Pixel Cove Header

[4colourprogress]

Put in a london skyline at the top of the header, I'm not really sure about it thought, what do you think? Yey or Ney?

http://www.pixelcove.co.uk

[egwardo]

i am guessing in an ideal world you would like the website to go global so maybe putting a london skyline might imply it is more of a local thing, you could change the skyline periodaclly to other international skylines.

also i am a bit torn where to look at the image or the header so could be a bit distracting.

hope that helped.

[4colourprogress]

Ideally that would be the idea, I'm just focusing on the UK for time being though. Originally I had the featured picture over the skyline but it made it quite difficult to see. Now that someone has said that it's distracting I think I will move it back up there, thanks Ed

[ALwin]

Hi Chris,

If you're looking for some web design tips, I have a few, only if you don't mind that is

1) As much as the 'Hi, Guest | Register UI' looks nice, it's not really a good idea to keep them as text only and then have a down arrow on the side with a green arrow pointing towards it with the words "Start here!". I say, make the text 'Register' click-able and also add the text 'Login' next to it.

2) Color contrast for visibility: use something like this online tool http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/access ... _tool.html
White text on the cyab/bluish color you're using has only a small contrast ratio. The ratio should be a little higher. Currently it works for the text which use large font sizes but not when the text is small or using very thin lines.

3) I guess I can't complain about the speed of the site transitioning from one page to another, it's a server & bandwidth issue.

4) For pages like Reviews, Tips & Tutorials, etc. it's nice that you have tags for each item, and pagination at the bottom. But I assume you will implement a search feature at some point unless I'm not seeing it if you've already done so. Another thing is to have something what is called Faceted Navigation, perhaps on the right column.

5) I like that you're keeping the navigation consistent and also the use of breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs are important, many web designers forget that these days.

6) Checking out your style sheets, if you declare something like body {font: 62.5%/1em}, this will trick the browser to treat 1em font size as equal to 10px instead of the default 16px. This helps makes font sizes easier to scale using a decimal format. (think of it as how the metric units are easier to scale vs. the imperial units)

For the moment Pixel Cove looks pretty straight forward. I think any newbie to the site would be able to figure things out easily.

Some other tools you might want to use to test the site, they are Firefox add ons
> Firebug, you probably know this one already
> Web developer, you may know this one too
> YSlow, I like this one because I can use it to test for performance issues when I'm developing my sites.

PS: Just performed a YSlow test on your home page, it's telling me you're referencing a lot of CSS and Javascript files. Typically it's better to have fewer JS and CSS files.

[4colourprogress]

Hi Aung! I really appreciate it when people take the time to let me know what they think! So many thanks for the taking the time with that post!

1) I completely 100% agree with making the Hi Guest | Register section clickable.

2) In terms of colour contrasts thats something I'll have to look into as I haven't really given it much thought outside of picking the sites identity.

3) The speed and perfomance issues are going to be looked at after all of the sites functionality are addressed. I am aware of it though, and expansion would depend on how popular the site is, if I get a lot of members I will be forced to switch over to dedicated hosting as my shared host would throw me off lol.

4) The search feature and navigation is next on the list to be looked at

5) In terms of css and js efficiency, again once the sites finished I will be looking at combining all the CSS and JS script files together to help with server load. I also use a CDN to host the CSS and JS files to lighten the load and speed up load times.

I use firebug and I also use http://www.yottaa.com/ for speed and performance but I'll check out the others you mentioned!

Thanks again!