The Wonder Emporium - Interested in your opinion [Archive]

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Phosphoer

03-26-2009, 11:03 PM

Hi all, I've been working on getting this site up and running for the last couple days, and thought I'd get your opinion on it.

http://www.TheWonderEmporium.com

The design is intentionally simplistic without a lot of flashy buttons and animation, I think it makes it less confusing, but I'll be interested to see what you think.

I've tested it with Chrome and Firefox. Firefox has an annoying habit of outlining the pictures in the art tab in blue, since they are links, not sure if there's a way around that.

Thanks much :)

yell0wdart

03-27-2009, 01:38 AM

I think you've got a good start. I found a couple glaring issues that can make your site difficult to use:

First: What's with the meta refresh? This line is present in many of your pages. It makes users want to kick puppies.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://www.TheWonderEmporium.com/Html/OtherProjects.html#1">

Secondly: Your <head> tags are residing inside your <body> tags on some of your pages. <head> and <body> should be siblings in terms of their placement in the DOM. Not child/parent.

Third: You've got some excess code outside of your <html> tags on many pages. I'd suggest getting rid of it. The only tag that should reside outside the <html> element is your doctype.

</iframe></noscript></object></layer></span></div></table></body></html>
<script language='javascript' src='https://a12.alphagodaddy.com/hosting_ads/gd01.js'></script>

As far as the link outlines, you can use CSS to get rid of that. Add something like this to your CSS file:

img
{
border: none;
}

Finally, regarding your choice of color palette: Dark/forest green and black can be a a difficult combination to pull off. Especially when used in an element of your website as important as the page header. You might want to play around with your colors to bring out some nice contrast.

Phosphoer

03-27-2009, 03:03 AM

Thanks for the feedback ^^.

I had the meta refresh as a sneaky way to bypass the ad at the top of the screen, it refreshes the page to a lower position, but I removed it since the menu links to that position anyway. This also answers your question about the code outside of the html tag, I'm using a free filehosting account until I can scrape up some dough, so GoDaddy places an ad at the top of the page. Apparently they just stick the code in at the bottom >.>

The CSS code did the trick for the images, thanks!

I also tried upping the brightness of the background colors as you recommended, which I think makes a marked improvement. I made no changes to the header but just having the brighter colors around it helps a bit.

http://www.thewonderemporium.com

cjx3711

03-27-2009, 06:49 AM

The design is not good. Your repeated background of the site is last gen. The background and the words are both dark colours, too little contrast. The banner looks out of place. Basically the entire website design is last gen.

Sorry, but I am just saying what I think about your site. Sorry if I insulted you.

kkbbcute

03-27-2009, 07:04 AM

Agreed, the site looks very last generation, especially with the use of your green aqua color is very irritating to the eyes, as the black text is hard to read. Also, the repeating background image looks odd, and looks odd when tiled. Lastly, your used of solid colored tables to hold your content just looks odd.

As much as you want it to be simplistic, this website just lacks anything to really hold the users attention, try for a more eye ctaching design with brighter colors for your banner the next time.

Hope these will give you a few clues on what to improve on ;)

Phosphoer

03-28-2009, 09:47 PM

Interesting, when you say black text, do you mean just the banner? Because on my screen, all the actual text is white..

Also, could you give me an example of what is 'new generation' for reference?

jasonJ

03-28-2009, 10:03 PM

kkbbcute

03-29-2009, 03:25 AM

Errr... All the text is black, not white. Even the main content for some reason.

Anyway, check out this site for ssome inspiration:
http://www.webdesignerwall.com/tag/inspiration/

yell0wdart

03-29-2009, 04:38 AM

Just a quick tip: to remove the ad at the top, just hide the iframe. Get it by its id (conash3D0) and set its css display style to none as soon as the DOM is ready to be modified (obviously, use javascript for this).

