Two Websites I'm currently working on...

ShaneRounce

Junior Member
Forgive the various links, I work under a few different companies. kind of a word-of-mouth contract as a freelancer with each one.

Anyway, I'm currently working on the following 2 websites.

foodplea.se
This one's for xDesign365, for whom i do most of my work. It;s a website for an iPhone app we're currently developing, which i assure you, is shaping up to be something pretty awesome. :D
Custom CMS for this one.
foodplea.se


Kudos Group
This one's via another company, who I do work for occasionally. It's for a group of building contractors.
Wordpress for this one.
Kudos Group | Just another WordPress site


Neither are finished as of yet but I think they're looking pretty good sa far.


Opinions?
 
Hi Shane, Im not a web designer so Im looking at them from more of a visual point of view.

The foodplea.se website looks very slick, lots of gradients and shiny bits, but it doesnt really say food to me. I understand the concept of the app and it sounds like a good idea (altho it has been done so many times before) but although the site is very visually appealing it doesnt tell me at first glance what kind of subject matter the app is related to. Did you consider using images of food/restaurants/chefs/hungry customers etc to reinforce your message?

As for the Kudos Group site, again it looks very slick, obviously you have a particular style that your work adheres to (which is not a bad thing, I just thought the 2 sites looked very similar when they are infact for 2 completely different, unrelated businesses). The other thing that struck me straight away is that your slideshow is maybe 2-3 seconds too quick as it skips through the images. I just started to look at an image and see some of the detail on the shot and it changed before I had chance to process what I was looking at,

My only other point is that the Kudos Group calls itself a friendly family run business but to me the site is quite clincial, professional, business like but not friendly and not family orientated. They sound like a very warm, friendly company yet you have used silvers and blacks with bevels and gradients which gives the complete opposite message in terms of the look and feel of the site.
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WASHINGTON DISPENSARIES
 
davewill said:
Hi Shane, Im not a web designer so Im looking at them from more of a visual point of view.

The foodplea.se website looks very slick, lots of gradients and shiny bits, but it doesnt really say food to me. I understand the concept of the app and it sounds like a good idea (altho it has been done so many times before) but although the site is very visually appealing it doesnt tell me at first glance what kind of subject matter the app is related to. Did you consider using images of food/restaurants/chefs/hungry customers etc to reinforce your message?

As for the Kudos Group site, again it looks very slick, obviously you have a particular style that your work adheres to (which is not a bad thing, I just thought the 2 sites looked very similar when they are infact for 2 completely different, unrelated businesses). The other thing that struck me straight away is that your slideshow is maybe 2-3 seconds too quick as it skips through the images. I just started to look at an image and see some of the detail on the shot and it changed before I had chance to process what I was looking at,

My only other point is that the Kudos Group calls itself a friendly family run business but to me the site is quite clincial, professional, business like but not friendly and not family orientated. They sound like a very warm, friendly company yet you have used silvers and blacks with bevels and gradients which gives the complete opposite message in terms of the look and feel of the site.

You make fair points and I have explanations for both.

The foodplease site was based on a cutting board style concept I sketched up. Though I removed the knife from the board in later stages of the design process because it didn't look friendly enough.
I have purposely not use any images of food as the app covers everything from italian restaurants to chinese takeaways. There's no simple way to cover every type of cuisine and I don't really like using stock photos of things. We will, however have user generated content around te site hen the app goes live. So photos of places/food will be uploaded and shown in feeds and search results, this should give it more of a food-feel.
For now we just wanted it to be visually stunning. :)

The Kudos Group site. Well, I'm just following their specifications based on examples they said they liked, logos they showed me and colours they suggested. One of those "the customer is always right" type of situations I guess. I just took their brief and did my best with it. Though it obviously still needs content.
 
I'm just going to say that I thought foodplea.se was actually a charity site until you see the iphone etc.

the prominence of the name and lack of any real info about the site/app leaves it open to interpretation
 
Levi said:
I'm just going to say that I thought foodplea.se was actually a charity site until you see the iphone etc.

the prominence of the name and lack of any real info about the site/app leaves it open to interpretation
Yeah, I'm still waiting on any content being written up. All the stuff there right now is what I just came up with, on the fly.

We went with the name like that cause we have http://www.foodplea.se and loads of other apps have fun unique names too.
 
wac said:
Yes I thought it was a rather clever play on words charity site
Think of "food please" as the user asking where to find food, not as a homeless person begging for it.
I don't really think that many homeless people own smartphones anyway. With the exception of one I've met, who had a Blackberry. :S
 
davewill said:
Did you consider using images of food/restaurants/chefs/hungry customers etc to reinforce your message?

ShaneRounce said:
I have purposely not use any images of food as the app covers everything from italian restaurants to chinese takeaways. There's no simple way to cover every type of cuisine and I don't really like using stock photos of things

How about matching illustrations of table top items? like cutlery/chopsticks/plates, etc?

Levi said:
I'm just going to say that I thought foodplea.se was actually a charity site until you see the iphone etc.

the prominence of the name and lack of any real info about the site/app leaves it open to interpretation

wac said:
Yes I thought it was a rather clever play on words charity site

As the guys have said, I think it's the breakdown of the word please using the domain extension, which leaves it open to being read as 'Food Plea'. As Levi says the iPhone visual makes it more obvious, so how about bringing that further up the page? Or drop the logo size so that the text line explaining the product/app becomes more prominent?

I like the colour scheme, just not sure how the background wood image fits in, at first glance I thought it was going to be a table top, but then it repeats down and fades out, so guess it's purely aesthetic?

My only quick bit of feedback for the Kudos site is the navigation text is quite tricky to read with the CSS text-shadow, personally I would try a darker text-shadow (#999?) so that it makes the navigation clearer.

Hope some of that helps!?
Greg
 
ShaneRounce said:
Think of "food please" as the user asking where to find food, not as a homeless person begging for it.
but we shouldn't have to think what the site is about, the title which is very much the emphasis when you load the page (especially on smaller screens) implies that the site is for something like food for africa or similar.

I see the title as Food Plea, SE not food please
 
Greg said:
How about matching illustrations of table top items? like cutlery/chopsticks/plates, etc?
Valid point. I did experiment with trying to make a wine glass and some cutlery, turns out I'm not so good at getting the perspective right though. Not to say it's something that we can't add in future.
I still think we're a good month off getting this launched yet anyway.

Greg said:
As the guys have said, I think it's the breakdown of the word please using the domain extension, which leaves it open to being read as 'Food Plea'. As Levi says the iPhone visual makes it more obvious, so how about bringing that further up the page? Or drop the logo size so that the text line explaining the product/app becomes more prominent?
I'll try experimenting with the logo at some point. And i should probably bring up the naming issue with the other guys. We've had quite a few people look at it so far, you're the only ones that seemed to read it that way. Most people read it as one word, kind of. Cheers anyway.

Also, I think that a lot of the people visiting will have heard of the app before, from reviews on other sites and stuff. It's not a site we expect people to randomly stumble across. If they do, they're probably not looking for the app anyway.

Greg said:
I like the colour scheme, just not sure how the background wood image fits in, at first glance I thought it was going to be a table top, but then it repeats down and fades out, so guess it's purely aesthetic?
Think of it as a fat ass chopping board or table. Though, yes, it's mostly aesthetic.

Greg said:
My only quick bit of feedback for the Kudos site is the navigation text is quite tricky to read with the CSS text-shadow, personally I would try a darker text-shadow (#999?) so that it makes the navigation clearer.
Hmm, #999 didn't really show any drop shadow at all.
How about #CCC?
Here's an example, it's much fainter than the original shadow but still has some prominence.
content


Greg said:
Hope some of that helps!?
Greg
haha, well no feedback is bad feedback. And people are always going to have their differences. Much appreciated though.
 
ShaneRounce said:
Hmm, #999 didn't really show any drop shadow at all.
How about #CCC?
Here's an example, it's much fainter than the original shadow but still has some prominence.
content

Yep that's looking much better to me, much easier to read IMO.

ShaneRounce said:
haha, well no feedback is bad feedback. And people are always going to have their differences. Much appreciated though.

For sure, part of the thinking behind the DF slogan 'it's subjective' :)
 
Greg said:
I'm guessing the name, FoodPlea.se might be out of your control?
Not totally, though me and the other guys all like it.

And I tend to idiot test things with my mother, she seemed to like the name.

I guess it all depends on how much of a charity oriented person you are? If I see the word "plea" I tend to thing that at first, someone misspelt the word "flea", then again, I have cats.

Though the words "plea" and "please" are pretty closely related anyway. So it could either mean a "plea for a place to find food" or "please, could you tell me where I could find food". They're pretty much the same thing.
I guess more of an emphasis needs to be put on the eating out and restaurant experience. Hopefully that'll come when user content starts coming in anyway, though I'll look into some cutlery for sure. :p
 
Greg said:
Yep that's looking much better to me, much easier to read IMO.
Yeah, cool. Well this is hopefully going live early this week. Well, as soon as I receive payment, so I still have a day or two to change things round.

I often don't have time to get feedback on things from others as I'm knocking sites out in a couple of days usually. (Some poor, some brilliant. Depends on the client's forced design input and whether or not they are reasonable people.) I'll certainly post more things here in future though. :)

Great community you got going on Greg. ;)
 
ShaneRounce said:
Not totally, though me and the other guys all like it.

And I tend to idiot test things with my mother, she seemed to like the name.

I guess it all depends on how much of a charity oriented person you are? If I see the word "plea" I tend to thing that at first, someone misspelt the word "flea", then again, I have cats.

Though the words "plea" and "please" are pretty closely related anyway. So it could either mean a "plea for a place to find food" or "please, could you tell me where I could find food". They're pretty much the same thing.

That's cool, but I think you should ask the question who will be using the app? Is it likely to be your mother?

To me the whole emphasis of a question, eg. plea or please? indicates a lack of food, 'please Sir may I have some more', where as for this type of app, I would be thinking more along the lines of Top Table, so playing with the reservations/bookings trail of thought, but you may be way beyond that stage, so this discussion could all be irrelevant?

ShaneRounce said:
Great community you got going on Greg. ;)

Thanks, we've got a great group of regulars that's for sure (nod)
 
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