Behrentzs.com new design!

Hi guys.

I have finally come up with a new design for my site. After gaining a lot of experience with xhtml, css and a little php & javascript I've come up with this.

The site is tested in IE6 and FF and works fine for both. Please let me know what you think and if you have any ideas for improvements.

AND, the site is not finished yet so links and other testcontent can be unavaible.

Thanks,

http://behrentzs.com/site/

:: The marquee colour and background do not fit well. I cannot see marquee, an extra thing is the marquee speed is too fast.

:: The footer is a bit tacky

:: The logo is amazing! Good creativity

:: The top of the page is a bit ugly, because it goes from a dark to a light colour. Why not try a gradient halftoned background? It will look good like that.

:: Time to celebrate! The first site on this forum that has passed validation! Validation!!!! (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fbehrentzs.com%2Fsite%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0)

Thats about it! The site is amazing! Love the creativity involved with it!


BabYJack

Good point about the marquee colors. The reason why it might not fit is because I'm at a laptop where the screen abviously is more bright. I will review this site on my other computer, thanks for pointing out.

I will try the gradient instead - thanks for the suggestion!

Thanks for your review, sir!

Your Welcome =D

Don't use a marquee at all.

I like it, but my main complaint is that you're using a typeface which does not anti-alias using MS ClearType, which makes it look awful. Also, shouldn't you make those validator icons links? ^^

Technical:
- Hooray! The XHTML validates! CSS doesn't (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http://behrentzs.com/site/), though.
- You appear to be using flash for the logo, I don't know why. One time the flash didn't finish rendering for me, kind of annoying
- Don't use marquee

Do not create scrolling text with the marquee element.

Do not use the marquee element to create scrolling text. There are several reasons for this:

Scrolling content can provide accessibility problems.
The marquee element is not part of the HTML specification. (from http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG20/WD-WCAG20-HTML-TECHS-20050211/#marquee)

Design:
- Very nice graphics, especially the logo only one thing: IMO the "behrentzs" is a little fuzzy. But I'm just being extra-picky because I can't find anything else wrong! :)
- Marquees are distracting and the color-contrast isn't good
- IMO the "You are here:" is unnecessary; it already tells you where you are in the header. Either that or you could make it a breadcrumb trail, up to you

:thumbsup: Excellent-looking site!

Nice work,

One thing however, to save loading time, bandwidth, and disk space for gallery photos; only store the large copies of the photos, then resize them using HTML on the gallery page. This way, they don't have to load in twice: one thumbnail, and large.

Good job though.

CyanLight, could you suggest a font which does anti-alias? :)
Well, not intended to, but could be I should do.

binaryWeapon, I know about the css. It isn't possible to make it validate though, as its the unsupported (by CSS2.1) opacity tags are needed for my design. I don't care though, as all the other important CSS is valid.

The reason I'm using flash is because I'm dynamically loading different pictures from a folder into the banner. Each the time loads a new picture is displayed in the header.

I already know about the marquee and I did research it. That's why I'm using a javascript which works in all major browsers. No <marquee> tag.

Thank you guys for all your help and critique :)!

binaryWeapon, I know about the css. It isn't possible to make it validate though, as its the unsupported (by CSS2.1) opacity tags are needed for my design. I don't care though, as all the other important CSS is valid.

I've run into the exact same problem on my site, quite understandable. :)

Nice work,

One thing however, to save loading time, bandwidth, and disk space for gallery photos; only store the large copies of the photos, then resize them using HTML on the gallery page. This way, they don't have to load in twice: one thumbnail, and large.

Good job though.

Are you kidding? That should never be done.

Are you kidding? That should never be done.

I would have to agree with that. Think about users with dial-up; they will have to wait several minutes to load a tiny thumbnail. However, even thumbnails will load quickly for dial-up (usually) and even for high-speed you'll see a noticeable difference. The thumbnails should be small enough that they don't unduly effect your bandwidth. I have about 50 thumbnails on my site, and all together they only take up 700kb of space. That's about 14kb per image, which isn't too bad.