Website has been revamped

Information regarding The Narrow Path Ministries.
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darinhouston
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Re: Website has been revamped

Post by darinhouston » Mon Apr 18, 2011 11:34 am

I hesitate to even mention further out of fear of being considered ungrateful -- he clearly has a gift and I am grateful for the improvement. So, at risk of seeming "narrow" minded and petty,..

Speaking only in the hope for layout improvement of what is a beautiful theme, has he considered the divergence of screen sizes such as the increased use of netbooks, handhelds, phones, and tablets? Also, the different font sizes and browser renderings? Just as some desktop screens are getting bigger, multiple devices and browsers are increasing the diversity of screen sizes and renderings.

As an example, looking just at the home page, the photo is on the left, and the summary text is on the right. Same with the logo and the scripture verse and tab elements. Tab elements don't start until second third, and the logo takes up the first third of even my large monitor at work. Consider removing the text logo, doing a mirror image of the logo banner, then replacing the text logo and aligning on the right (or removing the tab elements from that block and left justifying them). Consider vertical tabs with rotated text.

The beautiful "Listen Live" elements are aligned vertically under the text paragraph, and come out right justified (or centered under second two thirds).

I have a large screen at work and still have a scrollbar to see the entire width of the screen unless I really shrink the font. Perhaps, consider not using a fixed page width? Or look at the user-agent of the browser being used, and adopt alternate style sheets for agents, etc.

For the "content" pages, consider breaking up into multiple pages. That's a lot of content to just use anchors. Take a look at some of the iphone-navigation style sheets, which make it really nice to access/drill down in hierarchical data like this.

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backwoodsman
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Location: Not quite at the ends of the earth, but you can see it from here.

Re: Website has been revamped

Post by backwoodsman » Mon Apr 18, 2011 1:52 pm

steve wrote:The Current website width is 1164px with an 80px margin on both sides, bringing the total width of the content below the menu header to 1004px wide. With that being said, it fits the width of almost 100% of all end users.
With a 1024x768 browser window, I get something like 150 pixels of header, menu & text cut off on the right side. I can't see everything without scrolling sideways. That makes it hard to use for something like 30% or so of web users, not to mention, as Darin points out, mobile devices with smaller screens.

I agree with Darin that a fixed page width isn't really the best idea for usability by a broad spectrum of users. Web designers like to do it because it makes it easy to ensure the layout will always look nice, but it comes at a cost in usability for many users.

That said, it is a very nice looking page. Really cool picture on the homepage.

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Joan
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Re: Website has been revamped

Post by Joan » Tue Apr 19, 2011 4:46 pm

I tried visiting the site with my phone's browser and at first glance, at least, it works well. By the way, the Radio Archives pages are very nicely done. A great look and fun to use!

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darinhouston
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Re: Website has been revamped

Post by darinhouston » Tue Apr 19, 2011 9:20 pm

Here's an example of a few of the sort of subtle changes that would help a lot... ignore the inverted logo -- I don't have access to the original artwork.

Image

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VIDesignz
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Re: Website has been revamped

Post by VIDesignz » Wed Apr 20, 2011 6:54 pm

Hi Everyone! Thank you for all the compliments on the website! I am very happy and appreciative to have had the opportunity to update the old site.

Besides layout preferences as talked about in this thread, if anyone finds any bugs or broken links along the way (with over 1,100 audio links there is bound to be a few :roll: ) please feel free to bring it to my attention!

You can either email me or post a message in this thread.

My email is james@videsignz.com

Hope you are all having a great day and I look forward to getting to know you guys!

James

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RickC
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Location: Piqua, Ohio

Re: Website has been revamped

Post by RickC » Wed Apr 20, 2011 9:31 pm

Greetings all, with comments -

I like the new site design overall (you did a good job James, nice to meet you)!

However, a couple suggestions (or things to consider). First, the font color (light blue) was a bit hard to read initially. It was also too small on my old-fashioned dinky monitor. I used Firefox's Add-On NoSquint to make the font bigger on pages. But the links at the top are still hard to see (they've remained very small). Also, after I resized the whole site ("full-zoom in"), the 3 blue boxes cover part of the "Welcome" page.

I can easily navigate around the new site design (with NoSquint's help). But was just mentioning these things, as others may have problems "seeing" some of the links or text.

Thanks :)

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VIDesignz
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Re: Website has been revamped

Post by VIDesignz » Thu Apr 21, 2011 7:34 am

darinhouston wrote:Here's an example of a few of the sort of subtle changes that would help a lot... ignore the inverted logo -- I don't have access to the original artwork.
I swapped the homepage content, though not the header since the lower of the two menu's is pretty muched fixed so either way some may have to scroll horizontally.

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VIDesignz
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Re: Website has been revamped

Post by VIDesignz » Thu Apr 21, 2011 7:39 am

RickC wrote:Greetings all, with comments -

I like the new site design overall (you did a good job James, nice to meet you)!

However, a couple suggestions (or things to consider). First, the font color (light blue) was a bit hard to read initially. It was also too small on my old-fashioned dinky monitor. I used Firefox's Add-On NoSquint to make the font bigger on pages. But the links at the top are still hard to see (they've remained very small). Also, after I resized the whole site ("full-zoom in"), the 3 blue boxes cover part of the "Welcome" page.

I can easily navigate around the new site design (with NoSquint's help). But was just mentioning these things, as others may have problems "seeing" some of the links or text.

Thanks :)

Thank you Rick for the Compliments! I was going back and forth about the font color, I may darken the lighter blue up a bit at some point. As far as the font size, in FireFox, you can zoom in the whole page (not just text) using the standard "View/Zoom" without distorting the page layout.

Nice meeting you as well!!

James

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darinhouston
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Re: Website has been revamped

Post by darinhouston » Thu Apr 21, 2011 7:50 am

VIDesignz wrote:
darinhouston wrote:Here's an example of a few of the sort of subtle changes that would help a lot... ignore the inverted logo -- I don't have access to the original artwork.
I swapped the homepage content, though not the header since the lower of the two menu's is pretty muched fixed so either way some may have to scroll horizontally.
Understood -- you might think of doing some reorganization to reduce the options on the home screen (and thus the width of the fixed menu) and move email, contact, etc. to a footer. Grouping like media together or all teaching under a single tab for example... Then, a second screen to choose between verse by verse, topical, radio show archives, audio, digital ministries, etc.

SteveF

Re: Website has been revamped

Post by SteveF » Thu Apr 21, 2011 12:24 pm

Thank you James for upgrading the website! I don't produce web sites like you do but it does appear to me that you put a lot of thought into it. It's easy to navigate and the pages have a very clean and non-muddled look.

Steve

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