Website Design

Ki-Ki

Ki-Ki

Veteran
I'm not a profesional website designer, but i've had a crack at coming up with a simple bland design for a site: www.piratebaystudios.com :and I guess i'm looking for feedback off it & how long it takes to load. The images are 80% .gif and the rest .jpg

Another site i did before this was: www.piratebaystudios.com/vampirates :which i still probably gotta correct spelling errors on.

Thanks

- Kieran
 
On both of those the images loaded kind of slow for me. If you know css that can be a big help, that way you could make one gif button and then use it for all the buttons, and just have the text change on top of it. Other than that not too shabby! The only thing I would suggest is add some type of feedback when you mouseover the links. Like a color change or underline or something. The only problem is, if your using a picture then you would basically have two gifs for one link, which could lengthen loading time
 
Loads pretty quick on my end. I like the grunge style. The only thing I would say is that it is hard-coded to wide. I'm at 1280x1024, and it just fits my screen. I think you need to design with a smaller screen resolution in mind.

I like the second link with the ship and the lightning flashes. That's pretty cool.
 
First Link - Not too shabby, but it's somewhat hard to read...

Second Link - I would get rid of the gray bars running vertically down the left and right side. Also, your mouse-over images aren't matching up. When you mouse over, it shifts up and to the right.
 
Had no problem loading the pages.

I'm at 1024X768 and the first one is too big for me. Usually web sites are designed taking screens that are at 1024x768 into account.

I like the designs though. The font seems a bit of a weird choice for the first site. I works, but doesn't at the same time. It's a modern cool font on an old paper background. Hmm, I'm in between for that one. But I agree, it's a bit hard to read.
 
Thank's for your feedbacks,

What i'm planning on doing with the homepage. Is making it an intro, so there's either an automatic detection of what the visitors screen resolution is and it opens it immediatly. Or theres options to click your resolution. Not decided yet.

The text on the first site, BankGothic. I think you knocked the nail on the head Jon when you said modern font on an older background. I'll have a look for an older style font, or maybe just stick to the basic Arials & Veranda. Yet again perhaps CentuaryGothic.

As for the General Design, I've had mixed feedback. Some like it, some think its a bit odd. I'll keep working at it for now, see if i can make it more authentic. I want to redesign the menu anyway to more relevant options, or a smaller amount.

Ty for the comments, i'll work on it & post again soon when I've updated / completed it.
 
Ki-Ki - The site does load too slow (for what it is). The reason is because you made every inch of the site an image. There's no real text. Which makes updating your site difficult and also makes it impossible for web crawlers from search engines (G**gle, Yah**, etc.) to index your site. Which means when people search for something (film related) they're never going to find your site.

It's a common mistake to use all images (or flash) but you really should redesign the site so that there are tables with real text (like your vampirates site). It will be much easier to update and also much better for search engine placement.

Also, to make the images load faster you'll need to make the file sizes smaller. Adobe ImageReady does a great job doing that (it comes with Photoshop). Just fiddle with the optimization settings to lower the file size of each image. It does an amazing job of getting 100k images down to 10k.

Good luck!
 
just a tip: you should never make a site that's wider than 850 - 900 pix unless you have some sort of dynamic resizing in the script. the first one is too wide and people absolutely hate scrolling to the side.

other than that, get rid of the "tube" like gray bars on the side and put a solid background behind the main content instead. the bars make the site look cheaper than it really is. oh, and the images need to be compressed for web. they are too big. use ImageReady or FireWorks or something. PhotoShop is not for compressing stuff for web.

mor10
 
Ki-Ki said:
The text on the first site, BankGothic. I think you knocked the nail on the head Jon when you said modern font on an older background. I'll have a look for an older style font, or maybe just stick to the basic Arials & Veranda. Yet again perhaps CentuaryGothic.
Click to expand...

I would say an older style font. Usually something sans-serif looks more modern, so try and go with serif and see how it works. But in the case of an old paper background, something a bit fancier that looks a bit like calligraphy might be more suited, at least for the title as it would be difficult to read. But that's all choice and you'd have to see how it works and how easy it is to read. Maybe something like Verdana would work better.
 
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