So I have been working on a new website for many months now on and off, and I am ready to receive some feedback on it and hopefully it meets a good quality to what it is supposed to accomplish. (You may have remembered me going through name ideas and logo concepts in the past)
However, it is a work in progress so over time there will be more improvements and explanations.ALERTSTUDIOS.COMThis site is intended for 3 general purposes:1. Have an official place to promote and give information on different projects and products that are being worked on. This makes it easier to have a landing page when you are searching for more information.2. Have a development portal (which uses Google + email account for sign-in), that provides the resources, links, and technical diagrams for projects that I would like to have help with to get more products out for people to start using.3. And finally, showcase the projects that I am working on and the extent to my development behind the scenes of the different projects. This is basically showing my work to potential partners, team members, and employers. But maybe others will learn from the processes of the development cycle as well.Please remember there are improvements that need to be made, but feel free to give me your opinions on this, and if it is a good source to show people interested in my projects, or to show an employer. Sometimes my graphical sense can be a little different (lol).Thanks guys. Props to you for checking out my page!
(A concept image for mobile apps)
Nice website! Personally I'm not a fan of bright webpages, but apart from that I like the design. One thing I'm not sure about is the menu, it may just be my incompetence but I couldn't find the menu at first, and even once I had it was rather non-interactive(As in no text hovering or anything). Other than that I like it, and it even sort of works on mobile, its just really crowded lol :).
Thanks spike. I do want to add slight images with hovering to the bottom navigation.
I know that people do like dark webpages, but I guess I stand on the side of the argument that dark webpages are less social and friendly than bright ones (I was strongly against the YYG's first decision to have only dark theme).But I will be redesigning Alert Games.net to be a more interactive cool looking dark theme to have both sides of the coin haI rather like bright webpages, feels more cheerful and a lot less depressing, but I could understand why people like darker ones for reading purposes.
Thanks for checking it out rob-the-pirate. … heh… funny wording.
Oh, and the site does get cramped when you use a horizontal phone screen unfortunately.To be perfectly frank, the design and implementation look a bit hacky. I am not completely sure what is temporary and what not, but here are some tips from a web designer and developer: - Like you mentioned yourself, the site gets cramped on a horizontal phone screen. I see several solutions: - Make the navigation smaller. There really is no reason to make it so high. - Don't bound the main content by the header and navigation. Instead you could make the navigation fixed and the header static. - I see you are using jQuery animate to animate some CSS. There are CSS transitions and animations nowadays. You should use them. They increase the performance. Unless you went for backwards-compatability. Then I still say use them. Out-of-date browsers do not deserve fancy effects. :) - Maybe you already planned to do it, but you should rewrite your URLs to SEO friendly ones. It adds that little extra professionalism to your website, you know. - Not like it breaks stuff in this case, but please use tag IDs and classes how they should be used: "The difference between an ID and a class is that an ID can be used to identify one element, whereas a class can be used to identify more than one." - Use <br> and how they should be used - as line breaks and non-breaking space. You've used them as padding here and there. Not very semantic. - Consider adding some padding. For example, the footer is really, really cramped. - Consider making the padding more consistent. On the front page for example, the padding of the main section is really inconsistent left, right and at the top. - Probably pretty trivial: consider styling your links. :)
Pretty much agree with everyone here. There are a few more things you should consider:
1. The menu has already been mentioned but I think the menu should go on top. That's the first place everyone looks. This is just my preference though.2. The text. I don't think you are taking advantage of the color, size, and style. For example, on the homepage, the about and what's new headings just kinda blurred in with the text below it makes it seem like a giant paragraph. Definitely make the headings stand out to make it easier for the user to find the content they are looking for. The same could be said for the team page (making the team lead and links stand out). 3. Going back to the home page: The about and what's new. As a new user to your site, I had no idea what it was about even after reading your about. I know you have something to do with software but: is it for the end user or developer? This software makes what convenient? Just clarify what you have now.4. The urls. This is kinda odd to me. Sirxemic already touched on this. You seem to be using arguments to navigate to different pages. This alertstudios.com/team/ is a way better path than alertstudios.com/?s=team. I think you're doing this to use the same template and just using if statements to check which page they are on? You should definitely change that mainly to decouple your code and SEO.Thanks guys for your feedback. I am already planning on doing a lot of these things that you have mentioned, but I do focus on my other projects more than the site so it helps a lot to know specifics of what I can do to quickly make it look much better and appealing. The overall goal is simply to have a convenient showcase of the projects that I, and team members are working on.
Navigation: Yes, planned on having it smaller with slight gray images with slight animation on mouseover.CSS animations: I'm not as up-to-date with them so you'll know their compatibility way better than I would sir xemic. Though I am probably with you on that because people seem to be trying to minimalize the javascript use now.ID versus Class. Makes sense, I used it to differ between elements that I manipulate versus static but ok.Padding: Yeah I haven't gotten to improving that yet.Navigation and header: Yeah I was going to switch that around too when I get to it.SEO: Well, if you go to the different projects and such, there are the better paths without the ?s=team. Those were meant to be for more information that didn't necessarily need to be organized into another page.Thanks blueBX for your input. This is what I am really looking for, because I want to somehow explain what me (and team members) are working on and what we are trying to do with it.I'll take all the input and work with it and then post another blog later when I get around to doing all of these things. Its really helpful :>