How does my website look?

[RickB]

www.richardalanbunch.com

I created this website from scratch for my dad, who is an author. I was going for a sort of warm, personal feeling with the design.

Please feel free to leave advice and critiques. Even harsh criticism is appreciated

Thanks!

[Alamalloy]

I think it looks and works nicely! No advise or anything from me.

[RickB]

I think it looks and works nicely! No advise or anything from me.

Thanks very much

[pendavet]

Nice design

[Web Outsourcing Gateway]

I don't wanna be harsh, but I want to be honest. It has no impact to me at all... I mean no "wow" factor when it comes to the design. It's so plain and boring for me. Black, red and gold, it's supposed to be a good combination but you did it wrong. It lacks of some of important elements that would make it livelier or compelling.

Check these websites for some inspiration.
http://www.danbrown.com/
http://isabelallende.com/ia/en/home

[RickB]

I don't wanna be harsh, but I want to be honest. It has no impact to me at all... I mean no "wow" factor when it comes to the design. It's so plain and boring for me. Black, red and gold, it's supposed to be a good combination but you did it wrong. It lacks of some of important elements that would make it livelier or compelling.

Check these websites for some inspiration.
http://www.danbrown.com/
http://isabelallende.com/ia/en/home

Thanks for your honest feedback. I agree it isn't much of an eye-popper, and being my first ever functioning site, there are definitely things I could have done better. Are there any specific things you would recommend for me to do in the future to make it more interesting? You mentioned a lack of important (design?) elements; could you specify a bit more? Thanks

[Webzarus]

As a first site, its not that bad. Code looks solid ( from what I can see of it ), there is a lot of whitespace in the code, and that might have a little to do with the slow load times.

The load time on the original load was extremely slow, I think that's more to do with your host.

Not a fan of the "effect", again, I'm on a iPhone, so its likely I'm not seeing it the way it was intended, but once it loaded ... You may want to look at and optimize the images you're using for the background effects.

Not bad at all

[RickB]

Thanks for the comment, I just went through and got rid of a lot of the whitespace, just haven't published it on the server yet.

My host seemed to be messing up a bit yesterday so that may have been some of it.

As for the 'effects', which ones do you mean? The main background is a picture gradient that isn't too big. Did you mean things like the text-shadow and box shadows on some of the divs like the navbar?

I checked with my iPhone and it seemed pretty much the same as on my laptop. Except the main button on the contact page seems to be messed up. I could probably just make the background gradient 1px tall and tile it vertically instead of having the image stretch to 100%. Would that make it faster/better?

It would be great if you could give me some more specifics on the effects that gave you trouble, and how I could improve the site. Thanks!

[Webzarus]

It did load better this time, might be a mod-rewrite as seeing the home page goes to a directory named home... Which may actually hurt your search engine chances...

The "home" page should be on the root of the domain .. Not a directory beneath... The way you have he other sections is fine and pretty common place...

Th effect ( when I zoomed in ) I see is the effect of the fold of a book... I've never cared for any site that tries that effect, because unless you can do it from tolld page to bottom of page... It gets interrupted by nav bars.. Etc... And its just a tough thing to do... Again, personal preference.

Now... Fonts... Most books actually use a serif font... Because the serif font is a traditional font used in books, and it helps the words flow together... Personally I'd try changing the content and side bar at the very least to just a font-family: serif; Take a look, see if its easier on the eyes and goes a little better with the "book" effect...

I know, many newer publishers are actually moving to sans-serif fonts, but is for cost savings, they can actually print more words on a page, less pages, less cost... But it is harder on the eyes... And since the web is all about visual presentation ... I'd at least try a serif font... See how it fits.

Your footer links may need some padding between them... Just to give them a little room... And at a glance for those of us with older eyes, we know they are links.

[RickB]

Thank you for your response, you've been very helpful

After some confusion and then deliberation, I deleted the HOME folder completely, and made the homepage 'index.php' in the root folder instead of having a permant redirect to the home folder from the root index.php. I tried doing root-relative links but they wouldn't work on my localhost due to my file heirarchy and I figured not being able to test offline would be awful.

Hopefully that makes things a bit easier and makes it a bit more search engine friendly.

I added some extra padding on the bottom alt navigation, so let me know how that looks.

As for the serif font, I tried it, and it looks pretty good so I may do it when I have some extra time to spend changing the fonts and font sizes.

Is the serif font that big of a difference? What if I changed it from the 'book' effect to something more traditional. My only problem with that was finding a color for the sidebar that would look good. If I make it red like the nav bar and footer, it will look like a strange red object framing the page. If I do something crazy like blue it just won't match, and brown doesn't seem to go either. What would you suggest doing to the sidebar if I were to get rid of the book page effect?

Thanks!