SITE REVIEW: Graphics2you.com - Graphics Market + Portfolio

Finished redesigning this site not long ago, basically the site supplies a Graphics Market, where a normal member account can upload two graphics related items for sale (Logos, Web Templates, etc.), the site will list it along with a preview of the item and purchase information.

The other is a Online Graphics Portfolio, where members can upload examples or their work, an article about themselves, areas of expertise etc.

Basically I'd like a review of anything and everything, the design, concept or whatever

Link: http://www.graphics2you.com

Thanks.

good one

Forgot to add the link sorry Added now.

Any reviews?

Hey there,

At first glance, it looks like a pretty good design.

I always have a few comments though

1. The text in the header is hard to read. It does not blend well with the background color. The text I am referring to is in the "Create Your Free Online Portfolio" section. I wish that could stand out a bit more, more black maybe?

2. Love the hover effect on the top navigation bar. However, the hover effect on the left navigation menu could use some work.

3. I usually add this comment to most of my reviews. I would work on getting the website W3C compliant. It helps with compatibility. Check out the validator here: http://validator.w3.org/

4. Very nice forum.

5. Perfect page width for 1024x768 resolution.

Overall, it is one of the better websites I have seen lately. Just work on your text to background issue. Text should be more readable. Clean up some of the coding errors and I will give you a 10 out of 10.

Sincerely,
Travis Walters
admin@codebuyers.com

Thank You for the detailed review,

1. Good point, I don't want to make the black as I want them to be noticeable as links but I'll probably try a much darker grey.

2. Yeah, I've just redesigned the navigation there, just trying to think of some ways to make it look nice.

3. At the moment the site does have a lot of little errors (my fault for being slack when I was doing all the PHP really ) so I'll get around to them soon.

4. Thanks

5. Thanks again and yeah I designed it for 1024x768, I was originally concerned about 800x600 resolutions but I hear the vast majority of people use 1024x768+ these days so not as concerned about it.

I want to start by saying beautiful site. It's visually appealing and you made great use of CSS for the layout. I only have a few suggestions..

1) The left navigation is hard to figure out at first. It might be as simple as working on the padding on your navtitle and nav elements in your CSS.

2) I agree with twalters84 in that you should work on getting W3C compliant. I found 177 errors, and that's with a transitional doctype!

3) I know what you mean about not worrying about users with 800x600 resolution, and your target audience is probably not very likely to use that resolution, but it might be worth doing anyway. For example, and I imagine I'm not alone, I like to browse without having my browser maximized all the time. To look at your site (even though I'm using 1280x1024) I get a horizontal scrollbar.

It's also interesting to me that a lot companies that offer hosting choose blue and green for their websites...

Overall, the site looks great and very appealing!


-jameson

Thanks for the review Jameson, been working on the errors a bit. Got it down from 229 to 177 but I'll definetely be fixing them soon. I'll also be working on that navigation and a few other little things.

I find a lightish blue and white works well with a business style template and since I also wanted a secondary colour besides white and thought green looked the best

Thanks again.

I've made a few updates to the site, such as the icons for the links in the User CP and I've added a new section for recently updated portfolios.

Once I've cleaned everything up I should have some time on making it valid XHTML.

Back again, over the past month or so I've made made a few more updates and added a few features and everything is just about done now. I just need to fix the rest of those Validation Errors.

Any more reviews would be much appreciated .

Nice design with my 2 cents:

- The heading of each section can be difficult to read, for the heading Navigation is black against a blue background have you thought about making it white instead? Might be easier to read.
- When I click on the forum it takes me to your forum section with no ability to navigate back, have you thought about either putting this in a wrapper on your site so I can still see the navigation from the homepage. Once I finish a post I might just leave your site since I can't find a way to get back to your home page.
- I see you are running a promotion, giving away an ipod have you thought about making that pop a bit more to really sell having user register?
- At first read, I am not sure why I would want to join your site or what you are trying to do, have you thought about creating an about us section so people know what you are trying to do with your website.

Just my 2 cents

Good luck.

The site looks very pretty - clean, stylish, neat, and I like the graphic on the header.

The gray really bugs me though. I want to run your whole site through photoshop and put it in 'screen' mode or something. I'd bleach out at least 25% of the gray (especially the gray contained in the blues - if that makes any sense.....) It will give you a cleaner, more saturated look, which IMO is neat.

second - I agree with npennington - I wasn't entirely sure what the site was supposed to do. I could see it's something to do with graphics, but do you sell them? buy them? cater to designers? cater to clients looking for designers? all of the above? the last i guess is the correct answer, but that takes a bit of figuring out. maybe I'm just slow though :)

third - links don't work. I tried to look at some of the portfolios, but did not manage to access a single piece of work, either on 'deviantArt' or the link marked 'portfolio'. hmmm.

fourth - regarding the previous - if you click on 'portfolios' in the left-hand nav, and then select a designer and click on 'portfolio', you yet have to click on another link that says 'portfolio' or 'my portfolio' in order to actually see some work. (and then you find that that link doesn't work. hmmm) So maybe you could include some examples of each designer's work on their 'portfolio' page - not all of them, just a few to give us a flavor of what they do. If I'm looking at designers or graphic artists, the first thing I want to see is their work. In fact it's the only thing I want to see :)

fifth - some of the links are in strange colors - when I went to 'conorp's portfolio, for instance, his 'status' seemed to have a yellowish smudge under it - I had to highlight it to make out the word 'undecided'. I get what you were going for - a traffic light system with green for go, yellow for maybe and red for no - but the yellow really cannot be read against the pale blue background.

hope you don't think me nitpicky, but the reason I'm picking I guess is because I really like the site, and think it could be brilliant with a bit more work!

Thanks guys, very nice advice. npennington I especially agree with the forum having now way to get back to the main site I'll add this in when I can.

Celandine are the links that dont work the ones inside the portfolio, I'm pretty sure you're talking about their portfolio site link and Deviant Art. If the deviant art isn't available it should show up as Not Available but if they fill in the box incorrectly it will still show up the link will not work. With the portfolio link the default link if they have nothing filled in is just http:// so I could see how that could be confusing. I'll try to change that a bit to make it more clear to the user putting the link there and for people looking.

About having their work on their portfolio page they have the option to put 3 up there with a description (more if they have an upgraded account) but a lot have not put any up. So I created various links to the portfolio's such as the 'Active Portfolios' which will only show designers that have at least 1 image uploaded.

Definetely agree with the yellow too, I've tried various shades of it but it just dosn't seem to work unless I go really dark which looks bad for yellow. So perhaps I'll just have to use a different colour.

Thanks again.

Awesome neat pretty design and good color scheme... although some tables didn't fully load on the first try and when I refreshed the page they loaded finally... (I'm talking about "Portfolio's & Market" and "Top 5").

You have 168 errors on your site... fix them... that would help you out with compatibilities with all different browsers there are out for people's use.

I tried rating one user and it already said that I have rated that user before even though this is my first time being on the site...

Thanks for the advice, about the rating you need to be logged in to rate someone. The reason it said you've already rated before is that anyone not logged in has the Guest seesion so someone can be rated by a guest but only once. This is somthing I will change as I know it would be confusing and dosn't make much sense really.