Coughin" <nrkn!no-spam!@woosh.co.nz> wrote:

I would appreciate a critique of this template:

http://www.uphamgo.co.nz/concept/

Hard to do without real content.

--
Spartanicus

On Mon, 27 Sep 2004 20:58:20 +1200, Nik Coughin
<nrkn!no-spam!@woosh.co.nz> wrote:

I would appreciate a critique of this template:

http://www.uphamgo.co.nz/concept/

TIA!

Can't put a heading inside a paragraph. The heading closes the paragraph,
so all your paragraphs are actually not in p markup. This might mess your
page up if you attempt to style the p's.

You're not allowed to put an image in the body element directly in your
doctype. Wrap a div or something around that one on line 15.

Colors are a bit loud. Structurally it seems OK.

Nik Coughin wrote:

I would appreciate a critique of this template:

http://www.uphamgo.co.nz/concept/

TIA!

Is the highly saturated green bar at the top necessary for your branding?
That's OK, but if you keep it, you need to saturate the flower-and-greenery
background of the bar below it to keep up. Soft color images on strongly
saturated background are awkward, and this is almost the same thing.
Once the images of the goats load, covering the flowers, everything seems
all right, because the blue is so strong.

I like the way the goats move when you take a corner of the browser and make
the window larger and smaller.

That single rounded corner is odd. You either need to break out the nav so
that it is free floating with 4 round corners, or (better IMO), just lose
it. And, you really sure the navigation needs the blue border at all?
I think the whole top of the page could do well without the blue borders
except the round one of the Upham Go logo. I get the idea -- you're
repeating that logo border, right? But the top might still look better
without them.

Very close to being very nice.
--
mbstevens
http://www.mbstevens.com

"Nik Coughin" <nrkn!no-spam!@woosh.co.nz> wrote:

http://www.uphamgo.co.nz/concept/

It does not validate.

The layout is generally good, but the green is a little hard to read. The
banner at top looks washed out near the blue logo - the logo does not
"pop".

The Doormouse

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On Mon, 27 Sep 2004 20:58:20 +1200, Nik Coughin wrote:

I would appreciate a critique of this template:

http://www.uphamgo.co.nz/concept/

TIA!

If I compress the width of my browser (Mozilla 1.7 on Linux) down to
less than about 740 pixels, the three goats-on-sky-backgrounds in the
header start to overlap the menu on the left. Maybe make them a tad
smaller.

Also, along those lines, why does the header take up around 375 pixels in
height? I have an unusually large screen resolution at 1600x1200. So
losing 375 pixels is no big deal for me. But if I resize my browser to a
smaller window, poof! there goes a ton of content, down the
fallen-off-the-bottom-of-the-screen drain.

Also, also, try looking at the thing in Mozilla (or a gecko-based browser)
which will *really* let you change the font size. The thing does not work
quite so well with real beg (or real small) fonts.

Also, also, also, the "Impact" font (used in your headings) is not really
guaranteed of being installed on client computers. Sure, its common, but
its far from 100%.

Just some things to think about.

Love the goat pictures. Not crazy about the color scheme. But it is not
horrible and, as taste is personal and subjective, it may be extremely
appealing to some.

What is the deal with the goats, though?

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Jeffrey D. Silverman | jeffreyPANTS (AT) jhu (DOT) edu
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Peter wrote:

Nik Coughin schreef:

I would appreciate a critique of this template:

http://www.uphamgo.co.nz/concept/

TIA!



Does not validate
Peter

Bah... fool that I am, I validated it, fixed the errors, and forgot to
upload the new version.

Jeffrey Silverman wrote:

Nik Coughin wrote:


http://www.uphamgo.co.nz/concept/

If I compress the width of my browser (Mozilla 1.7 on Linux) down to
less than about 740 pixels, the three goats-on-sky-backgrounds in the
header start to overlap the menu on the left. Maybe make them a tad
smaller.

Hmmm, no, that's bad. The menu should always go over the top of those,
making them smaller is fixing the symptom, not the problem. Will look into
it. Cheers.

Also, also, try looking at the thing in Mozilla (or a gecko-based
browser) which will *really* let you change the font size. The thing
does not work quite so well with real beg (or real small) fonts.

It doesn't break anything, it's just that the design looks funny.
Everything is still there and readable, so I'm happy. If there are any
issues with this that I'm not aware of, please enlighten me

Also, also, also, the "Impact" font (used in your headings) is not
really guaranteed of being installed on client computers. Sure, its
common, but its far from 100%.

Can you suggest a fallback font that is similar? Needs to be a condensed
(is that the right word? Narrower than usual) sans-serif font. From my
limited research, Impact is the most common of these type of fonts, and
there's always just plain old sans-serif if it fails. Don't really want to
use images of text to cater for the 5-10% (or whatever) that don't have the
font. It's still usable without it, just less pretty.

Love the goat pictures. Not crazy about the color scheme. But it is
not horrible and, as taste is personal and subjective, it may be
extremely appealing to some.

I'm going to tweak the colours, in terms of the saturation as suggested by
some other posters (Neal, Doormouse, mbstevens).

What is the deal with the goats, though?

It's a site for goat products.

Thanks for your comments Jeff! Everyone else who commented too.

On Tue, 28 Sep 2004 11:48:13 +1200, Nik Coughin wrote:

Hmmm, no, that's bad. The menu should always go over the top of those,
making them smaller is fixing the symptom, not the problem. Will look into
it. Cheers.

You could possibly mess with z-index property. Also a possibility is the
actual order that items (divs) appear in the HTML.

http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-positioning-970131#'z-index'

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Jeffrey Silverman
jeffreyPANTS (AT) jhu (DOT) edu
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