[thelist] re: Mo. River Reg. Library Critique

H. G. Quinn hgquinn at attglobal.net
Sat Apr 21 07:16:30 CDT 2001


1024 x 768, NN 4.76, IE 5, NN 6, 56K dial-up.

Quick loading, well-organized, attractive, informational, useful, clean,
well-laid-out text, successful overall.

Quibbles: I agree with Ben about the mouseover states making the buttons' type
nearly illegible; in the mouseout state, more contrast between the button text and
their bars would be helpful -- the majority of the text lies in the lightest area
of the bars' gradients.  Also, a slightly sharper contrast between the heading
texts on the Kids page and that page's gold pattern bg would be good for people
w/vision probs (as would allowing the font to take the brower's style sheet
typeface and size settings, since it's a public site and there may be state or
federal accessibility guidelines that the site must adhere to -- I know that
allowing a browser's large type setting to break your layout is uncomfortable, but
people who set their font sizes high for vision reasons are used to that
distictive look ;->).

One thing I found curious, and is not your issue, but maybe you can discuss this
with the people who are collecting the content for you:  the Kids page is very
text-intensive, and has virtually no links within the page, wheras the Teens
section whose audience already knows how to read, is very light and has lots of
active links.  Even little kids get it about links, and less text but larger type
would be good for early readers.  If the library staff thinks the Kids page is
really for the kids parents, they need to wake up just a bit -- kids will be
accessing that page, and will get turned of the library site, they way it's
designed.  Can you see an 8-year-old being thrilled by that content?  Maybe there
should be a link at the top of the Kids page for kids' parents, and it could use
the current Kids page content.  The Kids page "dawg" and paw print bullets are
great.

Where's the 'random "wacky" link' on the Teens page?  The text is there, but it's
not active as a link -- I wanted to try it out ;-).

Back to the Kids page -- in both NN's, the top table breaks, cause it's set to
100% even though you have fixed widths for the cells, so NN is distributing extra
space amongst the columns pretty evenly, thus breaking the contiguous graphic.  My
quick-fix for this wonderful NN feature is to add an extra column on the right of
each table containing only a non-breaking space in that right-most column, with
_no_ width on it.  This "extra" column acts like a buffer, absorbing the
"overflow" as NN tries to adjust the table width -- it works about 99% of the
time.  To cover that 1% not, I add a complementary bg color (and if available, a
bg graphic) to all the cells that have a pattern or graphic that should look
contiguous, so if the table does end up breaking, it's either virtually
unnoticeable or it looks like a "design feature".  This break shows white, and
looked like a design feature until I checked the page in IE.  Once while resizing
the page in IE, it broke there too, but resizing the page again "disappeared" the
break.

Overall, a success, I think, so congrats, take a deep breath and pop the cork on
Monday.


> On Fri, 20 Apr 2001, Robin Hastings wrote:
>
> I'm biting the bullet and presenting our new site for critiques! At the library
> I work for, I have teamed up with a graphic designer (print mostly) to
> completely redesign our web site. The target launch date is Monday - AGGGH!!
> ...but I'd still like to get opinions about how this new site looks, navigates,
> functions and works in various browsers...I'd love to hear how this site looks
> in the 4.0 browsers! Thanks for everything in advance!!
> http://207.160.148.219/  (Missouri River Regional Library)...

--
Cheers,

Heather Quinn
info at windyhilldesign.com
http://www.windyhilldesign.com
hgquinn at attglobal.net
http://pws.prserv.net/windyhill






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