Posted by John Hosking on 09/20/07 02:26

windandwaves wrote:

F'ups to alt.html.critique

>
> Can you please have a look at: http://www.winsborough.co.nz/ and tell
> me what you think. Apparently it is not working in IE6, although for
> it does.

I'm sorry, but I don't care for it. The contrast between text and
background is too low for me. I imagine the designer of the site sitting
at a gleaming new Mac with a large screen and bright display and sharp
young eyes to view it all with. My conditions are ... different.

The fancy meandering borders don't enhance the site, even when they're
functioning properly. They don't look quite right on the main page
(there's an extraneous thin horizontal line in the upper left), and on
the "our staff" page (capitalization missing) it's a disaster (bits of
curve and straight in various wrong positions).

There is no BG color declared, so I see my ugly default yellow.

The pictures of rocks and ferns and, I think, a basket seem to have much
less to do with organisational development and more to do with the clip
art you had available.

The main page has (well, it looks like all the pages have) a permanent
vertical scrollbar, even when there's nothing to scroll.

HTML validates on the main page (great!) but the CSS has some errors
(http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator) which you should know about.

Oh my. The CSS is, um, quite special looking. The repetitive patterns of
code like

#bottom{background: url(../images/homeBottom.gif) no-repeat; width:
969px; height: 34px;}
#about #bottom{background: url(../images/aboutBottom.gif) no-repeat;}
#staff #bottom{background: url(../images/staffBottom.gif) no-repeat;}
#consulting #bottom{background: url(../images/consultingBottom.gif)
no-repeat;}
#assessment #bottom{background: url(../images/assessmentBottom.gif)
no-repeat;}
#contact #bottom{background: url(../images/contactBottom.gif) no-repeat;}

make me question the efficacy of the design. Especially when the results
are as discombobulated as they are, it suggests some rethinking might be
in order.

Feel free to change font-size:14px; to font-size:100%;, since specifying
font-size in pixels keeps IE <7 from resizing texts, which users will
likely want to do, thanks in part to the low-contrast colors.

Text upsizing in FF seems to work nicely, only overflowing the alloted
spaces in a few areas.

At the bootom of the pages, the "top" link goes to #home, and the "home"
link goes to the main page, too, even when it's already there.

Most of my testing was with FF, but in IE6 it looks a lot better. The
lines and curves line up, and don't look broken. You didn't say what's
"not working in IE6", so I'm done here. GL.

--
John
Pondering the value of the UIP: http://improve-usenet.org/

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