A while ago I asked for feedback on the website. It's getting a bit on the huge side, I'm not happy with the navigation scheme and if I don't mess with the site periodically, I get bored. A few people chimed in with some feedback. Mostly positive. I think people are afraid to step up and say "Wow! That really stinks!". Although the website is mine own, I consider it to be a work in progress. Which is to say it has to change every now and then to remain fresh.
William Mitchell is/was a new visitor to the website. I asked him for some first-time visitor feedback, not knowing that he teaches web design and usability in his day job. After some assurances that I would not take any comments heavily to heart or think ill of him, he responded with:
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"Ok, you asked...
Navigation:
The horizontal bar is not a problem and works quite well, allowing you to divide up the navigation into categories and sub categories. Where the problem lies is in the drop-down display.
Spacing - As I'm sure you are aware, reading copy on a screen is much more difficult than reading it on paper and to help alleviate that problem somewhat, the text should have an increased leading or spacing between the lines.
Background - I would suggest keeping the blue background to the drop-downs and using white font, the same as you have with the main navigation. By switching the colours like have, the viewer's eyes and brain take a moment to adjust to the change and it can throw them off.
Alignment - The drop-down is aligned with the left edge of the button, which is fine, but it causes the text to shift to the left in most of the displays. This means the viewer has to pause again to get his brain to orientate itself to the change and any time you cause the great unwashed to pause, you chance loosing them. You should play with the alignment of the text within the drop-down so its left edge aligns with the left edge of the main button's text.
Table Boarder - Setting the boarder of the table that holds the navigation bar is not necessary. The contrast with the white text is more than enough to divide up the bar and without the cell borders, the bar would look much neater.
Body:
I checked your code and it is very clean and well done. You have used a table, which is fine, but the industry is switching over to Layers which are now called "AP Elements", the AP standing for Absolute Positioning. The reason for the switch is that some of the browsers in handheld devices do not support tables due to them being code intensive. AP Elements are positioned now using CSS positioning styles so the bad rap that Layers got for moving all over the place is in the past.
I think the colours and logo you are using are great. They give a "studious" impression. My first impression of the site, however, was that it was a bit all over the place and difficult to to figure out. A lot of this could be cured with just a few adjustments to the current layout.
Page Colour - If you changed the background colour of the page to the same blue as you used in your logo, it would give the page a much tighter and more cohesive look. You have enough contrast with the white text so further division is unnecessary.
Body Table - Using white as a background colour for the body content is an excellent idea and if used with discretion, very helpful to the viewer. The problem I find is that you have applied the white background to the table, not the individual cells. This means that the whole area is white instead of just having white in the different sections. If you added a column of cells to the table between "The Toolemera Press Free Stuff" and "Mother Brook Books", you would further divide those two sections. By not applying any colour to the background of the cells in this center column you would have a stronger division between the sections, one that is adjustable in width simply by changing the width value of the center cells. Applying the white background to only the cells that hold the content would give the page a more organized look.
Table Border - Ya, I know. Everyone likes to use them. What most designers do not realize, though, is that they are distracting as all get out. When you look at site you see three things in this order - the white background, the red border, THEN the content. The problem with that is that the content is the most important thing. When designing, enhance the important, don't distract from it.
Font Size - It is natural for designers starting out to use larger than necessary font sizes. It is understandable, if you want something to stand out, make it bigger. When reading from a monitor, however, large fonts are much more difficult to comprehend than small fonts. I wouldn't use any font larger than 14 pt and try to stick with 10 to 12 pt wherever possible. 10 pt is large enough for even us old farts to read on a monitor.
Spacing - You would enhance the experience of the site a thousand fold if you reduced the size of the font by 2 pt and used the space you gained in spacing out the lines of text. An example of this is your definition display. By dropping the size of the font you used down to 10 or 12 pt and adding a line between them they would a) stand out more, and b) be much easier to read. By breaking that section out of the common white background and putting it against one white background and the Subscribe button against another, you would attract more attention to both. What we call "white space" in layout, areas were there is no content displayed, is a good thing, especially on a monitor. It gives the eye a place to rest, it offers up an unconscious way for the eye to follow from one line to the next and it is clean looking.
Text Alignment - You haven't used center alignment very much. That is a good thing as center aligned text is very difficult to follow because it is unintuitive. The viewer's eyes expect to go back where they started on the left and when it gets there, it discovers that it is either half way into the line or in white space. Justified text is worse than centered text, so you shouldn't use that either. There is no white space at the end of the line to help the viewer to the next one, so it becomes very difficult to read.
Numbering - You numbered the Free Stuff section which, if it relates to understanding where to find the content for a given line after you click on it, I can understand. If it doesn't, then you shouldn't use a numbering system, but if you must, you shouldn't use Romans. To someone who deals in roman numerals daily, they are second nature. To the the great unwashed, though, they distract as their meaning is not intuitive.
So now that you feel I have beaten you up, let me summarize. Keep it simple, keep it properly sized and keep it separate.
On the bright side, having looked at your code, I am positively impressed by your abilities to figure all of this out and put it into a very functional application."
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I think he should have been my first HTML instructor at Simmons. If so, I would not have had to unlearn a whole bunch of so-called rules. I have rarely read such a concise and clear review of a website. One point: I can't take all kinds of credit for the clean code. In large part, that is the result of using Freeway Pro 5. Well, I did do a lot of work cleaning up errant CSS code, a never-ending chore. Beyond that, Freeway produces some of the cleanest code you will ever see.
A few of the other comments from readers related to the depth and breadth of the site and the difficulty in finding their way around, or remembering where they were at any given time. Which brings us back to navigation schemes. And pull down menus in nav bars. Personally, I really don't like pull down menus. When I get to a site that has them, I typically ignore the pull down and just go right the the page that holds the pull down items. If possible. So why do I have pull down items on the website? Because it was a challenge to design it and I wanted to try it out.
But I still don't like them. I may have to keep a pull down menu bar just to save screen real estate. For now, I'm trying out a few variations on menu layout and overall site scheme. Which brings us to the last part of this post:
Now is your time to step up and say your piece. If there is something you really don't like, or a suggestion or two, feel free to say so. I won't take it personally. Honest. It's just a website. Except for the logo and title. That's mine, mine, all mine!
Till next
Gary
