Critique my website design

powerss

I was wondering if the kind citizens of H/A could take a look at a recent design endeavor of mine:

http://www.a-k-a.net/newsite/

and give me some advice and critiques. Something just doesn't feel... right about it.

Any tweaks, or opinions would be fantastic.

exoplasm

I think it looks pretty slick!

The only thing I don't like about it is that any pages that require scrolling do not scroll smoothly. At all. It reminds me of going to a random myspace page before I had AdBlock configured. *shudder* But other than that, looks great!

ArbitraryDescriptor

"Welcome" is in a pretty weak Sat red.

Contrast in general is pretty weak. I'm not going to say you have contrast problems, but I have problems with your contrast. The same low saturation red is in the logo, you use a lot of different grey tones, but all very deep in the black end of the spectrum. The tail of the F-22 in the banner just kind of bleeds off into the interface unceremoniously, and incompletely. Neither really work, but I don't think it was the intent.

The only splash of color you really have are the 3 deeper red icons on the right, and the "design" graphic. The design graphic really only stands out because it has green in it, which works contrasts with the red elsewhere however weak. But the green is also pretty muted, as are the blues and yellows. More color, it doesn't have to be light colors, the current scheme is just kind of drab and lifeless.

The other pages look better, and I'm wondering if it isn't the nicer red in those three icons that makes the rest of the red (used throughout) look so dismal on the main page.

Edit: Oh, and the space between Interfaces and Manufacturing is 4px wider than Design and Mfg

Edit2: Its the Design button that throws it all off for me. Its like it hints at something else and never delivers but still winds up out of sync with the theme. When I black it out it looks better.

robaal

Home Products Technology etc. are too dark - not enough contrast for easy readability; actually, that applies more to the lower one - the larger font at the top makes it look OK. Making it bold might also help.

OTOH white text on black background is a bit too much contrast IMO

I find the airplane looks a bit strange because the lower wing was cut out from the image...

khain

I agree with Arbitrary. Also the Latest Press and News box seems weird to me. The top being partway in the picture just makes is look off centered and at first I thought I could drag it or something. Also the search in that box, the white then gray area doesn't work at all in my opinion. Every search box I've ever seen is white and the gray was just confusing especially with the white little bar. Also if you keep gray, gray background with black text is difficult to read. Now looking at it all the boxes you can type in do the white bar then gray typeable area and I just think it looks really weird, either choose gray or go all white.

Also you have two of the exact same row of links on the title (Home, Products, Tech, About, Contact just also seems redundant and slightly weird.

Aikanaro

Will you be replacing the lower set of 'home products technology' etc links with something more relevant to the specific section? Because otherwise I'm not sure what everything above the jet is for -- you could reasonably cut everything above that point out without making a difference to the user experience, as long as you replaced the jet/tank/doctors pictures with the AKA text and logo.

If the lower set of links will be used for something else, then please ignore the above.

tony_important

OK, I'm not a pro at this, but usually, a morons look is sometimes the best one...


Can you make the red icons links to the material as well? I just think that since they stand out so much, people might try to click on them to find out additional stuff...

That's all I've really got for you.

Szechuanosaurus

tony_important wrote:

OK, I'm not a pro at this, but usually, a morons look is sometimes the best one...


Can you make the red icons links to the material as well? I just think that since they stand out so much, people might try to click on them to find out additional stuff...

That's all I've really got for you.

Yeah, the red icons are way more eye-catching and so you naturally gravitate towards them. I'd make the text-links more visible as well, don't hide your navigation.

jclast

At the bottom of the home page, there's that whole "We are the end to end solution" thing. All three of "Design", "Manufacturing", and "Integration" look like they should link somewhere.

It's not enough for a customer to know that AKA integrates things, they're going to want to know why, and the first way they'll try to figure it out is to click on those "links" and think the website is broken.