Christopher Sawtell wrote:
On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 21:05, Steve Holdoway wrote:I made the conscious decision to go wider than 800, because I know of nobody who uses anything under 1024. I thought the same about it taking up too much of the screen, but wanted unbiased opinions.
Can anyone give any constructive advice1)The Picture.
It's been taken a the wrong time of year. It's got b*all contrast, and the brown hills are just so _boring_. It takes up too much vertical space. Is it possible to add on some more of the panorama so that the picture can still stretch across the page yet be not as deep as it is at the moment? There are quite a few monitors out there which are still set to 800 x 600. Some would say that the picture should be narrower.
2) The Background Colour.
While blue _is_ my favourite colour. In this particular case it just far too much of a good thing. It needs to be made either a paler sky blue or a darker Oxford blue. The latter preferably as the text is white, and a darker background would perk up the apparent contrast of the picture.
I'll take it up with the boss. Compared with the original site, though...
3) There should be a very definite contrast between the hue and saturation of the links and the background. I try to make the visited link a different colour too. While the default purple is just vile, imho it is a good idea to have a different colour. I've used red in the past quite successfully.I tried out red, and I found that a) it required all fonts to be bold or it looked really awful and b) it looked like poster paints. I looked at sites that talked about colour theory and the wheel, but I just don't have the training to back it all up. I had meant to make the visited and unvisited colours the same - can't see the point in reminding you where you've been... does not compute.
4) Line Lengths.Good point. Another reason to make the display narrower as well. I'll play around with that.
It's generally accepted in the publishing world that the optimum line length for easy readability is of the order of 70 characters. That's why newspapers are set in columns.
5) One has to decide whether the pages are going to scroll or not, and be consistent, otherwise the supposedly constant header - the picture in this case - dances a jig left and right in sympathy with the scroll-bar on the right of the frame appearing and disappearing as one browses the site.One of my personal hates as well. But how do you cater for all the different browsers, screen formats, sizes, ...
6) Font size.Thanks for taking the time Chris, many things to learn from your points. More questions too, but I suppose that's life!
This is a publicity stunt. The text has to be super simple and literally jump out of the page. i.e. too much text on some pages and the font is too small.
That'll do for now.
--
C. S.
Cheers,
Steve
