Scrapbook.me.uk Re-Design.

http://www.scrapbook.me.uk/

I just finished a major re-design to this site and I'm really happy with the way it turned out. I hope other people enjoy using it too!! I would appreciate praise and criticism you might be able to give me (be nice though... please... :P).

I still need to do something about the skin for my forum and figure out what to do with the panel on the right of the layout where the shoutbox is (or should I just leave that as it is?). Also I realise that the seperate logins for the site and forums may be a little annoying, but it's the best I can do (for now...).

Thanks.

ally153,

The site looks great! I love the header image with the pixelated eye.

Only thing I found a little odd is that the login box's colour seems to be washed out when overtop the background image (keyboard). Because the 2 colours are very similar, they seem to blend too much... I would suggest using a darker bg colour for the login box, or perhaps an even darker border colour than what you currently have.

The shoutbox doesn't look bad. Leaving it doesn't hurt the overall look. If anything, you could perhaps apply a style to the scrollbars (although it will only work in IE).

Do you have a link to the old site? I'd like to compare the past with the present!

The top nav needs a little work. Make the fonts larger and clearer, and something weird seems to happen when u mouseover HOME - the sub menu seems a bit buggy.

Pretty nifty. The subnav weirdness looks like maybe there's a clear gif graphic that doesn't actually exist on your server being used to position the nav horizontally. It doesn't exist, so it blinks the "missing image" icon before being sized to 1x1. That's what stumpy saw, and I saw it on my system too. Check the nav code and see if there's maybe a reference to an image that doesn't exist on your server. FrankieShakes is right about the washed out login box too, I think, though I dig the look of the site overall.

I was referring more to the inconsistent sub menu activation. Sometimes the options remain, once you mouseoff the menu, sometimes not. It seems to depend on where you mouseout from. If you mouse over about 8px left of the Articles option, the sub reloads... it's weird. What I'm getting at is, it's not intuitive. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a sub-menu or not, and the way it works is confusing. None of the other menu options have sub menu's so maybe you could do away with the sub altogether?

Also, read up on pre-loading images for rollovers - saves the user missing out on parts of the site if an image hasn't loaded when they perform a rollover

Thanks for that suggestion FrankieShakes, I'd never even considered what the login box might seem to some people! I think the main problem is that there are subtle differences in monitor/video settings... I've got a fairly vibrant screen setup compared to the computers in my university for instance that might cause that... I'll get the colours changed ASAP... I'll add some styles to the scrollbars to like you advised too soon.

stumpy and dhouston, yeah quite a few people have been complaining about the size of the text for the nav menu, so I'll get that changed to something more readable... The problem you mentioned is probably to do with a little lazy coding by me... I haven't specified the dimensions of the images, so it's likely it's loading the submenu before it has loaded the images causing the problems you described... I could be wrong though, but the graphics are definitely there and loading fine when I load the page.

Glad you all like the layout. It's my first serious attempt with PSP8, so I wasn't too sure how it would go. It also represents a lot of coding and debugging time to get the template working with the portal I'm using...

I haven't got all the parts that made up the old site, but it looked something like the screenshot I've attached...

Thanks for the additional points stumpy, yeah I see your point abou the submenus right now... I'm intending to add some more categories to it fairly soon for the other menu options, which would make the whole concept more relavent.

I agree that I need to think about pre-loading some of the images, I'll get that done soon.

Cool! If you need a hand coding the pre-loads, give us a yell!

The only thing I would have done is to use some javascript that removes the text inside the Username/Password fields if you click inside them.

Else, the page is very nice looking.

I've changed the colours of the login box so they look less washed out. I've also got rid of the graphic links for the menu and replaced them with text ones to make them more readable. I had to get rid of the sub-menu because the script wasn't wanting to work right though, which was annoying, but it solves the bug issues anyways...

I'll look into clearing the text for the login screen and also the styled scrollbars at some point too, thanks for all the help so far everyone!