Yep, a single line of jQuery should be able to solve that problem. Just inspect the DOM with Firebug or look at the source output and build a jQuery (http://jquery.com/) selector and hide it:

$(document).ready(function()
{
$('iframe').hide();
});

Of course, you'll want to make sure and import the jQuery library to each page that uses it. It looks like the <iframe> is being assigned an ID of "conash3D0". Not sure if that's dynamic or not, but if you plan on using an <iframe> anywhere else, you can use that ID, or build a selector to get partial ID values (if they're assigning ID's dynamically).

kkbbcute

03-29-2009, 10:52 AM

Oh, and another thing I just noticed, your search bar is placed at a totally wrong position. Put it somewhere whereby even a newcomer to your site can see without having to scroll down. ;)

Phosphoer

04-01-2009, 03:10 AM

Here is the latest version, it's not complete but some of the things you mentioned have been re-done.

I brightened up the whole site, no idea why the text was black on your browsers ( I've tested it on Mac/Windows with Chrome, IE, Safari, and Firefox, all white ), but now it's actually supposed to be black as the brighter colors warrant.

I also changed the menu navigation, and began working on adding some more eye-catching content on the front page. I still have the solid color tables because I haven't decided on a better idea yet. A background image that reflects the style of the banner is under progress.

Tell me what you think :)

The Wonder Emporium (http://www.thewonderemporium.com)

kkbbcute

04-01-2009, 12:59 PM

The navigation buttons are now better, though they don't stand out enough if you askk me. Seriously, your main problem is your choice of color, change it to something more mild, like beige or white, not some green-aqua like color which stretches the ysers attention everywhere.

Anyway, good to see a small tiny improvement somewhere. Oh yeah, the random movement of the tiny circles seems quite random.

cjx3711

04-01-2009, 03:29 PM

The circle thing is quite strange. Not saying you should remove it, it's just out of the ordinary. But since it's a personal web page, it should be fine. The design has huge improvement. It's still not a good choice of colour though. either make the background very dark and have white words or very light and have black words. Your contrast is not there and I am straining to see the words.

kkbbcute

04-01-2009, 04:12 PM

The circle thing is not quite strange, it's very strange:p

But no, in all seriousness, unless your site is a site about physics or brownian motion or something, the circle thing just seems like a random personal work which you put there just for fun, though again the main problem you should be addressing is color, like cjx3711 and I said in our posts previously.;)

Phosphoer

04-06-2009, 06:50 AM

Another update: http://www.thewonderemporium.com

I've been really busy so haven't had much time to work on it. This is a very tentative theme. I like the look but unless I can find a way to accomplish the same appearance without using one background image, it'll have to go since it's ridiculous to update the image everytime I add content. Maybe I could use some kind of javascript or css to accomplish this look?

What do you think?

kkbbcute

04-06-2009, 12:29 PM

Err... The information at the bottom is all the way at the left, shift it to the right or reading will be quite hard. Also, although the color scheme is improved, I still feel you should try to create a more professional site banner or something, anyway keep up the progress!

Phosphoer

04-07-2009, 08:51 AM

"The information at the bottom is all the way at the left"

Not sure I understand what you mean, this is what it looks like on my screen:

http://i723.photobucket.com/albums/ww238/David0Evans/Picture2.png

Seems pretty much centered to me >.>

What are your specs?

kkbbcute

04-07-2009, 09:19 AM

22inch widescreen 1680 by 1050, viewed on IE8, other factors shouldn't affect hjow your site is displayed, and for your computer, it seems centred enough, but mine is to the left...

Phosphoer

04-14-2009, 08:11 PM

Well I couldn't figure out what the issue was with your config, anyway I've made some changes, the home page is now the blog, because I think it all works out better that way, and I've done away with all panels of any kind ( although the desire for panels still festers in my mind xD ).

http://www.thewonderemporium.com

kkbbcute

04-15-2009, 06:34 AM

Try to create a semi transparent BG behind your text to make it more visible. ;)

Phosphoer

04-15-2009, 05:34 PM

You mean to make the text more visible? It seems like a background image would make it harder to read the text >.>

kkbbcute

04-16-2009, 08:28 AM

A whitish background with maybe 80% opacity would look good, trust me. ;)