Website Project: What do you think?

[VaKo]

Back on the old forums i started posting my ideas for a website. During the time offline I got asked to do the my degree show site (or at least a "normal webpage" backend to a fancy flash site thats in production).

When we were last here i had this

http://vako.ath.cx/v6/

Now I i'm working on this:

http://vako.ath.cx/r12/

The flash bit is:

http://eyeswideopentest.5000megs.com/

Could i have some *brutally honest* apraisal please?

[/url]

[cooper]

Brutally honest? I think I can manage that :)

Main page.

- Lose the generator meta tag. Useless.

- There's a div for the whole page, the header, a wrapper, an index, and indexbox, a leftcol and a footer. Of all those you're only filling one. Why?

When I click on artists, only the top-left artist becomes clickable, but most others light up when you move your mouse over them. Exception to this is the center column, where hovering your mouse over all but the top name will light up all other names.

I should say that I didn't expect that clicking on artists would result in a new page. I expected to see tha bottom part of the page, the only different part of the entire page, to become visible. Maybe you should combine then and play a little with visibility using Javascript.

Without an intro on the main page, I didn't expect the intro link to bring you back to this main page.

I didn't like the page you get when you click on that one clickable artist AT ALL. The top half of the page, constant throughout the entire site, was now GONE, the navigation for ARTISTS, SHOW and INTRO moved to the top... It looked broken.

You're including javascript on this page for some effects when you click on the photographs. Being a super minimalist I did not appreciate the effect, and even more so the fact that I had to wait a few seconds before the image was on screen and couldn't be moved about so I could read whatever was written about Mr Placeholder (what kind of funky text IS that anyways?).

So, in short, my humble opinion is that it looks pretty sleek, could do with a bit of tidying, and you need to rething the artist page as it's not doing it for me.

[VaKo]

Most of the unused divs are for the layout, just making sure things go where there supposed to. And with quite a few of them, there only used on one page, or I came up with a better plan and never deleted them. Plus a few bits are to make sure it works on 800x600...

There hopefully will be an some kinda intro soon, just not sure what its going to be yet.

The list of artists mostly doesn't work yet because i'm still waiting for the content from my peers. But I've added an underline on the hover to make it clear its a link.

As for the artist page, it doesn't work that well. I agree. Needs some kinda layout change to incorporate the main site graphic, have the thumbnails and a bit of text (its called Ipsum, standard filler text used in DP/graphic design).

As for the javascript, its the best solution i've had so far. Its only slow beacause its running on my home cable connection... once i get proper hosting set up it should be a lot more snappy. Right now your seeing threw the eyes of a 56k modem. Once its on a faster host i'll add a preload to the "mr placeholder" page... which should spead things up a little more.

Cheers for you input, i'll keep updating it as I go along.