New Library Website

wac

Senior Member
Hi guys I’ve just finished a website. This is my first non-flash based site. The brief was to replace this site and to provide potential visitors to the Library with more information. I would really appreciate some feedback and of you could take a minuet to fill in this survey I will give you a McVities chocolate digestive next time I see you.

The Site


The Survey




Many Thanks
 
Hi Wac,

You've got some good ideas in there, but the execution could be much much better. It looks very unprofessional to be honest.

All the images look like they're just stuck on and not part of the design.

You could try to make them look more like they're part of the website by using textures/adjustment layers etc. so that everything looks organic and more like one unit instead of a page with images that look like they've been cut out very quickly (and poorly) and just chucked in there.

The white background doesn't work with this style I think. Here you could use texture again perhaps, to try and get that 'olde worlde' feel which it looks like you're trying to achieve.

The typography needs a lot of work. This is the most important aspect of web design, yet it seems you have neglected it. In the area below the image you could create some nice typographic work for example. But the rest of the sites typography needs work as well. Try to think of the typography as a design element in itself. Particularly on a library website.

Colours are wrong. Grey and red screams corporate/technology. It's not a bank or similar company you're designing for.

The navigation is a bit lost and could be far more exciting.

Not the best examples as it's not really 50's design you're going for, and something more classic would probably work better for a library, but just to show you what I mean with texture and bold attention grabbing typography and how you could incorporate more of it into your design.

50 Retro and Vintage Web Designs to Inspire You | Inspiration

Hope that helps!
Soren
 
ouch! lol, I'm glad your not the client. I agree the typographic features could use a little work. I tried some alternate backgrounds as I also agree the white inst ideal but I couldn't get a good fit. This is a live brief at Uni so there's about 20 other people working on their own versions of the site. The best one will get picked up as the real site and in the unlikely event its mine I'll definitely look at some of your suggestions which will hopefully improve it. It's certainly better than my first attempt!
 
ok, the cut outs of the menu's seem jaggy, if you can't cut them cleanly look at an alternative way of doing things as on white it will stand out a mile. They're 'detached' from the rest of the design too, you could try moving them down so they look like they're sitting on the top of the site sort of thing.

I've got alignment issues in firefox, it's just a few pixels but once again they stand out being on a white background. There's also a scroll bar causing issues on the bottom section too.

Not keen on the font, seems small and it's not a very crisp font either which doesn't help matters.

You've used flash for some of the page, the slideshow in particular can be done using javascript (plenty of scripts out there if you can't do javascript)

As to the colour scheme, I personally would have been expecting browns, greens, deep reds etc due to the classic 'library' archive books and wooden bookcases - ie a play off of the 'old library' look in the pictures.
 
Hi Levi, cheers for the feedback. Are you talking about the navigation sprites when you say jaggy, because if you are I would be inclined to agree although there was no cutting out involved. I've picked up some alignment issues in some earliy internet explorers but your the first firefox so that will definitely need looking into if the site gets picked up. Most people found the font too small so I'm on that. There's absolutely no point in doing the sideshow in jquery since there is too much image data for 3G anyway and as you noted, there are other features of the site that jquery wouldn't touch but if the site goes live there will be a stripped down mobile device site.

Fill in the survey when you get a mo!
 
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