Website Design Reviews

Rei Do Gado

Posted in Cool Graphics Design | July 14th, 2007 Comments Off

www.reidogado.net is the web site for a steak house out in San Diego, CA called Rei Do Gado Brazilian Steak House. The website is used to explain the steak house’s theme and origins, give a list of the different kinds of meat they use in their meals (17 different kinds!), display their menu, and more.

The site itself uses a combination of Flash and HTML. Flash implementation is used for the navigation buttons and the underlying image/slide show. Rolling over the Flash buttons brings a fork driving down into the button providing for a unique presentation. While reviewing this site I found myself going back to the site to simply run the cursor across the buttons just to see the flurry of forks come down (strange, I know, but give it a try you won’t regret it). The images in the slideshow under the navigation buttons give a thorough look at various aspects of the steak house. You see the interior of the restaurant, the entrees, the unique serving method of their meat, etc. The slideshow acts as a simple tour of their establishment giving you a taste of what to expect from your dining experience there.

The overall layout of the site is clean and easy to read through. The color scheme used is equally clean. There are no colors offensives to the eye, nothing too vibrant or jumping of the screen at you. Just simple, dark colors that relax the eye. While plenty of websites have a color scheme that could compete with the sun for a blindness olympiad, this one keeps things simple and almost monochromatic. There is a nice contrast between the backgrounds and the content. The user’s eye is first drawn to the slideshow, enticing them to dive deeper into the web site, and then slowly pulled downward to the body text area. A simple concept of design but one that is often implemented poorly.

Design elements are taken from the restaurant and menu items. The background is made to appear as a table cloth and the content area appears as if it were a menu (sort of an imaginative leap to see it but its there). Absolutely everything used to style the web site is taken from the restaurant. The only way to take this concept further would be to have the entire site be built into a page turning user interface, making the entire site into an interactive menu. The text is nicely laid out and is easy to read. Resizing the text does not cause the design to fall apart so that is a plus for any user with a higher default font setting than normal.

I do have a few small problems with the site. Well, not really problems, just nitpicking and wishing really. So much effort was put into the forks coming down when a button is rolled over so because of that I would love to see some sort of Flash solution to the body copy. Either have a page turn effect like I mentioned earlier or perhaps have the text fall down from the area that the slideshow is in. Also, I would like the site to have some music playing, perhaps something from the restaurant or music native to the roots of the culture behind the restaurant. To me, the music would complete the user’s experience on the web site.

To sum it all up, www.reidogado.net is a terrific website. Interesting navigation, clean layout, thoughtful graphics, and mouth watering food. I would love to see any future revision of this web site, hopefully using elements similar to the ones I mentioned wanting to see.

Presentation Junkie

Posted in Cool Graphics Design | July 5th, 2007 No Comments »

Presentation Junkie www.presentationjunkie.com provides presentation creation services using everything from PowerPoint to Flash. They provide various design services as well. They not only provide a service to potential clients, they also help inform viewers of their website about different advancements in their particular industry. The web site is still young (launched in June of this year) so their blog and FAQ section don’t really provide much information right now. From the way they appear to handle their web site I’m sure that when they gets things running smoothly. www.presentationjunkie.com will be a valuable resource for people looking to have a presentation made or learn about presentation in general on their own.

The look of the site is governed solely by CSS. That’s right, pure beautiful CSS, meaning it’s standards compliant and therefore a good example of standards based web design for anyone looking to become a web designer. Looking at the web site as a web designer big on CSS design, I’m most impressed by the style sheet used on the web site. Different styles pertaining to different parts of the web site are sectioned off with comments telling anyone viewing it what each block of styles affects. The HTML is written in the same manner, using comments to show what each part of the code affects. This is one web site I would show to anyone interested in learning web design because the designer took the time to mark off what his/her code does.

t first glance the web site looks kind of small sitting in its little container on the homepage. But then once you go to different sections, it blossoms and expands filling with information. The web site sports a little bit of a web 2.0 look and does so successfully. I love the use of rounded corners all throughout the site.

The layout is very traditional and safe but it works. Users with smaller monitors won’t have to do much scroll¬ing around to find what they’re looking for at all. The navigation is easy to find and pages are easy to read through. The text size is comfortable throughout the site and the font is clean and very readable. The only problem with the site’s text content is that when a user manually resizes the text the design falls apart slightly. It would be perfect if more consideration was put into the text resizing.

