[thelist] design critique (or whatever you wanna do, really)

[aardvark]

> From: "Olly Hodgson" <gnarly at punkass.com>
> 
> I was drawn in by the "Applicants should be familiar with Liandri
> Central Core, and be comfortable handling a Redeemer in close
> quarters." :-) Unfortunately I'm in the UK so unless you want a remote
> worker...

depends on your ping...

> Anyway, heres my critique. Using Opera 5.12, Win2KSP2.

oh boy... i *did* test in that, but it also makes up less than 1% of 
our users (not counting me)...

> The front page looks fantastic - except for the 10cm border above and
> below. I didnt see this in IE5.5 so I assume its an Opera specific
> problem. I really like the subtle background graphics in the masthead,
> thought I have noidea what the "Ctrl" in there is for :-) The
> perspective image works for me too.

cool... the huge gap up top is pretty specific to Opera, yeah... and 
the ctrl key is tied to our marketing campaign for our CMS... a little 
consistency for those familiar with it...

> Thankfully huge border disappears for the rest of the pages. These
> pages work fairly well, but I feel that thhe use of a few more images
> here and there would help to spice things up a bit and hold my
> interest a bit more. Maybe I'm just being a bit superficial, but I
> find that they help to break up large chunks of text and make it

you mean inline?  or elsewhere?  how about the white masthead on 
each page? too simple?

> easier to read. On the clients page particularly I just went bleurgh
> at all the text. I'm not sure exactly why, perhaps its the colour
> combination, but my eyes just didnt like it.

yeah, small text, mixed colors, two columns, mini-icons, all make 
for a rough page... i have no other ideas on how to do it, however...

> On the Articles section front page the links in the left hand sidebar
> werent obvious until I rolled over them - once I had entered the
> technical/news sections they became more obvious though.

hmmm.... might play with those...

> Other than that, its great.

thanks for the input...