Would appreciate some feedback on this (draft) webpage .

There are some debates as to whether the video slideshow (under ‘UWE in pictures’) adds any value.

In preliminary testing many users weren’t aware of it and never used it. What do you think? should they link off to seperate pages with the video or do you like the idea of opening up the videos in the same page?

Any feedback on the page also appreciated

I like it – it is a fresh looking page and clearly well designed. I have NOT functionally or user reviewed it – just first impressions of the design.

I do think that the two user-driven animations are a bit lame though – either animate it or make i clear there is something to click. The tiny arrows are so small as to be unclear as to what they are. I had no idea I could see a slideshow until I read your instruction.

But a lovely design.

it seems squashed over to the left on my 22in monitor. would be better centered like STW.

Yep, I’d go with MrSmiths suggestion to centre it body {margin:auto} should sort it.

And you’ve got an closing */ in your carousel.css (below #flash) that is throwing a warning in Firefox. And I’d suggest pulling the .js files into the head section if I was being picky…..

Think the slideshow needs some more obvious buttons for the slider, it’s not apparent that you can move them – many carousels have an auto function, maybe making it do one circle of the options would inform the user they could scroll.

I’m not keen on pulling the movies into the main page, personally I’d go off to a “movies” page but that’s personal and as long as the movies are only pulled in once the user clicks then it’s not really an overhead, it’s not as if the page is too heavy.

Nice page though. Looks good.

Cheers for the feedback.

Breatheasy> It’s better to include JS at the bottom of the page as it allows the page to render faster

“The HTTP/1.1 specification suggests that browsers download no more than two components in parallel per hostname. If you serve your images from multiple hostnames, you can get more than two downloads to occur in parallel. While a script is downloading, however, the browser won’t start any other downloads, even on different hostnames.

“…With scripts, progressive rendering is blocked for all content below the script. Moving scripts as low in the page as possible means there’s more content above the script that is rendered sooner.”

http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#js_bottom

From an aesthetic point of view, I think it looks really good. Nice, simple, uncluttered layout, simple, stylish graphics, and just formal enough, without losing it’s ‘friendliness’, if that makes sense. I like the powerful eye-catching image of the rocket car; like having the blingest bike in the shop window. Nice font on that, too.

I’d personally like to see the UWE logo a bit bigger. But that’s ‘cos I think logos are important!

I like the video bit, where it ‘pops’ up slowly. It does not in any way intrude on the page in a negative way. If you have it open, and you click on the other video, it does not in any way then want to close. FF on Mac.

‘bettertogether’ logo is nice, but again, make biggerer.

S’all right, is that.

seems fine to me if squished to the edge of my screen

Looks great, and it’s well coded.

Only thing for me was, I had to look to the page title in the browser to find out what UWE stood for.

SB

In my browser, Firefox on Linux, the #main content is centred and is pushing the #rightcol down. Can’t see from the css, using Firebug, what might be causing this as it appears you want the #main to float left and the #rightcol to float right – appears to be caused by the ‘Open Days’ link in the nav bar above it which drops down probably due to the widths of the three list elements.. Also the containing div, #content?, does not extend down to include the floated #main and #rightcol divs.

Don’t have time to check further.

Mike

Cheers for the feedback guys.

TJ> Addressing that this week (reason being we rolled out this new design and still had the old design running in parallel which had the navigation butted to the left)

We’re going to also address the buttons used to scroll to the different images