South Creative - Gold Coast Web Design

Submitted by South Creative ... on Thu, 2008-01-17 15:09.

Critique

Hello everyone,

Our new site and portfolio went live a few days ago. It would be great to hear any comments / criticisms from the Creative Bits community.

Link to the live site: South Creative - Gold Coast Web Design

Cheers,

Trevor Curtis

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FANTASTIC! My only gripe at

Submitted by natobasso on Thu, 2008-01-17 16:32.

FANTASTIC!

My only gripe at all, and it's a small one, is that the webiste live area is too wide. Looks like it's wider than 800.

Otherwise, great pages, great backgrounds, kick butt design. AWESOME!

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Powerpoint is not a design application
My latest web design work

Just wanted to chime in and

Submitted by Tadams on Thu, 2008-01-17 22:28.

Just wanted to chime in and agree with the OP of the site. Now a-days according to most statistics and surveys, the percentage of people using 800 X 600 resolution is less than 10%.

I'd say in the past 2 years or so 800X600 has been slowly fading and most professional designers design websites for 1024 and up at this point.

Don't get me wrong, years ago it was our strict policy to make sure a site fit in 800 X 600, but now adays it is simply not the case.

I have to disagree. Studies

Submitted by natobasso on Thu, 2008-01-17 22:44.

800px doesn't have to do with the overall browser window size as it does with the content and how it can fit comfortably in the browser window for the largest amount of people.

Although anything goes these days, I tend to fall back on my print background for most sites I build because the human eye hasn't changed along with the change from paper to screen. :)

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Powerpoint is not a design application
My latest web design work

Have I seen this before?

Submitted by Apfhex on Thu, 2008-01-17 19:40.

It SCREAMS "web 2.0" and as such looks very familiar, like a lot of other "2.0" sites — but that's not necessarily a bad thing, I do really like it. Cool logo too.

...

Submitted by dpc on Thu, 2008-01-17 19:44.

I would liked to have seen the colors in the logo work into the pages. Also, make sure your links that go to anoter website open in a new window, especially the portfolio sites.

Fresh Portfolio ---> http://www.davidpcrawford.com

True, don't give people a

Submitted by natobasso on Thu, 2008-01-17 20:04.

True, don't give people a reason to leave your site.

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Powerpoint is not a design application
My latest web design work

Thanks for the input guys.

Submitted by South Creative ... on Thu, 2008-01-17 21:53.

Thanks for the input guys. It's always appreciated.

natobasso: It is wider, yes:) designed to fit a 1024x768 screen in a window that's almost maximized. The content is 960px. There's a few reasons I did this:

Out of the 6000+ visitors since the launch, Google Analytics shows 15 people running 800x600, and 14% are at 1024x768. Everyone else is higher.
There's more room available to display large portfolio images.
Potential clients running unusually low screen resolutions are generally not the market we're after.

Apfhex: I wasn't particularly aiming for the whole "2.0" thing. My style has remained fairly consistent over the years. What might I look at changing to make it more unique/less 2.0 ish? I'm definitely open to any suggestions.

dpc: Your portfolio looks great! Some really nice stuff in there.
In regards to the offsite links... I'm not sure what the solution is. I don't want to do target=, that's not valid code. I guess screenshots of the sites would be an option. It doesn't seem to be driving people away so far. Most visitor go through and visit all of the sites in the list, so they're obviously sticking around for a bit.
Thanks for bringing this up, I'll need to consider my options.

See my comment above

Submitted by Tadams on Thu, 2008-01-17 22:31.

See my comment above agreeing with you on the 800 X 600 issue.

In regards to your site I love it, nicely done. And I ran into your EXACT problem with the target attribute recently on a site I was developing. The client wanted everything to validate XHTML strict, and as you've found, target is no longer accepted. After much searching I never did find a solution other then using javascript which I refused to do.

In the end I told the client if they wanted to keep it STRICT then there would be no new windows for external site (which I did not recommend), instead I told them we could either have that simple validation error (which is nothing big), OR we could simply go to XHTML Transitional in which the target attribute is still valid.

In the end the client just went ahead with strict and the target and weren't concerned with the error. It's a tricky situation for sure! I wonder why there isn't a replacement for it in XHTML STRICT?

800x600 isn't just screen

Submitted by natobasso on Thu, 2008-01-17 22:45.

800x600 isn't just screen res but readability too. If you have text stretching across more than 800px, you're breaking people's eyeballs. It's something to consider, no matter what size someone's screen is.

Here's a javascript solution to the target problem in XHTML:
http://www.thefutureoftheweb.com/blog/target-blank-xhtml11

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Powerpoint is not a design application
My latest web design work

that's only an issue if...

Submitted by gwells on Mon, 2008-01-21 22:18.

you have text that spans the entire browser window, which he doesn't.

