A little website critique

Ok. Could I ask you guys to take a look at a few designs for my personal company website? We want some opinions so we can get an idea of what featuers we should spend time making better, and whats a good way to go about the main page.

Anyway, here are some links:
Design 1 - This is my one (oh and the menubar will be collapsable too (so if you click on Products it comes down with all the links underneath))
Design 2
Design 3 - This is the one we started doing together, but it started to get over-complex.

Anyway, tell me what ya think of each of them, and of course any other things you think you should be there.

Thanks

EDIT : Bracket nesting

 

i like the second one b/c i have no idea what it says...

i like the first one

 

Ok, fixed design 1 so the text is a bit less distrating

 

The first one is the best out of the three. Try to stay away from black backgrounds.

 

yeah thats better

 

Nice! I like the layout of #1 and the logo graphic on #2

When I clicked #3 I kinof jumped back a little.

On #1 I'm not to sure about the grey, its OK yet I think it could be nicer shade of grey. (there prabably is a song there) Maybe the grey blue from #3. It's a tad lighter with a tint of blue right?

On second look at #1, I would be careful of putting name so far to right as with my window minimized I miss part of the name. And to have to maximize takes valuable time from surfing.

Pages all loaded nice and fast, and works on the Macintosh platform.

 

I vote #2.
Nice, clean code.
Loads fast.

I'm on dial up.

I like lightweight. I think that people on dial-up pay attention to how long it takes to get the site in the browser.

#1 took entirely too long for me.

 

#1 is fine but I do like the logo on #2 better
forget #3

 

I like the looks of number one, the foreign language is a turn-off for me. Loaded fast (all three). I think you need some quick info right off the get go to let folks know what your site is all about. What with the foreign language, at first glance I haven't a clue. Having said that, not all sites are in English are they? At any rate you've done a good job and #1 and #2 have good eye appeal. #3 isn't in the running.

 

the text is just a filler for the site.. it's quite common text too. It helps us web dev's get a feel for a content filled site and how it will look.

 

I agree number 1 is the best of the three, but never mind the pseudo-latin check your English spelling!

 

Could you please tell me how you like my design on my site? It took a while to make...

www.alien-head.tk

 

Haven't looked at either yet, but bear in mind some users want to print the screens out. Black/dark backgrounds use a lot of printer ink. Bazza.

printer friendly versions and/or text only options are good too. Baz

===

 

Doesn't look so good in FireFox..
Too much black..
No container
Intro needs to be taken down a bit..too much going on.
Not enough contrast.

 

I like Number one also... although I think the text size is too large. I'd cut it down to a 10pt font, as most browsers have the ability to scale the fonts up and down. How are you planning to make the menu collapsible? Java? Just curious, it would give you room for another table cell for future expansion

BTW... whatcha think of this? http://unifiedx.com/?styleid=2 I just got done porting the skin for a portal, and think the site is almost ready for public consumption

 

Just out of curiousity... what's the big attraction with Firefox lately? I see people commenting about it everywhere, so I tried it and didn't like it. I just missed the tabbed browser I guess :\

 

Ok!

Well, you say "clean code" but the only one there thats fully W3C complaint is design 1, which is XHTML 1.0 (check HERE), the others arn't.
Oddly enough, the "cleaner code" is actually done by a programmer (my colleague) rather than a web designer (me!), and he doesn't like using too many images, and isn't so good with image editing programs. The thing is its more code than design. But then, thats just my opinion.

I'm glad to hear they work on Macs... thats definatley a plus point especially as we've not actually tested them in any other environments yet. Hopefully that means standards are holding up Also this means I've had to put alt values in for images, so if images aren't shown you should get the alt text and still be able to navigate the website.

Now I've not gone for any optimising of graphics or other stuff yet (as they are just concepts) I bet I can shave a good few KBs off the images. Though, the ones that require lots of images obviously will take longer (more requests to the server...), and therefore can only be optimised to a certain degree.

BTW, I updated design 2 so there are no black borders looks much airier and nicer

 

Everyone's jumping to it because IE has been under public scrutiny over security (like THATS new news) and its the easiest alternative. I happen to like it .... the rendering engine is pretty quick in comparison to others, and is mostly standards compliant.

 

Tabs are available in "Extensions". You add extensions to build Firefox the way you want it. Free!!!

 

i think the first one- easier to read and navigate, imo

 

:O I didn't know that... gonna give it another go then

 

Thanks debbie Appriciate it

Myself I've always used tabbed browsing... I thought it was on by default?

 

I dunno if it's a default feature, but it's definitely NOT on here.. I'm kinda lost. Where do I enable it? There's a whole section of it in the help file too... but no instructions to get it going LOL

 

LOL n/m... I got it

 

Dan, only get grey screen with a very small cube in the upper left. Music comes through but coulnd't find a mute button. This was on a win 98se with IE 5. 15 or more seconds and no change.

 

agreed.

 

I really like the first one Goldy

 

Email contact should be a web form, Goldy.

 

Dan? My name is Desmond lol

BTW, it is a shockwave applet, so maybe you don't have shockwave?

 

impressive. I like it very much...