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X-Istence

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Hey guys,

I am currently working on a website for the company I work for and was hoping to get some feedback from you guys on what I should improve and what I should do to make it better.

Please be aware that this is a rough draft, that nothing is set in stone and that it still has a lot of work to get to what it needs to do in terms of functionality, but at least some of the pages are up and running and are functional.

Images will be missing until I get a chance to sit down with my boss/co-workers and get some more generic images to throw up on the website. The website should be fully compliant in IE 7/8 (as in it should not blow up on you, tested here at work ...), and works in all the other major browsers Gecko based (FireFox, Camino), Webkit based (Chrome, Safari) and Opera. It works in IE 6, but not that well ... certain things are not rendered correctly.

If anything is broken, in terms of layout (images, I know are missing) give me a heads up.

http://aec.0x58.com/
 
only thing i don't think is too great is the menu bar other than that all works fine here :)
 
semi transparent instead of pure white, you could always use a drop shadow to make the writing stand out from the background picture
 
semi transparent instead of pure white, you could always use a drop shadow to make the writing stand out from the background picture

When CSS3 becomes the standard for browsers that would indeed become possible and easy to do ... right now it would mean making all of those links images to get a drop shadow.

That being said, one suggestion I got was to make the top-border for those rounded, so if you are using a browser that supports the border-radius tag (Gecko/WebKit) you will see rounded corners.

Edit: Your suggestion of semi-transparent with a drop shadow on the text does not work that well, the text would need to be bigger to get the same effect and it makes it harder to read.
 
i understood it would require a bit of work, wasn't sure how much you were willing to do :)
 
i understood it would require a bit of work, wasn't sure how much you were willing to do :)

Eh, I don't care much about the time/work it would take, getting paid by the hour. I tried it out like I said in my previous post and it did not look good.
 
those links look very out of place where they are - make them part of a menu bar just below the header image and you should be okay. You can use CSS Sprites to jazz them up a bit :)
 
Many people did not like the menu bar, mainly because I had not realised that the menu bar in FireFox/Opera on Mac OS X did not render properly. FireFox on Mac OS X has a different box model than that of FireFox on Windows.

The other issue was that it looked out of place with where it was, and I agree with that, so I did another mockup for my boss and he liked it, so I spent some time fleshing out the design aspects.

The blue is brighter than the other colours on the page and might get toned down a little bit, but overall the menu looks and acts and feels better as part of the page than before.

If you guys have any more suggestions or comments please let me know, I will see if I can incorporate them in the web page!
 
FF 3.0.10

Site loads fast and I noticed no issues......
 
could still do with spicing up the menu a bit there. looks really out of character to the rest of the site.
 
could still do with spicing up the menu a bit there. looks really out of character to the rest of the site.

Colour needs to be changed from the bright blue to something not as bright. As for spicing up, this is an Civil Engineering firm, they prefer to keep it simple.

How do you suggest spicing it up? What is it missing?
 
it's missing effort :)

It looks uninspired and tacked on as an afterthought.
 
it's missing effort :)

It looks uninspired and tacked on as an afterthought.

Just for the record, it was never tacked on as an afterthought, the whole layout was devised with the menu system in its original place, the changes I made to it yesterday were made because of comments I received from various different people here and elsewhere, along with the fact that the layout did not display correctly in various different browsers on different platforms (IE 8 on Windows, and FireFox/Opera on Mac OS X). Current layout has been tested in IE 6, IE 7, IE 8, FireFox, Opera, Chrome, Safari and Camino.

The only thing that needs to be done is the colours need to be substituted for something that fits more within the page, the current colours were picked mostly because they helped me build up the menu using CSS correctly, and like I mentioned they need to either be toned down or changed. Just like the background still has to be changed from its current colour to some texture of some sort, since the current even background just is not pleasing to the eye. This menu is more a part of the page than the previous one was.

Stating it is missing effort without stating what it is missing is annoying, just about as annoying as getting incomplete project requirements and attempting to guess what the client really means.
 
simple doesn't imply plain, dull and uninspired. Take a look at design blogs for inspiration such as smashingmagazine.com or themeforest.net for templates to borrow ideas from.
 
I am not sure on the font. Also...the personnel page... Not sure if it is the silhouettes but it is sort of 'in your face'. May look softer with actual pictures of the people.
 

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Also Hi EP and people. I found this place again while looking through a oooollllllldddd backup. I have filled over 10TB and was looking at my collection of antiques. Any bids on the 500Mhz Win 95 fix?
Any of the SP crew still out there?
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Impressed you have kept this alive this long EP! So many sites have come and gone. :(

Just did some crude math and I apparently joined almost 18yrs ago, how is that possible???
hello peeps... is been some time since i last came here.
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