Personal Site For Review

[FastZ]

I have had this website on a different server for about 5-6 months and just recently moved it to Powweb. Just couldn't pass up the hosting deal this place has.

Anyway, the site is still in its beginning stages. I am new to web design and this is my first attempt at building a site. So bear with me and please hold any harsh comments if any. Eventually, I plan on making it a lot more than what it is now. It'll just take me some time.

I'm looking for some honest feedback on what yall think of what I have and maybe even some recommendations on what I should add or some different layout changes.

http://www.fastz.net/

Oh, the page is just a personal page, nothing fancy yet. It has some pictures and videos on it of my ATV. (I race in local cross country races) I also just added a page devoted to my beloved T-Maxx R/C truck.

[Kazuya_UK]

It's ok... it's your first site so obviously design wise it isn't going to be amazing, but it's a good start. Practice makes perfect anyway, so I'm sure in time you'll be able to improve the layout... the way yours is set out at the moment is actually very similar to the way I made the original design of my website actually.

The only thing I will say is that when I first visit that page, unless I was a friend of yours or had specifically gone to the site for some reason, there is nothing there that really grabs me and makes me think "I'll take a look around here". Although I'm not a fan of overly flashy sites, and prefer simple and effectively laid out ones, I personally feel you need some kind of way on the main page to just grab peoples attention, and explain what the site is about. I'm not sure what (maybe some better designers out there could lend you a hand), but I would definitely play around with that.

I haven't looked at the vids yet, but there are some nice pics on there. Good luck with the site! :)

[Marko Peric]

Not bad at all for a first site. I have a few tips on your photos, though. I don't know what you're using for photo editing, but colour photographs should generally always be in jpeg format, not gif, regardless of size or placement. Jpeg is a file format for photographs, and it compresses photos far better than gif or png.
I noticed right away that the first photo on the main page of your site, which is really a bit too big, is a gif file, and rather grainy. As a jpeg it would look better and take up less disc space, therefore it would be loaded faster. I generally use about 60% compression on photographs, the picture quality is still nice and high without noticeable loss.
In your galleries there are a lot of photos, many of which are really nice. You might want to reduce the size of some of them, since some were much larger than full screen. IE tends to resize pictures that big anyway, and large pictures take longer to load. As well, you use gif files for the thumbnails in your galleries, which is okay on those small pictures, but I'd still recommend jpeg for all photos.

My only other suggestion would be to consider something other than that bright red text colour for your main body text. It's a little hard on the eyes. Apart from that, you've done good job for your first site.

[(jj)]

For a nice looking html photo gallery, you might want to take a look at Web Album (http://www.ornj.net/software/webalbum/). It's free and it not only generates all of your thumbnails, it also generates the html files for the album. Looks nicer and is easier for your visitors to browse through your photos.

[jatticks]

I like how your site is pretty straight to the point easy to navigate. That’s a plus.
Your pictures are way too big and unless the user has broadband they will take too long to download fully to view. The pic on your index page is almost 200kb. You should be able to trim that down to about 50kb and keep good quality.

I like the photo of you on the front page. Did you mean to give it that grainy look? You saved the photo as a .gif not .jpg, hence the textured look. A .gif file is usually great for graphics and text but not pictures as they add that grainy look. If you don’t already have Photoshop Elements you may want to purchase a copy. It will be invaluable if you plan to add more pics to you site.

Looking at the other photos… they are each about 500kb. That’s huge in internet language. These photos you should manage to trim down under 100kb.

I downloaded a Tmaxx video but it wouldn’t play on winamp’s movie function?

I like Brillo the cat!

If this is your first effort… fantastic work!

[FastZ]

I like how your site is pretty straight to the point easy to navigate. That’s a plus.
Your pictures are way too big and unless the user has broadband they will take too long to download fully to view. The pic on your index page is almost 200kb. You should be able to trim that down to about 50kb and keep good quality.

I like the photo of you on the front page. Did you mean to give it that grainy look? You saved the photo as a .gif not .jpg, hence the textured look. A .gif file is usually great for graphics and text but not pictures as they add that grainy look. If you don’t already have Photoshop Elements you may want to purchase a copy. It will be invaluable if you plan to add more pics to you site.

Looking at the other photos… they are each about 500kb. That’s huge in internet language. These photos you should manage to trim down under 100kb.

