Well I just finished a re-design of my site and I was wondering if you could review it. I can take critisicm as long as it's constructive. And I know about how many errors come up on W3 validation and I currently porting to an external CSS and fixing the errors. The website is ZPGamez. If you do decide to look at it, then thanks. I really appreciate it.

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It was ok the moment I changed my resolution to 1024x768, and that begins the design problems I can see. first you need to optimize the website at 1024x768 because thats the standard resolution for practically everyone. As for browsers make sure when coding for IE that you stick with IE6 because what looks good in IE7 doesn't look good in IE6. Make sure to run it through a validation to clean up some simple errors as well (count is at 40).

First thing you need to fix is the size of the website because it is breaking the horizontal scrollbar, so you will want to make your left and right boxes just a tad smaller along with your main content box so everything will fit.

With your header I like that roll over effect especially for the reflection so I will be stealing that coding right there. Now for the banner itself you got to many images especially on the bottom half; basically everything below the reflection will be one image up to the point of of the giant Z, and the same thing above it.

It would look like this roughly:



That will cut down on the load time for the website just a bit, also for the glass effect lighting that layer just a little bit more.

As for your left and right columns get rid of the Iframes and just use a solid background color, because the frames are making your image dividers look short.

You on a good start just plenty of cleaning that needs to be done, but getting there.

 

 

 

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The design is good, but there are quite a few little bugs that need to be ironed out. First, the member login box is slightly wider than anything else for some reason. It's only a few pixels out, but it makes the background repeat and looks a little odd.



The shoutbox does a similar sort of thing - the scrollable box sticks out past the width of the column down the left hand side. The background image also repeats, putting a random border through the middle of the shoutbox every so often (see the picture for an example).



The slight horizontal scrolling of the entire page is also slightly annoying, especially when it isn't actually scrolling anywhere.

Last, but by no means least - my scrollbars! Not only have you decided you want to change how my browser looks, but you've made them black buttons with black symbols against a black background - you can't see them! Personally I would take out the code that is setting the scrollbar colours completely. It serves only to annoy people - they don't expect the GUI of their operating system to match the design of your website.

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Well thanks you two. I've written down everything and I'm going to start fixing everything tonight. I have a widescreen monitor so when I shrank down my resolution I saw how unbelieveibly messed up everything was. So thanks again.

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Yeah thats the worse problem though if your designing in a widescreen and get yourself use to it, and when you have to adjust your screen to that small resolutions it just hurts your eyes, and of course you have spend even more time with it. Of course thats the magic of CSS though if your code is clean then once you get it right in 1024x768 then just making edits at your normal resolution and it won't break your design. Thats of course if you go with a fluid design, but hte same can be applied to a fixed layout as well, but go with the fixes and see what shows up after you go through them.

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Well it looks nice however, there are things that might be corected. firstly of all the two columns don't fit into design in my very personal oppinion. And you should correct them as soon as possible they have tendention to jump out and you should make it fit more into the black and blue colors of your site because gray somehow doesn't fit in really it does not. And another things start it as soon as possible because many people now just come and see and leave you cannot get any real feedback.

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and thank you too. I think I'm just going to go flat black on the columns and I've been planning on adding feedback option for a while, but there's a difference between planning and doing.

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The design of the site looks nice, I like its dark style. I think it would look better if you make the header take up 100% of the page width space. Try setting a repeating background and make that div 100% width. Also, the footer on the bottom is not centered, it looks kind of akward. I really like the image of the subtitles (the one that says member login, shoutbox, site stats, etc.) it looks really good.

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Thank you as well, all these suggestions, are wow. So overall I suppose I should make my site much more dynamic, easier said then done, I'm afraid.

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