Re: Website Redesign

[Bryan Stanbridge]

Kyle N. Leitch wrote:
> I’ve come up with a simple (and developing) idea for a new design at my 
> site, www.lws.cjb.cc/Lilypond <http://www.lws.cjb.cc/Lilypond>. 
> Regardless of whether or not the new design will be used, I would 
> greatly appreciate your feedback.

Greetings from a web professional,

It's a nice first step into a redesign. The concept is fairly nice and 
shows quite a bit of thought.

1) I recommend making the "Home" "Introduction" etc. links plain white. 
It's hard to read the special effect (and it requires images which 
increases load time, unnecessarily in this case).

2) There's a little too much space in a number of places. Between the 
header and the navigation, for instance. That seems a lot of extraneous 
space.

3) I think that perhaps you're using too many different colors, 
especially in the uses of headers.

4) The markup is very "old school." Your design could easily be 
accomplished with fully compliant (X)HTML+CSS and be leaner and load 
faster as a result. It would also be more appropriately elegant for such 
an elegant program. (Granted the originally is equally "old school")

If there's any interest in this, I could take a look later this week and 
bring your design into a standards compliant format and then post for 
comments. (If there's any question of my qualifications to take 
incredibly table-heavy code and translate it into (X)HTML+CSS, please 
see http://www.bgsu.edu for the ugly table version and 
http://www.bgsu.edu/music/ for my redesign with one table [that's 
largely unnecessary, but for a few pages. I'm working on getting the 
table out of there entirely, since there's no tabular data.]).

Cheers,

Bryan...

---
Bryan Stanbridge
Purple Frog Productions