homepage review

okay, here goes :D
here's a couple of layouts i've come up with for the homepage of the site i'm working -- it's an Arabic teaching site. it'll have comprehensive lessons, examples, tests and exercises on the language, and each user will be a registered student working at their own pace.
please check out my two layouts (http://www10.brinkster.com/asaakitesting/) and tell me what you think of each of them, and any suggestions, criticism etc. this is my first 'real' project.
i've only just designed the look of the first page, so none of the links will work.
i'll work on the details and do it all in XHTML afterwards...
so, any says?
gulp...

design one: spacious, need more contrast on those grey bars (search, users, not registered etc...)

on 800*600 you get the horizontal scrollbar, only scrolling a couple of pixels... quite annoying, can it be sorted? and also the drop down menu is overlapping the menu bar.

design two:... very green :)... again a little more contrast would be good, that "content" div thang has a couple of pixels of horizontal scroll at my res, and i had been expecting the buttons (go, sign in, sign up etc...) to light up in the same way as the menu (home, my auk, forum etc) onmouseover...

methinks its a rather massive logo? but i guess it's part of the sites "character"... so i'll let you off ;)

good work :thumbsup:

One! One! Even if the picture IS big. It looks like candy. :o

I didn't know that Lorem ipsum was Ahsan-ul-Kalaam in Arabic. :D

1) the bottom buttons could go up a little more, to border the bottom of the left logo, its just hanging below it, and yes theres the horizontal scrollbar, that doesnt even really scroll.
<div id="left"><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/></div> all the breaks are a little primitive, maybe just assigning a height to your div? otherwise just keep it that way, its not too important. ;)

2) everything redhead said *lol* plus i think you should make the form field text black. stick with that green one though i like it :D. but contrast a *little* more. :)

It looks like candy.
mmm, candy

I like the second one more, mind you I am not a fan of the scrollbar inside the window...

The colours don't seem spiffy either, very bright, hurt eyes...


I like the layout though.


7/10



:thumbsup:

thanks for the reviews so far. any more are definitely welcome.

btw, you're all complaining of that scrollbar..but i don't get any scrollbar .:confused: or is it the one that comes on res 800x600? yea, it didn't occur to me to check the layouts on that res. When i did, i found out the first layout is a complete wreck :eek:. i suppose it's the fact that i gave some explicit heights and widths, but using percentages should fix that i guess.

redhead: you said it's spacious. so... is that a good thing or a bad thing? :o

The colours don't seem spiffy either, very bright, hurt eyes...
I like the layout though.

ionsurge, are you talking about the first one?

cg9: yea a stupid way to add height :). actually after i tried adding an XHTML doctype to the page i found out that "left" ended up having no height, so before i gave up XHTML for the time being i had a short fit of adding breaks to see the picture come whole:D maybe i'll have to add it as an 'image' rather than an empty div with a background.
hmmm..i've been trying to align the links with image border, but it's turning problematic.

so far it's the scrollbar and the colors... i'll probably be adding more contrast then... i'm not sure how to fix that uninvited scrollbar.

I didn't know that Lorem ipsum was Ahsan-ul-Kalaam in Arabic. :D
lol:D

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oh and besides the comments plz do say which one you think is better.

spacious is a good thing :)... some can make cluttered look good, but its abit of an artform methinks and ive never attempted it ;)

Originally posted by ASAAKI
cg9: yea a stupid way to add height :).
naw, i wasnt calling it stupid, its just fine, not too many br's.
Originally posted by ASAAKI
i'm not sure how to fix that uninvited scrollbar.
in the green one? adjust the width? :)

i like the green one :D:D

Originally posted by ASAAKI
ionsurge, are you talking about the first one?


That was the second one...


I didn't like the first one at all.


:)

okay i've made a few changes to design II. tamed the green background just a tad, put the button rollovers and adjusted the width. is the horizontal scrollbar gone now?

The scrollbar has gone, but the image that was on the right has gone behind the info table...

looks fine too me.
being obsessive like i am i would ask that you make the other buttons return a hand cursor as well. lol

also everywhere you have cursor:hand; add in that tree cursor:pointer; as well, this way you get the hand for netscape too. but i dont think this site is for them.

I am using Opera v7.0.3 so there may be things wrong there...

:D

being obsessive like i am i would ask that you make the other buttons return a hand cursor as well. lol

don't mind that. i was going to add'em anyway :p;) i'm not unobsessive myself :D

but why wouldn't you think it's for netscape users? wouldn't show up right on nn? actually this site has to be for any and everyone, that includes image-blind lynx users, so until i have the time to download opera, netscape etc on this extremely slow connection, any cross-browser suggestions are greatly appreciated. :)

i made a tiddly change to the background picture position on the right. hope it isn't slinking behind mommy now?

i was thinking, would it be better to be an image instead of div with a background?:confused: for some reason i thought making a div would be the right thing to do, but when i try xhtml on IE it needs some content to have any height. or is that just IE's erratic behaviour?

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well i got mozilla on a cd. wow! never expected such a complete mess! i'll have to really work on this..

anyhow over here it's almost midnight so i'll be going to bed in a while.

and i may wake up and i may not.
the war has begun and THIS region is HOT

:D

all i do to make a crossbrowser page is stick to the standards, with that and a little tweaking its perfect.
also, if your worried about accesibility, dont forget that HTML is more important than CSS. pay attention to the elements stacked in the HTML, so when its viewed without CSS everything is at least in the right order.