My Website Design , Any Suggestions? this is something i designed with the help from user sonesay , what do

[keego 0]

Hey guys

I designed and almost finish my site, http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ .. so what do you guys think?
Have any good suggestions? or anything that i should take out? anything good or bad about it? anything at all that would help me out would be nice

Is it too plain?

any beneficial criticism will be fine
let me know

thanks
and thanks sonesay for the help. ^^ hehe i learnt alot! ..

if the site kinda sux.. lol well bare with me. seeing how i just practically learnt how to do coding from tutorials.. and did the whole thing step by step lol

^^

[sonesay 7]

I jsut had a quick look, the content seems to be good there so thats always a good thing. Nothing worse then having a nice looking site but no content. I personally dont like those types of gradients for footers and for your navigation bar. I'm no designer but I think it can look abit better and probably make your site that bit more professional. The colors seem very good overall. I think whats left really is just gradual(cant spell i know) fine tuning, making changes here and there when you can untill your satisfied. Nothing major of course it looks pretty solid as it is.

[Saint_Michael 3]

Simplicity in itself, of course thats the wonders of making a version 2, 3, 4 of the websites as time goes by. So I go gentle and start from the top and work my way down to the footer.

 

Banner - As a gfx person I look at the banners right away just to see what kind of work has been done, I would say simple as it maybe you have a lot of open space and I would think having a background designed using vector brushes would add a bit of style to the site and also a bit of color to it as well.

 

Nav - Although its fine as it is but iff you add that same rollover you have for your drop down menu you add a bit more to it. The next part I would say designing a contact form within the website (another link to add to the nav menu) it saves people the time to opening another window to the their email client and then writing the email.

 

Footer - Although not neccessary but in the footer wher you have your copyright info you ususally have a link of you domain and have your name with a clickable email link as well.

 

Copyright  Š 2007 <a href-"keegonguyen.com/;. All Rights Reserved. Designed By <a href="mailto:info@keegonguyen.com">Your Name</a>

Bio Page - On this page it isn't neccessary to have that within a frame since your background is white and you have nothing fancy you could let that expand and that way people who visit the site don't have to scroll.

 

Gallery - When you have images its good to get use to using the alt tag or alt="" within the image code:

 

<img src="yourimage.jpg" alt="your title">

Since your using the lightbox script you have some room for creativity such as putting info about the picture itself when the user clicks on it for the picture to enlarge. To do this all you do is add this to your images title="my caption"

and then fill in the info such as year it was taken, the name of the shot maybe even the photographers name. The next part of the lightbox script is something that is more of a convenience for the users then anything else is by grouping your photos within the source code by adding this rel="lightbox[roadtrip] right after the image. Then within the brackets you just use a name for that gallery such bridal and that when the user will be able to move on to the next picture by clicking the next or previous button which is (hide) hoverable link and that way they don't have to close the picture each time they want to see the next one.

 

Broken Pages - Just a small tip regardless if you have nothing on a page such as your links page its always good to have something up so not to deal with broken pages such as the one you have right now.

 

Other then those comments and adding a bit of color to the site your off to a good start.

[jlhaslip 4]

Nice. I like the simplicity of the page. I agree that it looks solid.

Only thing I found was a small warning about using an ampersand inside an anchor tag.

<a href="http://users3.smartgb.com/g/g.php?a=s&i=g35-16027-1a" target="_blank" class="style1">Guestbook</a> |

Should become:

<a href="http://users3.smartgb.com/g/g.php?a=s&i=g35-16027-1a" target="_blank" class="style1">Guestbook</a> |

[varalu 0]

Correct me if i am wrong.the time i post this.. your website is in some problem and not loading...Let me know once its up and running.

[keego 0]

im not sure when you checked it... but no its been working all day .. cause ive been checking back every 10 minutes.. im not sure what the problem is though. try again.. otherwise im not sure lol

[b1gv1c 0]

You have a very clean site. Your gallery is very simple.

[fffanatics 0]

