SITE REVIEW: www.divinemonkey.co.uk

Hi All

Seeing as I've been getting quite a bit of web design work lately, I decided I should have an online portfolio of sorts. So, I made a site for myself - but before I start sending it out to people I'd like to have a few of you guys check that it works OK. It's based on the Accordion V2.0 script.

http://www.divinemonkey.co.uk/

Thanks in advance

Sam

Sam,

What I like:
- It's original
- Good use of colors
- Good use of separation of content (good use of mootool)


What I don't like:
- I wouldn't put WTF on a profesional website though...
- I wouldn't include a registering domain category (because really you won't make a fortune registering sites for people)
- I would probably have a contact form instead of just a email address

Jeff.

Greetings,

I like the drop down effect. Can you make the beginning of it any smoother? Its fine once it gets started.

The width is a couple pixels too much. The horizontal scroll bar appears at the bottom of my screen in IE7. I did not check other browsers.

Your website did validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict. I only checked the home page, so make sure your other pages validate as well. This is huge for a design website.

As a design website, I think the website design is a little generic. I liked the website you had in your portfolio a lot better.

If I was looking for a design website as a consumer, I want to be WOWED

You have a good start.

Sincerely,
Travis Walters
admin@codebuyers.com

I checked your site and it is great. The Accordion V2.0 script is new for me and is this a CSS script?

Hi All

I took the advice onboard and decided to try and up the WOW factor - please give your thoughts on the newly redesigned http://www.divinemonkey.co.uk

Sam

I like it. Did you get rid of the accordin effect? Anyhoo, I think it's very original, only trouble, the load times. Maybe it's my connection but everything seemed really choppy. But great job!

Thanks for reminding me, keep meaning to trim down those image sizes...

Sorted...should load up a lot quicker now...

Oh, and that accordion script was mootools - http://moofx.mad4milk.net/

good stuff. simple and professional. this what is all about. keep good work

sam - its looking pretty good so far, but I have a few picky details that might help make it a little stronger all around.

First the white area on the top and bottom of the flash content really bugs me. It seems a little like a mistake since the rounded corners are a different radius in the flash and the border. I would either make the flash content fill that area or keep the white border but make it go all the way around and use proportionate rounded corners.

Second the quick contact is pretty rough. Default styled form elements tend to stick out like a sore thumb. I'd spend a little time messing with those to make them blend with the site a little more. You might want to take a look at NiceForms to make those look a little nicer.

Hey graphixboy, cheers for the NiceForms link - had never seen that before so I'll definitely be using that a lot in the future...

The white border thing, it's not Flash, it's just javascript and HTML so it's hard to get it looking as slick as it would in Flash, but I didn't want to use Flash for it so I'll have to live with it the way it is...

On second thoughts I think that seeing as my form is so short there's not much point using NiceForms on it, so I'll save that for some other site - I just did some styling with classes instead...blends in a little better now...

Nice look and verry fast ...

I really like the overall look you have going on. It looks great from the background rising sun effect to the mirror of the monkey in the footer. It's clean, you have an interesting way of displaying your showcase and it validates.

I think I might get rid of the exclamation mark after your 'showcase title'. I also think that you should display more of your work. Talk about it a little more and provide a larger thumbnail version so you can see a larger portion of the websites you've done. You could try lightbox js.

Also in your showcase, the hover buttons for moving through the images take a while to load.

Overall great job!

Interesting look, but I would have to disagree with Merlyn, the background almost makes me dizzy, and distracts from the message. I like the colors, I have always been a fan of the 'shades of grey', but it almost looks like your trying to hard to make it web 2.0ish if that makes sense.

Also, I noticed great similarity between your portfolio pieces. Most of them look like a version of the same template (which when using a CMS can be a result, personally I use Typo3, but I am definately going to check out silver stripe.

All in all it is a nice portfolio site.