New Health site

[bradyj]

This one was a loooong mess:
New site (http://www.dotfive.com/bed/)
Old site (http://www.bodyecologydiet.com)

I've tested it in firefox, IE 6 PC, Safari -- so far it bombs in Opera for Mac and IE for Mac (IE mac is out, let's be civil, I'm letting it die) -- see any other problems? Any issues that come up? Any design or code critique? Have fun :)

Per AaronW and mindlessLemming's suggestions, there will be a max and minimum width added soon to offset those of us who are super geeks and have larger monitors than tv's :thumbsup:

News section and content to the home page will be added -- at the moment, the search engine doesn't function until final launch.

[Scrowler]

i dont like the font you used in the new website for the Welcome! header. overall, i like the new layout, both are ok, but i think the new layout is much better suited for its style, and it looks much cleaner and organised.

[chilipie]

Nah, I prefered the old one.

:p Kidding.

Very nice. Looks fine in Moz. and IE at 1024*768, and in FF at 1024*768 and 800*600. How do you do that cool resizing thingy-ma-bob, where the header text is always at the right?

Only one thing I don't really like - I think the favicon would look better in the same red as the header than in green.

Just interested; are you going to be making-over the online store as well, or is that staying as it is?

[WA]

The new site definitely looks better. When I first saw it though, it felt rather empty- changing the layout to fix width is exactly what it needs IMO as well. Great suggestion from the two I must say. I think the footer links could probably use a little more decorating, whether a background color strip or change in font. Right now it feels out of sync with the rest of the design.

[mindlessLemming]

900px is a good figure for the max-width. It allows enough whitespace without feeling empty. If you really want to be tricky, define the max and min width in em so the site is both liquid and elastic ;)

[bazz]

I like it and agree with the expressions made already. I expect it isnt finshed yet and so it isnt what you asking here but, is the list down the right hand side meant to be inconsistently different from page to page? Y'know its the same on some and different on others.

Otherwise, it's another example of a site which I can look up to for inspiration.


bazz

[bradyj]

chilipie - You know, I forgot I didn't change the favicon back to red -- the site was a green layout before, so we had a green favicon... thanks for that, i'll give it a fix:). And for now, the store has to stay the same -- it's done through a 3rd party and there's only so much you can do. I'm hoping later we take it over for inside development and design, as well as a CMS for them then. And which header text where you asking about that I have at the right?

Scrowler - Yeah, I don't like the welcome font either -- but it was an arguement of either using a CSS sans-serif, or doing flash text replacement -- and I don't feel comfortable with the flash just yet... though I'm debating. Any Font suggestions for the header?

WA - I think I just might pretty up that footer... good idea:)

bazz - they actually wanted the links split up a bit so that they are reflective of the page... just because there is so many. Do any of you guys have recommendations on what would be better for the links here?

Thanks for the input everyone, I appreciate it greatly :thumbsup:

[rmedek]

so far it bombs in Opera for Mac and IE for Mac (IE mac is out, let's be civil, I'm letting it die)
Actually, it looks fine on IE Mac on my end... am I just missing a certain page or two?

I was all about ignoring IE Mac until I realized about 10% of my audience were still on OS9. So I use @import 'css/style.css' (single quotes) to send stylesheets to everyone but IE Mac, which gets no style. Sucks for those guys, but keeps it accessible, since my favorite techniques for aligning things tends to send them halfway of the screen in IE Mac.

Anyhow, another clean design and easily navigated site :)

[Scrowler]

oh yeah

works fine in FireFox at 1280x1024 resolution ( they both do )

[hemebond]

Just 2 things it's being sent to me as text/html instead of application/xhtml+xml; the w3c validator says it's valid, but you have an unencoded ampersand (which prevents your CSS from being validated)Other than that it looks really good (style wise, didn't look at the code).

[bradyj]

Just 2 things it's being sent to me as text/html instead of application/xhtml+xml; the w3c validator says it's valid, but you have an unencoded ampersand (which prevents your CSS from being validated)Other than that it looks really good (style wise, didn't look at the code).

Yeah, I have done the xhtml delivery yet -- what page did you see the ampersand? They were everywhere on the last site, I tried hard to get rid of them... but one may have slipped through :(

[hemebond]

what page did you see the ampersand?Front page (the only page I looked at). You should get the TidyFirefox extension for Mozilla Firefox. That's where I saw the warning for it.

[tsguitar2004]

I don't like the font in the top menu. It's not as smooth as the right sidebar. The pixelation of that navigation doesn't look good; it contrasts with the clean, profession design elsewhere on the site.