The site has been working and i have been looking at it. Saint_Michael had a lot of good information and changes that i recommend as well. Some thing i noticed that might be a little different (or a bit more specific) than his are the following:1.) Header: Like he said, there is a lot of blank space. Instead of just having the image with your domain name on it, put your name and be like Name - Model with a logo or something that you can claim as yours in the future. This is the area where you need to define the site in a single image and also give a users something to recognize as yours. The picture on the right is great, you just need more on the rest of it. Add a few more pictures whether it is of you or just of a flower (something pink to go with your theme), etc. It will draw way more attention to your site.2.) Nav Bar: Unlike sonesay, the gradient at the top is slight enough that i think it is fine and has no issues. As for the footer, the gradient is tooooo much since it takes to long to change color and the color difference is very noticable. Use something a bit more subtle. I like the links you have on the top but you need more and definitely a contact us page. Plus, make sure your rollover links work since i was unable to get to a few of the sections (specifically the multimedia and personal sections). Just make sure these work and feel right.3.) Content: Your site has a lot of content and that is great. However, you need to make sure you spell and grammer check your content. I was reading your bio (briefly) and there were a lot of run-on sentences and some grammatical errors. I am from the US so i dont know if there is much of a difference in the english here compared to Australia but i did notice some issues. Just copy and paste it into word and run a check on it. 4.) Colors: I like the pink and gray color scheme however, some of your sections on the main page are hard to read. If you made these with photoshop or the gimp, just put a drop shadow on them and possibly a 1px stroke with a shader or two darker color to really draw the text out of the background. Besides, that the colors work great, esp for a modelling website.Overall, very good and should do the job. Just a few small changes and your site will be amazing.

[FLaKes 0]

I think it looks sort of simple, maybe a bit minimalistic. In my opinion it is sort of boring, I would recomend that you spice it up a little, like for example, you could add interactivity to the links and the menu. I liked the headers in the main page, the photographs are also really good. I think you should play a bit more with the font and effects of the title on your page that is in the header. Well thats my 2 cents, hope it helps you improve. Good Luck!

[strange-garden 0]

Wow, you are amazingly beautiful.

Ok, now that's out of the way, i think the text in the banner should change and the text for the nav bar, the grey streak on the banner to the right took my eye straight away. I don't know you too well, but this website can't suit your personallity...No one is THAT boring. No offense, but I really love the style and stuff, but you could make it a little more feminem and interesting.

 

Kind of like this, see how it's pretty yet stylish?

Now obviously it wouldn't look exactly like this, but it's just to show you how you can have a grey website with colour in it to mak it suit who you are.

 

I really do like the website though, I promise, but if it were me, I'd change those things...Everyone is different though so don't get angry at me, lol...I think it's a really clean website.

Edited January 15, 2008 by strange-garden (see edit history)

[polter 0]

The trick to creating a successful website is not just how aesthetically pleasing it is to visitors, but the quality of content. And I think yours is not bad at all concerning that. However, as for the design and interface, a lot of people, including some of us here have stressed the importance of simplicity, and I agree with that too. However, simplicity shouldn't be confused with amateurism. For example, if you prefer to put a a simple layout with plain colors, it's good to concentrate on some specific graphics, such as the logo, to make your site look more professional. Remember, visitors would never come back if they think the website they just visited was created by somebody just to past his time. I'm not saying that yours looks amateurish but there's room for improvement. For instance, you could try and add more graphics on the homepage. You can take a look at my website to have an idea of what I'm saying - http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/.

If you check out the shoutbox on the right hand corner, you'll understand that this gives you the advantage of tracking how many visitors are interested with your website, and also adds more interactivity between visitors. But it's gonna require you to take a few php scripting tutorials to set up one if you're not familiar with it.

You should also really consider creating a forum, in which fans of keego could discuss about the model, or anything else they want to. This will certainly bring more traffic to your website, I guarantee from experience. (you can easily set up a forum with Xisto. example, like this - http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/)

As for the guestbook, if Xisto also has a ready-to-install php guestbook, the one I'm using myself. So, you need not sign up with other websites such as smartgb.com for a free guestbook. Like I mentioned before, we need to make the site look as professional can be so an url such as http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ would look more professional than the one you're using now i.e. http://users3.smartgb.com/g/g.php?a=s&i=g35-16027-1a, which is totally unrelated to http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/.

Overall, your site seems great and I wish you all the best.

Hope this helps...

Edited January 16, 2008 by polter (see edit history)

[safe.as.haz 0]

im impressed its simplicity does you all the justice in the world.Maybe you could create a stunning flash box for an intro to make the site come to life a bit more?But it really is a good site. And the pictures are beautiful.

[Fleet 0]

Nice colours, and general layout is cool. Although I think you could of added a bit more graphics, or used better image manuplation software. That's all I think.

[threepach 0]

i liked your color balance, easy to look atas i had a look for few sec it's a pure advertising website which tries to promote a business - firstly i liked few parts- secondly for suggestion: why don't you add some big signs to show what is this website about? i'm trying to say when i'm coming to the website i wanna get why is it up there within 5 seconds. i just wanna say a website is up there to promote something, it could be there to:- sell product- provide online services (like this forum)- providing information 24/7- introducing a new business- .... your dear website should say it in very details that what is it doing. if it's there to introduce a new business then there should be some bold fonts to say what is this business about and proudly say what they doing? hope i made my point. understand the visitor who is there to find what he/she is after as soon as possible + neath design. (which u have the last one so work on the better understanding of the business and home page content)