http://www.scionpublishing.com/

Hello,

I've almost completed a website for a small publishing house in the UK. The spec involved producing a dynamic site that was both functional and pleasing on the eye.

At present there is a little content required to fill a few pages, and a few images are required on the servers, this is however the responsibility of the client.

Any feedback at all would be greatly appreciated, especially on usability and robustness of the site, admittedly the design will not get any pulses racing! I would like to know how this site compares to what is required, and how much to charge (inc admin areas)

I'm pretty new to web development so all feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Cheers
Noel

http://www.scionpublishing.com/

as honest and frank as i can make it:

1. the menu buttons on the left don't work well - the pure black on white is a little bit too much constrast. tone it down a tiny bit if you can. a dark grey would look much nicer, and still go with the black and teal logo.

2. the font used for the title of the book image on the right hand side (Manipulating the...) is too large, and causes the text to break up vertically (a pain for reading). Make it slightly smaller, or put a little less padding around it to make the column wider.

3. When you click on the Publications menu item, it takes you to a page with the publication search on it, and displays two submenu items. Put links to those submenu items on the page along with the search form - otherwise a) people won't notice the submenu and b) the page would look empty. you might also consider listing say, the top 5 publications for each catagory below the search box.

4. for the book listings for each catagory, make the Previous, Next, and page numbers at the top and bottom about twice as large a font. They still won't take up much space, and that make them much easier to click on for all users.

5. Add a link to get a PDF reader next to or near the link for the PDF order form.

other than that, the site looks pretty good!

Simple design, looks clean. But those buttons just dont work for me either. It looks like you stuck them there with glue. The black would work if you pushed it vertically across the top just under the black line below the heading.

If you don't have loads of links, which you dont, its better to have all your links showing. That way people dont have to click twice to get to where they want to be.

The points above pretty much cover everything. One thing which is purely my preference and i am sure a lot of people would disagree, but i dont think your text on the heading shouldn't overlap the book covers that fade out. It would be more crisp if you just pushed the books over a bit.

Other than that really nice, good work.

I agree with bo on the heading - just push the text to the left a little bit.

Cheers for all the help people!!

Took on board all of the advice and made amendments as and where I could.

Thanks again for the help its good to get a different perspective on things.

Like the favicon! Your nav links down the left side are invisible on a MAC. I looked using Mozilla 1.5, Safari 1.0 and IE5.1 and I just see white space. I can see in the code you have links and the cursor turns into a hand pointer on rollover but there's nothing to see. Did you test on MACs?

whoa, you must have changed something by mistake, glinch - the nav links on the left are now white-on-white for every browser including PC Firefox and Safari 1.1 - the background color for the buttons/links must have been accidentally changed.

My Bad!

I made a school boy error last night and forgot to upload my graphic files!!

Sorry about that, cheers for looking out.
I've used dreamweaver's browser checker to check for browser errors. I can't check on a mac due to a lack of equipment, are there any alternatives?

Cheers again for the help everyone

just a tip - specify a background color in the stylesheet that is approximate the color of the background image - the image will override the color, but if for some reason the image doesn't load, it won't be the death of the page.

Good point - validating your CSS would have picked that up. Looks better now except you could do with a rollover state on the links maybe. You've still got some bugs in the nav links - when you click on 'editorial' the active link shows as 'proposal guide' and some don't have any active states at all.

thanks for the css tip

I think my navigation may be a little confusing by the sound of things!!

Active pages have bolder fonts, and the link is no longer active. Some pages have sub menus, e.g editorial -> proposal guide. Seemed fairly straight forward to me but I was the one who designed it, a good nav wouldn't need explaining!!

Although i did initially try to keep things simple looking and and not to bold to improve usablity it could prob do with a few changes. I reckon the menu could probally do with a greater emphasis on the active page and as you say a rollover state.

Cheers for the help and the time people

indenting the sub-nav items a little bit more would probably be a good idea.