I volunteer at the Wooden Shoe Bookstore in Philadelphia, and I've been working on designing a new website for the collective, that is easier to navigate through than the current website. I still have a ways to go, but I did however post it on a free website host so the other collective members could see my progress and make comments and suggestions that they feel fit.
Here is the CURRENT website.
www.woodenshoebooks.com
Here is the one in progress.
woodenshoebooks.freewebsitehosting.com
The text in the body of the pages are just fillers and they WILL be changed, it's just there acting as a filler to see how the website works.
As a very basic website, obviously this will pass; but I do feel that it is currently not well designed.
ReplyDeleteTry pulling all the text and images away from the edge for starters. This will ease unnecessary tension.
The shoe on the splash page needs to be retraced, it has a lot of rough edges - particularly on the top edge.
Read up on hierarchy in relation to typography; I feel that this is one of the major issues. Should the email address be bigger than the hours? All of this information at the top, I feel, could be brought down in size - making room for something else possibly, and not simply enlarged to fill up space.
In the "Staff Picks" section, you should align the text left, justifying it to the center creates strings of text at the end of the paragraph which are much small, and less legible.
Finally, I would comment that the shoe that appears when the cursor hovers on a navigation link is very redundant. The shoe itself appears at the top of page, it is not necessary to have it appear here again. Maybe a simple color change could do the trick?
Hopefully you will take all of this into consideration.
I may and probably will change some things at a later date, but right now, most of the people (including myself) want it up asap.. and will tweak it after its up, Since the current one is atrocious.. So basic will have to do for now..
ReplyDeleteThough I am not making the changes right away, they are taken into consideration and will be adressed in time. (I'm writing them in my note book)
and the splash page may not even stay.. I threw that up there because the homepage file name is homepage.html and I didnt want to recreate all the links yet by renaming it index.html