motley.ie review

[lostie]

Hey guys, take a look at Motley Magazine by UCC Journalism Society - Home - a site i did for UCC's journalism society and let me know what you think, and anything i could do to improve it - its my first total site design from scratch.

 

[louie]

Plain and simple.
Could you get the logo any bigger?

 

[Forbairt]

as Louie said ... nice and simple quite effective really ...

Can the logo be bigger ... and ... more cowbells

 

[paul]

i know you didn't ask for it, but I like playing with logos.

how about something along these lines ? Maybe squash the letters more to incorporate logo and text a little more
I don't know if it's something wrong with the font but the o & e seem to come down lower than the rest of the letters.

 

[Forbairt]

not sure which works better for me ...

Think I prefer the original ... would need to see it in context on the page though ..

 

[ghost]

hey lostie
I agree on the logo 100 to 120 pixels for a header is sufficient.
A few minor points
No meta Description tag ?
No robots.txt , I like to provide a sitmap for search engines and place a link to it in the robots.
I will assume no robots no site map tut tut.
W3 validator handy for checking your code
[Invalid] Markup Validation of http://www.motley.ie/index.html - W3C Markup Validator
Image tag should have height and width <img src="images/header.gif" alt="Motley Magzine" id="centimg" />
Run a spell check.
c Motley Magazine 2007 , welcome to the new year.
On a 1024 resolution I have to scroll a little to the right to see the whole page.
Over all the site looks good a little bit of tidying and your away.
Good luck with it.

 

[lostie]

Thanks for the comments guys. So you think the logo's too big? I knew it was a bit big but i kind of used that to give the site a unique and simple design - its not exactly conventional to have such a large-text logo so i thought it might make it stand out. Paul - Interesting take on the logo - i'll show it to the magazine editor and see what he thinks, but i've used the same font type as the cover of the magazine so changing the logo on the site would mean changing it on the mag too - but its something we'll look into. The font is just century gothic - the o and e do seem slightly down, but thats just the font. Ghost - thanks for the tips, spelling, validating and changing the 2007 are all on the to-do list whenever i have the time... also I havent done too much SEO on it so must put a meta desc and sitemap up sometime too. Glad you all like it though ! keep the comments coming.

 

[louie]

View attachment 97

There is a more decent version of your logo.

 

[lostie]

I like it... dont suppose you could send it to me or post it in a size you feel would be apporpriate so i could see what it looks like on the pages?

 

[louie]

right-click on the image and select "Save Picture as..." than upload it to your server, but first make a back-up of the original (rename it)

 

[lostie]

Ok its up... do you not think its much too small though? do you think it should be centered?

 

[louie]

you got used to the other one and this new logo looks out of place now.
Give it some time to get used to it.

 

[lostie]

Maybe you're right - what does everyone else think? The white space on the right looks a bit strange to me, like it needs to be filled

 

[lostie]

what about moving the model pictures up next to it?

 

[ghost]

looks much better you owe louie a pint.
I would be inclined to move the quick links down and the news section up.

 

[CiaranR]

Maybe you're right - what does everyone else think? The white space on the right looks a bit strange to me, like it needs to be filled

White space is your friend!!

 

[louie]

another reason why it looks so empty is because there is too much white so if you make the changes below to your style.css it should look better:

body {
 background-color:#f5f5f5;/*change this to light grey*/
 font-family:   Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif;  
 font-size: 14px;
}
 
#wrapper {
 margin-left: auto;
    margin-right: auto;
 background-color:#ffffff;
 width: 1000px;
border:1px solid #e5e5e5;/*add a light border*/
}