I do understand that (read

Submitted by natobasso on Tue, 2008-01-22 15:41.

I do understand that (read my previous post where I say his text isn't too wide) I just refute that just because his audience is higher end (I still don't think the majority of folks have larger than 15" monitors) doesn't mean that's true for all users on the web.

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Powerpoint is not a design application
My latest web design work

Fluid layouts with

Submitted by South Creative ... on Thu, 2008-01-17 23:52.

Fluid layouts with constraints to keep things readable is really the way to go, it's just too bad it's so much work with current HTML standards/technology.
Fixed-width (mainly of the 800 ish variety) is years out of date IMO. Most of my clients haven panels that are minimum 19" LCD's.

natobasso: I really don't see how readability is a factor at all with larger and wider website resolutions. With a larger canvas comes different design considerations. It's just a bigger format to apply the same design principals to. I've haven't seen a recent study showing that 800x600 is still an optimal fixed resolution to design for. I would even argue there's many 800x600 sites which present usability issues on large displays, since the designers usually choose smaller default font sizes.

Tadams: Thanks for the kind words. Glad you like the site.

Again, I'm not talking about

Submitted by natobasso on Fri, 2008-01-18 15:45.

Again, I'm not talking about screen resolution but the actual distance a person's eyes have to go on a line of text before it gets tired. And I'm not linking 800px of text legibility with screen res. You are.

If you stretch text across wider than an 800px area you are going to lose visitors due to the difficulty they will have tracking and reading your text. Your site doesn't seem to have this problem as far as live content goes, so good on you.

The idea that the human eye can only read so far left to right is not an idea that is ever going to go out of style. And the W3 still considers the 800x600 model to be the standard:
http://www.w3schools.com/site/site_users.asp

Just because you haven't seen any recent research doesn't mean it doesn't exist! Your graphic only represents your audience which appears to be on the high end of things, but I don't think your users are average.

Just because you have a ton of real estate doesn't mean you have to use it. You do have to use it wisely, and that's what I still think you have done. So good job!
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Powerpoint is not a design application
My latest web design work

Not to beat a dead horse

Submitted by Tadams on Wed, 2008-01-30 21:57.

Not to beat a dead horse natobasso, but you're really misinformed..

I don't know if you've noticed, but the page you link to is VERY outdated, as it mentions Netscape and Microsoft. Netscape has been gone for a long time now (years in all actuality) so it is very apparent that the page has not been updated in quite a long time.

Also if you click the link on that very page to look at resolutions you will find the following quote "What you can read from the statistics below is that most users are using a display with 1024x768 pixels or more, with a color depth of at least 65K colors." And you'll find it was last updated in January of 2007... If in January of 2007 they found the majority of users (>75% in this case) were higher than 800 X 600, I'm pretty sure a safe bet now adays is that that number is much higher.

Also I'm not sure why you keep insisting about "studies show the eyes moving great than an 800 pixel difference causes strain" etc... That makes absolutely no sense. Yes studies have shown that 100% width content pages on large monitors DO make writing harder to read, and that fixed width content is better, but saying over 800 pixels as far as I'm concerned has no foundation, and if an article was written that says that, it was probably > 5 years ago and holds no merit now adays.

Think about it.. If you're saying most users still use 800 X 600 (one you're wrong) but even still, that would mean they are reading content that stretches across the entire screen no matter what size monitor they have, 15, 17, 19 etc.. Let's just say 17 inches... If you design a site at 800 X 600 but the user is running greater (which IS the case in the majority now adays) the content displayed most likely is actually appearing in a space actually SMALLER than the 17inches previously.. Therefore it would make it HARDER to read... Users are using higher resolution monitors now, and sites using 800 X 600 designs are far outdated and in many cases provide more usability issues then sites designed with larger fonts and going to the 1024 area.

Also I'm not sure why you

Submitted by natobasso on Thu, 2008-01-31 16:50.

Also I'm not sure why you keep insisting about "studies show the eyes moving great than an 800 pixel difference causes strain" etc... That makes absolutely no sense.

If this doesn't make sense to you then you've obviously never taken a graphic design course before. It's standard curriculum.

While the article may be old, Netscape only just recently stopped support for its browser entirely. It's limped on for years now. :)

And you're still missreading me on the 800x600 thing. Go back and read my posts again to make sense of what I said; it's not that hard! The eye can only track so far, no matter what the medium. This is a proven fact, and this data is not out of date, and I am not misinformed.

The data shown in this post for screen resolution is for this person's website, not the internet as a whole. Thouth I am pretty sure the average person doesn't have a 19-21" monitor, worldwide, this point is not central to my argument of legibility (the dead horse we're talking about) because the human eye can only 'comfortably' read so far before it tires.

Why is this so confusing?

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Powerpoint is not a design application
My latest web design work