Welcome to Gaia! ::

Ok. Im going to critisize freely, so I may be a little harsh. Hopefully im not. Not sure exactly how everyone else sees the site, but since im a firefox user, things may be a little different.

On high resolution screen layouts. The contrasting background and foreground colours make it look like there is a lot of empty space on the page, like alot of grey. And in a case like this the spacing towards the top left is too small and it looks squashed in the corner. when the window is resized to around the size of the content area, the site doesn't look to bad.

The navigation is nice and easy to use. No trouble with that. The use of the word "Navigation" above it seems a bit iffy and not really necessary, but doesnt hinder the nemu in any way really, so thats ok there.

Another point is that it is always useful to go to www.w3.org and validate your site to keep your coding style as correct as possible, although it is not important for the layout its good to keep good clean coding for other people who may wish to modify it later. The coding is nicely laid out since it was generated by front page though, so thats not really too much of an issue.

The fonts on the menu and layout do not tie together very well probably from the seperate editors of the site, however i fint that the use of Venada, Helvitical, Sans in the inner frame is much more readable and easy on the eyes the the Century Gothic, Times new roman on the menu. Or maybe i leave my monitor on too bright >.<

The colours of the site dont apeal to me too much. Upon loading the site the cyan/green really screams out at my face at first even though i got used to it after a while the colour choice is a little too over contrasting.

The use of an innerframe, although i used to use it may not be the best choice of layouts. For arty sites iFrames rock for layout purposes (i know i used to be crazy about iframes), but for a content based website it may be less appropriate especially when we move to making the site more dynamic, like as Chisa suggested using a blog system like b2evo or maybe a content management system, the layout becomes very tedious to implement and maintain. You find that the sites of most corporate sights that are more contect based just used fixed pages which make the sites more powerful although they may be a little more bandwidth intensive.

Although its much easier the use square blacks to fin in inner frames .. the use of curves is not too bad (saw someone put an ifram in a cricle once and that is a waste of space >.<).

So here is my summary

• More balance in the layout. ie. less blank space on just 2 sides (maybe centre the layout more).
  
• Keep the fonts similar. Something like vernada or sans is nice n readable.
  
• Colours are too bold. Make the colours more easy on the eyes.
  
• Try not to use iFrames. Sometimes they are overated.
  

Although i must say that the site layout is quite a nice design in general it isn't really suitible for a content based site. The most important thing i think for a content based site is the readablility and the friendliness on the eyes of the person reading it. Being too bold usually makes reading of longer documents tiring on the eyes.

Anyway, don't fire back at me cause i was a little harsh. I don't have any training in art or design or anything like that. Im just speaking out of my webpage experience and my personal opinion.

Many thanks to Raine Dragon for the layout. It is very nice.

I can't really comment on the content, since half the sites i make never end up having any anyway >.<

But when we transist to using a content management system such a b2evo, ill try to be more involved with the developement of the site ^__^.

...[GhoSt-X]

ps. Actually looking back on the site. The blue green colour on the frame and text boxes is actually quite a nice colour. Its more the psychadelic greenish cyanish swirsl behind it that really disturbs my eye.

ok, so it seems the general idea is that the base is a bit too bright... and a bit to busy sweatdrop are there colors that people think would look better? it's all a vector and I can tone down the colors or change them and export a new base image if people are really bothered by the colors I used in my design.. I guess it is up to everyone... is it really bad looking or hard on the eyes in the bright blues and greens?

oh! If you want it to center in larger windows, you can put the image as the background of a table set to the sieze of the image, and stick the iframes or div layers in the cells and not make it absolute, that way it will all be in the right place when you center it ^__^

there is statistics already buiolt onthe the cPanel.. awStats ... so you can look at it from the back end >.< which only i really have access to .. ahha

once u have b2evo running.. .that has its own seperate stat records..

I also found the text difficult to read sweatdrop Same story with the white text too. I think that the layout colours just too bright for a site with lots of text.

The layout is a bit picture intensive... it doesn't really take that long to load, just enough to be a annoying.

The iframe ended up being a bit constricting. Large pictures can't be seen all at once, which I found annoying when adding pictures to the articles. It also meant that I can't link single pages which are within the iframe. And then there's the whole search engine issue with iframes... I'd like non-Gaians to be able to benefit from the site too, if possible.

Okay, thats good, we've learnt a lot from this experience. What I think needs to be done is a redesign based on what we know now sweatdrop I'm sorry Raine, I know you must have put a lot of work into this layout, and I think it would be awesome for a gallery~esque type site, but its not really working for a text-heavy e-zine.

So things we need to keep in mind for new layout:
- MUST be easy to read -> dark text on light background
- no iframes
- not too graphics heavy
- needs have a relatively large area for content
- needs to be compatible with different browsers/screen resolutions
- be able to work with b2evo -> css-y

At the moment I'm thinking along the lines of something very clean; header at the top, main menu under that, lhs column for content, rhs column for other links, featured member, plugboard? Similar in layout to A List Apart, but maybe a little prettier 3nodding

What do you think? I'll try get a concept pic together tomorrow.

I'll also post my ideas for what we can do with b2evo later; its a little complex, so I might have to resort to UML diagrams (I'm sorry Ghost, but you better gget used to it, you're studying SED200 this year aren't you? blaugh ).

Meanwhile, thanks everyone for the constructive feedback on the layout. What about the articles though? Any specific ones that were really useful or well written? Any authors you'd like to see more stuff by?

Nobody else looked at the e-zine? crying

Currently reading it... personally, I like the layout and colours. White on blue is easy for me to read...
Maybe centre the entire thing on the screen, don't leave so much black on the right. (I'm using Mozilla Firefox.)


"integral"

Tools of the Trade link is dead

hurray for the PS basics! There's a LOT there though >_< probably better to have a sort of contents at the top and link to the sections within the article

Braving the Pen Tool - although I'm used to seeing 'i' instead of 'I', maybe they should still be 'I's whenever one is referring to oneself...