I downloaded a Tmaxx video but it wouldn’t play on winamp’s movie function?

I like Brillo the cat!

If this is your first effort… fantastic work!


About that picture on the index page. I made it a .gif file one, because I kinda wanted it to have that grainy look to it and two, a .jpg version of the picture at the same exact size would be almost 300kb more than what the .gif is.

I still havent figured out what I am going to do about the videos not playing. I downloaded the MPEG4 codec, have no clue if that is the one that the videos need. I'll work with those sometime and see if I can fix the problem.

I took the videos with a Sony Cyber-shot camera. It saves them as .mpegs.

[jatticks]

okay, I tried it and came up with a verison of your pic. It's a cool and trim 71kb. It still has the grainy look too.

you can compare here
http://lifesessions.com/projects/various/example(71kb).jpg

when you use photoshop (if that is what you have) use the 'save for web' option under 'file'', review the picture and lower the Quality to an acceptable level. Usually you can lower it quite a bit before anyone will know the difference.

I'm not sure why your videos are not playing. .mpegs should work.

[tkbauder]

First I would like you to know that I only know what I like & I do not know all ther offical terms. I have built a site but don't ask me what I did - I just did. So take this as more of a lay woman's view.

I love the picture on the index page. Someone once told me that people should not have to scroll down on the index page-for some reason I agree. Making the pic smaller and maybe moving the "Disclaimer" - "Best viewed at" - and "Last Updated On" under the picture - I just think it would better show off the picture.

The color of the font - red - hurt my eyes & I loose interest fast on things I have a hard time reading. I found this happened where there were paragraphs. Again, the About Me page is a bit long - I would maybe move the picture over & put some of the text beside it to shorten the page. Maybe in the longer pages put the links smaller at the bottom so you don't have to scroll back up to change pages.

The clips - I only have dial up access but the computer was telling me it was going to take 41 minutes to load the first clip so I could view it????

The Guest Book - the regular site links are not there & you have to use the back arrow to go to the other pages. Can it be added?

Over all I liked the site. It is simple & I like that. Your pictures loaded fast & that is a good thing - I am impatient. Nice job

[dangog]

It loaded quick and is well balanced. My primary "complaint" is that the links in blue are very difficult to read on the black back ground. Try another color on the words. dangog

[linnetwoods]

You might want to choose a photo of you, for one of the first the visitor comes across, in which you and the cat don't look as though you were caught in the glare of a spy-catcher's flashlight...
You look as though you probably have a great smile - try and find a photo of you laughing your head off and having a good time to make the visitor want to know what it is that can do that for you...

[FastZ]

Well, after a couple of months, I finally learned a little bit about Cascading Style Sheets and redesigned FastZ's World (http://www.fastz.net). If you guys dont mind taking another look at the site and giving me some feedback, I would greatly appreciate it. For the galleries that I once had, I incorporated Gallery v1.5 which I think is working pretty well for me. Let me know what yall think. Thanks.

Matt

[Maskatay]

Anyway, the site is still in its beginning stages. I am new to web design and this is my first attempt at building a site. So bear with me and please hold any harsh comments if any. Eventually, I plan on making it a lot more than what it is now. It'll just take me some time.
Very well done! loading of pages very good and the gallery is wonderful. You may add meta tags to make it more search engine friendly. I certaily like it.

[Marko Peric]

I like the improvements. I like that you kept that large picture on the front page, but reduced the size. It still gets the message across of what this site is about, but without demanding too much of the viewer's attention.
I also quite like your CSS driven nav menu. I think you'll find that CSS really helps things when you want to make site changes.
I have a few suggestions, though. First, the logo up at the top is pretty hard to read, both because of the font and the colour. More contrast against the background colour would be helpful.
Second, the yellow text against the dark grey background is a little hard to read. You might want to play with line spacing on that, push it to 1.5 and see if that helps. It can often lighten up imposing looking blocks of text.

Keep up the good work,

[Coolviper1985]

a .jpg version of the picture at the same exact size would be almost 300kb more than what the .gif is.


Not always true.

You are probably saving your jpegs as fully uncompressed files while your gifs are compressed by default.

Not really a fair comparison.

If you are using Photoshop try using the save for web feature it is very handy and you can customize your pictures in any format down the kilobyte.

-Lucas