Webpage advice!

[ScottEmerson]

Two questions for all you computer-folk:

First of all, would anyone be able to look at our student ministry's new website for some constructive criticism! (http://www.fiveseventeen.org/) I used a couple of templates along with writing my own stuff. It's still a project in the making, but any advice would be welcome!

Second, I am looking at somehow making a message board for our students. Our server doesn't support CGI or PHP, and before I go looking for more servers, I wondered what advice anyone here had.

Thanks for your help!

 

[S Walch]

Not bad - nice intro to the site - with a nice frontpage.

As a rule of thumb - people don't like scrolling down to read things - they'd prefer to have it right infront of them without having to even touch the mouse.

So the scroll up/scroll down thing is a good idea - but people are laxzy and wont like that

The Javascript buttons to the right look great - but the writing that shows up when you hover over them needs to be a bit darker - I found them a bit hard to see.

oh - I don't like the green used to make NEWS stand out >_< - but I'm very picy

And the pictures to the bottom right - Need to be a bit more in focus - nice idea though!

On the whole - quite good

 

[WorshipTheLamb]

Looks very nice green is also not my favorite color.

 

[ScottEmerson]

Today at 02:12 PM S Walch said this in Post #2

The Javascript buttons to the right look great - but the writing that shows up when you hover over them needs to be a bit darker - I found them a bit hard to see.

oh - I don't like the green used to make NEWS stand out &gt;_&lt; - but I'm very picy

And the pictures to the bottom right - Need to be a bit more in focus - nice idea though!

On the whole - quite good

&nbsp;

I made the changes to the Flash - if you look again, you'll see that the titles are darker.

I'm still working on the pictures. The hard part is getting the size down, of course.

(And I like the green, so I'm gonna keep it... haha!) Thanks for your suggestions and your encouragement!

&nbsp;

Grace and peace!

SEC

 

[S Walch]

aha - That's MUCH better - nice.

actually - the pictures are cut off the bottom of my screnn - I have to go into full-screen mode in order to see them

I don't like Full-screen mode >_<

 

[ScottEmerson]

What resolution are you using? If you are using anything from 1024x768 or higher, it should be fine. If you use smaller stuff, you don't miss anything important...

At least, that was my plan!

 

[S Walch]

I'm using 32 bit - 1024 x 768 resolution.

It still cuts off a bit of the pictures

Edit: lol - I forgot - my taskbar is twice the usualy one's height

That's why it cuts off a bit of the picture - when it goes back down again - I can see them.

 

[paulewog]

It would probably be better to make it compatible with 800x600....

 

[S Walch]

What paul said is actually true - More people use 800x600 resolution anyways - i would take pauls advice o that

 

[Pete Harcoff]

In terms of visual design, it looks pretty good. I'm running at 1024x768 and didn't have any problems.

A couple recommendations, though:

1) Get rid of the idle animations. The human eye is naturally drawn towards movement, and the animations are distracting when trying to read the content.

2) Get rid of the "scroll up" and "scroll-down" buttons, and just implement a scroll bar. It would be much more user friendly.

 

[ScottEmerson]

It shoudl be compatible at 800x600. There's a java script that detects the size and sends you to the appropriate page... Unless something is wrong with my computer, I don't understand what isn't compatible!

Thanks for your help!

 

[paulewog]

I didn't check, I just figured it wasn't. Sorry

I think, though, that some people might just possibly not all have Internet Explorer completely maximized and the exact same size. Or, for example, I use opera and my dimensions of viewable area apparently is a bit smaller than the normal IE... etc. That sort of thing. If it could be squished a little or something... hehe....

Yeah, really, the best thing is to see how it looks on a bunch of different computers/browser. Takes a lot of time, and is rather annoying, though. I generally don't worry about it much hehe

It looks great though!

 

[S Walch]

I viewed it on Opera, IE and Mozilla - It looks fine on all of them.

 

[Jon]

You can get a free message board from http://agnes.vestris.com/
which will be hosted on there website.

 

[Jon]

I forgot to say that your website looks great