One part of the site I feel is particularly noteworthy is the FAQ page. The way the information is presented is beautiful! Questions are shown in long buttons and pressing them reveals the answer. It’s a clever way of fitting a lot of info into a small space and ensuring that the user doesn’t have to wade through useless information just to get to what he/she wants.

This site is fantastic on several levels. Great service, attractive design, and intuitive content handling with the FAQ. The site would be perfect if it weren’t for that one flaw of the design breaking when text is resized but other than that www.presentationjunkie.com is one site that is worth your time to visit.

San Isidro Properties

Posted in Clean & Simple | June 28th, 2007 No Comments »

San Isidro Properties sanisidroproperties.com is a real estate website offering its services to people living in, or hoping to live in, San Isidro and has been of service to several customers since 1991. Along with their impressive service and customer satisfaction comes a website with a good appearance.

The site has a nice simple layout. Nothing is more complicated than it has to be and that greatly helps the visitor’s experience. It makes use of a traditional 2 column fixed width layout and does so with a clean, organized approach. Navigation links are easily accessible so users don’t have to search for a way to get to a certain section, which is something that simply is not taken into account with several websites. The content of the website is presented in a nicely readable fashion, although users with impaired vision might have difficulty reading text with the small font size used.

The actual design of the site isn’t anything truly remarkable but, it’s one of the better looking real estate sites. The large header image does a lot towards making this site stand out: It’s a massive shot of exactly what the customer would be getting through sanisidroproperties.com. When someone visits this site the first thing they see is the beautiful scenery that they could potentially have for themselves. The scenery lends itself to the surrounding design elements as well. The blues and pinks used throughout the site all work together in harmony with the header image to provide a uniform design where not one element stands out from the others.

My only problem with the site is on the technical side: it uses a table based layout. While it is a simple method of web design, it is not the best and it slows down page loads slightly. However, the design of the site is simple enough so that the page loads aren’t unbearable. A complex layout would have taken quite some time to load but thankfully the simplicity saved sanisidroproperties.com.

All in all, this is a neat looking site. With a little work it could look and operate a little better but for what it is and what it is meant to do it’s more than fine.

FreeForums

Posted in Elegant Design | April 26th, 2007 No Comments »

www.freeforums.org offer a great service to those who are looking for a place to host their forum free of charge. With only few steps you will have your own forum ready to roll on.

Beside of their great service they have a nice eye catching graphic design. This site is about a free service so the webmaster did a good job to make sure that the visitor will not miss that point. They domain name is very clear and been used in a smart way in the header. The website name is burned in the visitor mind along with its message: we are dealing with forums and its free.

I like the choice of colors. The deep red/orange along with the semi silver effect give it an elegant look.

What I like the most is the way they use the font style. I believe that the font face and it’s size has a great effect on the user mind. Not many are giving the right attention to this aspect. On this website they actually built a virtual path, guiding the user attention just by playing with the fonts size and weight.

Another issue that need to be mentioned is the use of icons. If you would like to design a nice and a simple website but yet to keep it attractive - use icons. You will be surprised how few well designed icons can make the difference to the overall design. Here its a good example for using icons properly in order to enhance the attractiveness of the website design.

The only thing that I would change on this website is the phpBB logo . Well…. you can’t change it because its not actually yours so I cant really blame the web designer on this.

LogoBee

Posted in Elegant Design | March 22nd, 2007 1 Comment »

Logobee Logobee is a cool website. Its looks like a great place to get a professorial service if you need a custom made logo.

But I am here to talk about their website design not their service ( that I did not try anyway so far )

What can I say….. I like their design. Maybe it’s because of their elegant logo? Maybe it’s because of the choice of the colors? Great temperature, great contrast.

The layout direct you right to their logo. If they are selling logos then they should direct you to their logo. If you will like their logo you will consider them as the ones to design yours. How simple its sound, isn’t?

This is the art of design. To know how to attract the user attention to right place with the right message.

What I don’t like about this website is the height of the page. The fact that the homepage has a long scroll, to my opinion, it defects some from it elegancy. I am sure this website designer can find a way to take some of the information from the homepage to other internal pages. Except from my last comments nothing much to say about this great website. Good job guys!