Website pimp

Mongrelman

My new website. I'm flying off to visit my parents in a few hours, so I'll be limited with what I can do in regards to C&C until I'm back at my own computer.

I had a look at doing it in CSS (including going over rick's guide) but I had a bit of trouble understanding it, so just whacked it together the way I knew how over the past day or two.

www.mongrelman.com

Now to get me a job

Uly

Your work looks nice Lupus, but the website is lacking.

You should look into changing all your fonts, the header font and "thumbnail" fonts are far too gritty and hard to understand. Find a simple looking font that's easier to read. Your contact fonts and toolbar fonts look simply like Andy Serif from Word and some *really* generic font that looks... Well, really generic. Try to follow a rule 2-3 fonts maximum, and all of these fonts should be easy to understand, and well sized in contrast with eachother.

Colour scheme. Baby blue vs. 'WTF' Brown vs. Beige. Plan this out in advance, keep it simple, and keep it attractive. Look at the colour wheel and try and decide upon a good scheme, the fewer colours the better.

Layout. Way too busy, your site 'barely' fits on the standard 1024 width, and afterwards has no negative space for the eyes to rest. Just like with art, 'empty' space is a virtue. People need to look at blank(er) areas every now and then. Shrink your thumbnails. Thumbnails are called thumbnails for a reason. They should be tiny, but should give people an idea of what they're going to be looking at.

Watermark your renders. If somebody saves an image on to their hard drive in a hurry, and looks at it on a later date, there's a good chance he/she will forget where they got it from in the first place.

On the toolbar, what the heck does CV mean? If you're going to use acronyms, make sure they're general ones that everyone can understand.
: ) Also have your resume downloadable in a .doc format if you're actively applying to developers, chances are they'll want a printed copy if you score an interview.

W3 Validation. Nobodies code is perfect, (Unless you're a communist.) But make an effort to clean up as many errors as you can using W3.org's html validator. I looked up your site and you've got 12 errors. Which is a pretty good amount really, I've seen far worse. If you don't have the greatest understanding of website coding yet, like me, using a bit of redundant code here and there should be alright until you learn a more powerful language like CSS.

Again, sorry to be harsh, but you have some really nice work, and it'd be a pity if you didn't show it off in the nicest way possible.

Asthane

Mostly I agree, but:

[ QUOTE ]
On the toolbar, what the heck does CV mean? If you're going to use acronyms, make sure they're general ones that everyone can understand.

[/ QUOTE ]

CV stands for Curriculum Vitae and is common use by crazy brits to refer to what us rebellious colonials tend to call a resume ;P

Uly

My mistake. I apologize, and you should disregard that particular comment. : )

Por@szek

[ QUOTE ]
Mostly I agree, but:

[ QUOTE ]
On the toolbar, what the heck does CV mean? If you're going to use acronyms, make sure they're general ones that everyone can understand.

[/ QUOTE ]

CV stands for Curriculum Vitae and is common use by crazy brits to refer to what us rebellious colonials tend to call a resume ;P

[/ QUOTE ]

LOL, u are my master atm , haha.

Lupus, great site. Clean and easy to read. If U made it for job hunting u have the contract in Ur pocket. keeping thumbs for ya man

Michael Knubben

I'd suggest changing the title of the page as well.
It might not matter a great deal when they're allready on your page, but any bit can help.

Mongrelman

Thanks for the crits all, I'll see if I can get the software I need onto this comp to make some fixes.

@Uly: Are you referring to the size of the thumbnails on all the pages, or just the main page?

I'll also add the americanese translation of CV

Cheers Por

@MightyPea: Do you mean change the title of the site to 'mongrelman' and have my name an email under it?

seankaremaker

The main thing that jumped out at me immediately about your site is that you haven’t used grouping to unify elements on your page and I would really suggest that you use some alignment of the various buttons and images on your site.
I also agree that having a good amount of interesting negative space can do wonders for the professionalism of your site and also its functionality and readability.
Personally I usually stick to using a maximum of two fonts on something like this one that you could use for headlines and larger text and one that you could use for body text and smaller size text that would embody the feeling of the larger font but is more functional and readable as a block of text. Fantastic work you have there though.

hawken

its all a bit big

I don't want to scroll on the landing page just to see previews.

MoP

Really nice models, but you could present them more concisely (as has been suggested already).

Basically I'd say:
- Make the huge font with the model names about 10% of it's current size, and place it under or above the thumbnail rather than alongside it.
- Then you should be able to line all of the thumbnail images up, they're a good size already, they just need to all be in the same place, scrolling down that much is bad. I think it'd look better to have them all consolidated into 2-3 rows of images, then everyone can click around quickly.
- Lose the blue glow behind the title font, it looks 1990s and quite cheap, also it means you've aliased the edges of your name and title, which contrasts with the nice antialiased edges of your thumbnail text.

Nice stuff though, just tweak the layout and font sizes, unify the font style and colour scheme, and it should be perfect

Mongrelman

Cheers all.

I think I've incorporated all the suggestions (including the translation of CV into americanese ). The 'download resume' link isn't working for some reason (works fine when I preview the page from dreamweaver, but not on the actual site). I'm also trying to get the blackmesasource.com bit in my resume to act as a url link but am unsure as to how to code that in.

MoP

Yeah, much better image layout now!
Not sure why you made the "www.mongrelman.com" text so big on the title, surely you want your name to be more prominent, since any visitors will already be at the site, so they'll know the address but not your name?

To get the blackmesasource.com thing to work as a link, just use this:
<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>
<a href="http://www.blackmesasource.com">blackmesasource.com</a&gt;
</pre><hr />

Also to get your resume link working, just make sure the resume.txt is in the right folder on your FTP, it seems that the file doesn't exist online, maybe you forgot to upload it?

Good stuff though. Couple more tweaks if you feel like it to make it more coherent IMHO, although it's probably fine now.

Mongrelman

Cheers, just found the problem for the download link, I had the code all lower case, but the folders on the server started with capitals <smacks head>.

Also tweaked the title a bit as suggested.

Em.

That looks way better, it's nice to not have to scroll to see all the thumbnails, as suggested. It does your work more justice, as it deserves. The only thing I would say is to make the mongrelman.com title a bit smaller still in comparison to your name, but that's just personal preference. Best of luck in the job search.

Rick Stirling

You email address is non-clickable.

Uly

Edit: Doubting what I claimed earlier.

Keep up the good work! Looking much better!