Great use of the good ol' definition list, by the way! Nicely done! I just put one together for vocabulary lists and realized that it's been a long, long time since I've seen that markup used.

Maybe giving that sidebar a title would help with the changing links from page to page. Since Free Newsletter is on every page, could that be part of the navigation instead? Maybe some form on her site instead of a link to lyris? There's got to be a way to set up a script to send addresses to the mail list (http://www.webreference.com/scripts/signupmult.pl maybe??). It would look better if that page were on her server with her style. If I'm clicking around her site and am then taken out of that experience to the plain lyris site, I'm not so jazzed about the newsletter anymore.

Can we get a "current" state in that nav bar? That would be nice.

Consistency is always key, so making the H3 tag of each page the same title as the title in the navigation will go a long way (About Donna: the page is actually called Donna Gates; Contact Us: page title is Contact us).

Your first mention of Body Ecology Diet on each page should be: Body Ecology Diet (BED). All subsequent references to the diet should be by the acronym. I'm incredibly smart, so I never once thought she was selling mattresses despite the About BED menu item, but others might (ok, I thought it for a second, but it quickly passed!).

The Read More graphic looks fuzzy to me. Maybe it's just the dropshadow, but it's definately not as sharp as it could be. Also, I'd like to see that text the same shade of black as the rest of the body text. It's a light grey and I don't like it.

Any way to incorporate the sunburst stars.jpg from the old site, only make it red like the header image? Those might look better than the sweeping arrow on Read More and it would bring yet another element from your header image into the content.

The font of Body Ecology Diet in the header image should be the same font used in other specialty places, like that Read More text. If that style of font is used up there and no where else, it looks odd, especially when you have serif and sans-serif fonts in use on the page.

I don't like that the sidebar content isn't consistenly available elsewhere on the site. If I wanted to get to information about consultation with her, let's say it crosses my mind while I'm using the contact form, I can't necessarily click on that from my current page. And where would I go using the nav menu? Well, I'd go to About Donna and luckily find it in the sidebar, but what if those menu items change later? I'd like to see those items just a repeat of links elsewhere, maybe links that are further down the page in another logical seciton of the site and then called out in the sidebar of that section.

This is a general information architecture (aaah! remember the dotcom good-ol-days?) problem I'm having with the site. The sidebar content is full of items related to the nav I just clicked on, but it seems placed at random in relation to other pages on the site. I can't quite figure how to explain this better right now, so I can explain it futher later if that didn't make any sense. I hope it did, though. I usually think of sidebar content as transitory (am I the only one?). A menu treatment of those sidebar links (rollover color like the top nav, that kind of thing) would help solidify the idea that the sidebar is a menu more than a Flavor of the Week thing, you know?

The search isn't working. You know that, right? It makes sense why, but I'm just checking.

Aw, crap! I wrote waaaaaay too much and now you think I hate your site. Well, I don't. So there. As always, it's a pleasure to review your work, sir. Don't worry; you'll get back at me later.
-ts

[chilipie]

And which header text where you asking about that I have at the right?

I'm always crap at explaining myself :p . I wanted to know how you had the picture of Donna at the far left, the little man at the right and then the "Body Ecology Diet" text in the miidle of them.

[bradyj]

I took some of your suggestions, but not all tsguitar2004, and gave it a go. I also added some other user input and changes:
the cool link (http://www.dotfive.com/bed2/)

So a lot of difference, but still the same feel. I may do some flash image replacement for the text headers, but I don't want to strain the server anymore, I'm debating. New footer, new right bar (no the search doesn't work, but I won't install it till it's live). Thoughts?

chilipie: The middle logo is an h2 in the code, It's just a background replacement image, and absolute positioned so it's centered. The picture of the guy logo on the right is absolutely positioned to the right, and it is an h1 in the code. The bacground picture has donna already on it as one huge body image (http://www.dotfive.com/bed2/style/image/bodyleftside.jpg)... make sense?:)

any further comments are welcome. And the max/min width will be there soon, I'm not too worried about it now.

[Graft-Creative]

Personally, I liked this site the first time you posted it brady.

The one thing I'm not too keen on, is that once you start scrolling down, away from the nice, warm, welcoming header - you are left in a sea of white space (when you scroll down about a third of the page and after)

I'd like to see some nice (there's that word again) warm graphics further down the page, that reflect the style/colours of the header, just to re-inforce the branding and remind me I'm on the same site, if that makes sense.

Having said that, i'd be on cloud 9 if I'd designed a site as nice as this :thumbsup: