Website check

[Padwah]

Just finished a new ASP based blogging software, yeah as if we need another one! Anyway, I was just wandering if any of you guys could take a look at it for me? The websites here: http://www.hostforest.co.uk/ and if you want to have a play around with the back end (fnar, fnar) you can login here: http://www.newforestcurryclub.co.uk/ with Administrator/password. One thing that I know is a bit dodgy is that it falls over every now and again when displaying xml files from some websites, not sure why yet Anyway, let me know what you think

 

[fatbusinessman]

Just a couple of points:

• You mis-spelled “professional”.
• The section headings on the stripey green background are really hard to read (at least on Safari/Mac and Firefox/Mac; I didn't try any other browsers): might be worth shoving the font size up a bit.
• “All categoriess”: another spelling mistake.
• In the comments box, it would help usability to leave the name, e-mail and website boxes blank to start with: the labels already say what they are, you needn't point it out again. It just gives the user an extra something to delete once they're there.

Other than that, looks good. If you're feeling up for it, the calendar would be so much cooler with some Ajax-y goodness plugged into it.

 

[Padwah]

Cheers for taking a look fatbusinessman and damn my ineffectual spelling skills! I'll probably either bump up the font size in the main menu or stick it in bold to make it stand out more, or maybe try a more contrasting colour. As for the comments I see what you mean, I usally empty the text boxes on focus with javascript, no idea why I didn't this time. Will get on it later

As for ajax, well one thing at a time

 

[SheepCow]

Popup windows make me want to hurt you (clicking on thumbnails), but I am glad that when I middle click (open in new tab) I get the page and not some javascript

 

[Moo]

very nice, like the design too

 

[Padwah]

Cheers for the input guys I'd love to take all the credit for the design but its heavily inspired by Plain on OSWD. As for the new windows, that's a personal preference of mine, probably not the best idea for something that I'm going to release!

 

[Maljonic]

I know nearly nothing about ASP and ASP.NET, but on first impressions I think the site looks very good.

In fact I was going to look into learning ASP and ASP.NET but someone here told me not to bother. Strangely enough I spent 3 hours with someone yesterday at a software company talking about their ASP-run CMS, they're hoping I can help make it look a bit nicer as their main expertise is with backend production.

I didn't have a clue what he was talking about half the time, but then I lost him when I was talking about layout style and templates etc.

 

[Moo]

i personally do not like asp.

I do everything in perl.

Each to his own, however

and like i said, i like the design.

 

[Padwah]

I only like ASP as that's the first ever scripting language that I learnt and I've been working with it for ages. I've only recently started working with .NET, it's a bit confusing as it's totally different to vanilla ASP but it's looking pretty powerfull so far.

 

[Shovel]

I spent 3 hours with someone yesterday at a software company talking about their ASP-run CMS, they're hoping I can help make it look a bit nicer as their main expertise is with backend production.

I didn't have a clue what he was talking about half the time, but then I lost him when I was talking about layout style and templates etc.

Obviously both vocabularies have their unique terms, obviously, but .NET also wraps HTML up in its own classes, named based on their similarity to tradition Windows application development. Thus 'labels' (which generate superfluous spans), 'datagrids' (which generate tables) and so on. .NET is kinda designed so that in its out-of-box operation, you're not encouraged to think about the code it generates. Net result is that out-of-box .NET generates shit code. I'll not elaborate further though, else we'll back on Web Professionalism in the wrong thread.

Padwah: The site looks very nice indeed. The text resizes fairly well, which is nice. Only problem is with your horizontal navigation. If I resize the text too much (and not to an unreasonable size), text wraps off the bottom, onto the white background. White text, white background. You could perhaps rework how the background image has been done there, and separate the diagonal lines into the menu background and use CSS borders for the black lines, then the grey gradient can remain where it is.

That way when the menu resizes, so will the background.

I agree with Fatty that you could use a little more contrast on the menu bar text too.

Very nice, though.