[thelist] site critique request + Creative Director question
Paola Kathuria
paola at limitless.co.uk
Fri Jul 20 22:52:40 CDT 2001
Colin Buttimer wrote:
> http://www.mdx.ac.uk
First impressions are that the blue, white and grey choices are,
hmm, friendly and approachable.
The rest is hopefully constructive criticism:
design:
+ I find that the abundance of colour photos clutters the main
pages - having rubbed shoulders with some designers, I wonder
whether you could kill two birds with one stone by making them
duotones (colorise 'em).
If you colour code each main section (what I'm calling the things
that the top horiz links go to), you then colorise the photos
accordingly. This'll mean you can get away with having the
photos 16-col GIFs (smaller filesize perhaps), but if you then
colour-code the photo montage for each section too, it'll also
provide additional landmark info of what section one's in.
Simple photo buttons would be: unselected = colorised, no
border, selected = full-colour, with border
Here's the full monty of how the photo buttons could behave
to show the states selected and clickable:
1) When not in the section, photo button is colorised.
2) Mouseover of unselected photo shows full-colour photo.
3) When on the target page, photo icon is full-colour and
icon has border (which is now white) or the section colour and
the link text is black (or a dark shade of the section colour.
4) When further down in a section, photo button colorised but with
coloured border
5) Mouseover of button when further down in a section is
version 3.
You can then apply the colour-coding to things like the main
page heading, the top links, other photo buttons. One-off
pages like the home page, contents, search and results, and
feedback can then be considered to be notionally in a "site"
section, and given their own colour to apply in the same way.
+ Too many "top" links - having them at the end of every logical
content section clutters the page - I tend to add them every
100 lines in the source page (which is about 2 screenfuls at
1024 x 768 resolution)
+ Consider making the "current" section link colour black and not
white - I think that the current page link should be the most
prominent (adds to the "you are here" cues), not the least.
+ I think that the Middlesex Uni logo at the far right of the
photo comp is overwhelmed by the photos. If you colorise
the montage (duotones), perhaps this'll no longer be the case.
+ The 17K for the photos montage per section seems excessive
for what is really just decoration (colour-coding them would
make them functional, though). A compromise would be to have
the Uni logo (far right) a separate image and just finish the
montage earlier.
+ I'd prefer the two columns swapped - content on the left
and links on the right.
+ Consider duplicating the horiz section links at the bottom
of pages (see http://www.limitless.co.uk/stdterms.lml for an
example)
+ Add the photo icons to the relevant links in the site map
and pehaps make these <h2> links on the page.
bugs:
+ The link to http://www.mdx.ac.uk/research/portfolio/cs.htm (from
http://www.mdx.ac.uk/research/portfolio/index.htm) gives error
message - looks like the css file hasn't been referenced properly.
+ The error page has an error (maybe the same as the previous
problem) - symptoms suggest that the .css path is incorrect.
+ Photos and gif heading don't match on http://www.mdx.ac.uk/aboutus/
usability:
+ Set visited link colour for main navigation (and all links) -
at the moment, I can't tell if I've visited a section because
the blue link colours remains the same.
+ Don't include index.htm in internal links - it makes the URL
longer and thus more to get wrong if people are going to pass
URLs on to others.
To illustrate, a radio program advertised an appeal published
on a client's site - the page URL ended readers/index.htm but
the radio program said it was readers/index.html - visitors got
an error message (as they will on
http://www.mdx.ac.uk/research/portfolio/index.html for instance)
So 1) set up a redirect so that all references to *.html are
redirected to the same prefix at .htm
Then 2) remove index.htm from internal links - to do this
from directories above, replace <a href="portfolio/index.htm">,
say, with <a href="portfolio/">. To reference the index page
from a directory directly below, use <a href="../">. To
reference an index page from within the same directory, use
<a href="./"> (on a Unix server) or <a href="../portfolio/">
To reference the home page, use <a href="/">
This'll mean that /index.htm will never appear in the URL.
+ Mark off-site links differently (that is, to sites other than
www.mdx.ac.uk) from internal links - Reuters once used the @ symbol
as a graphic, I tend to use a pointy hand graphic (for an example,
see http://www.limitless.co.uk/~paola/tmp/chi-web/whyfox.html - this
is an old demo page - links don't go anywhere).
+ Consider replacing mailto links in the page footer with links to a
form - 1) you'll get less spam (by not advertising your address to
email harrvesters) and 2) anyone will be able to contact you, even
if at a library or internet cafe or a friend's house.
+ The breadcrumb [sic] trail looks broken by ending with ">" - I'd put
the current page as the last link or remove the trailing ">" as the
last link.
+ I don't understand what "back to your links" means (without clicking
it) - almost as sinister and confusing as "The Page you Made" on
Amazon...
+ Page layout too wide - requires minimum 800x600 screen resolution
or a wide browser width - visitors using WebTV'll get a horiz
scrollbar (and I did, with 1024x768 - as I have multiple windows
open). I realise this'd be a major change but it would make the
site more accessible (in the general sense).
+ I've just figured out what the links mean on the home page
under "Custom tours" - they've a vertical list of section links
that appear horizontally at the top of every other page!
These really should be presented in the same way on all pages or
else they just look like a different set of links. I initially
thought that they were a list of tours. The tour idea is great -
I think that the home page can stand to start with the horizontal
section links but you can use the vertical space with a bulleted
list of the tours.
> Also, I've been working with a graphic designer for a few months now in the
> role of Creative Director e.g. I come up with concepts, keywords, etc then
> agree with client and develop and direct with the designer. I'm doing this
> without prior experience - can anyone recommend a good book/website for
> guidance in the area of art/creative directing?
Having worked with a creative director (as a web producer), an issue
is of documenting and storing the design process. It's sometimes
useful to be able to go back to a source image from a certain date
and so this presupposes that you keep all originals in a dated form.
And having some record of considered routes and discounted designs
means that the person who will eventually take over your job, won't
end up reinventing the wheel or waste time considering things you
know didn't work or which you know there won't be approval of.
Finally, if you don't already, when briefing the designers to come up
with design routes, encourage them to present one "off the wall" route
even if it doesn't strictly adhere to the brief. This often produces
elements that you can bring into other "safer" routes.
I hope this helps.
Paola, paid pedant
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