Site Check: friendsofsealth.org/prototype

[akroll]

This is a site I am re-desiging for the Friends of Sealth. It is mostly HTML, and not entirely finished (the last two sections don't work yet).

I would love to hear any comments you may have.

http://www.friendsofsealth.org/prototype

Thanks!

[skitzofrantic]

that is very clean, I like clean i'm a big fan of easy to use!

7.5 / 10

cheers
ak

[ZeroInspiration]

Well Im sad no one else has noticed how good the code work is. This is a 10 out of 10 as far as code goes. Css navigation, great use of frames, and besides the header Its a great site. Only problem I have is the header seems a little plain. Keep up the good work. I couldnt help myself I had to rip it and disect it, Im going to learn alot from this layout .

[youngjediknight]

hahaha its like light-years better than the site of the school itself! nice job. color scheme is spot on. my only thing is that theres an awful lot of dead space at the top ... i realize thats some artistic measure but maybe think about all the valuable real estate youre sacrificing. otherwise, really cool site. maybe you should do the actual school's site.

[akroll]

Thanks, youngjediknight. I agree with the dead space at the top. I think, perhaps there is something more I can do with the header area (the area with the clouds in the background), but I haven't figured out what.

As for the site for the school: I actually met with the principal today to discuss re-designing their site... but I guess the school doesn't have any money. Bummer. Perhaps when they get some technology grant or something.

[akroll]

There we go. I got rid of some of the dead space at the top, and I do think it looks (and works) a lot better. There is no more Flash at all, but oh well. It wasn't really necessary. It's just about ready to go live, just need approval from the board of directors. Please let me know if you see anything else that needs changing.

[rjbeals]

I love it. I wish I could do that..
How do you start designing your pages? Do you design everything in Photoshop? then cut it up into slices and play with the HTML?

I added to my favorites just so I can go back to get inspiration.

[akroll]

Thanks for the compliments, rjbeals.

I actually start out with a combination of Photoshop and Illustrator. Personally, I am a bit more comfortable working in Illustrator, which also keeps me from going overboard on the textures and such. I lay out a couple of pages in Illustrator, creating any necessary images in photoshop and importing them into Illustrator.

From there it is a combination of simply rebuilding parts in Dreamweaver and saving images out of Photoshop. In some cases, once I have the site designed in Illustrator, I'll just take a screenshot and in Photoshop cut out the pieces that I need as images. I'm sure it takes a lot longer than just slicing things up in photoshop, but the result is a lot cleaner - and smaller - website. Less images, more use of the bgcolor tag.

Rarely is the fastest way the best.