Bush Hall's new site

March 2, 2009 2:59 PM

Bush Hall's new site
We just re-designed the website for the music venue I don't quite work at. This was my first real web design project (beyond the odd blog template), and I'm pretty happy with how it came out. I'd love to get Mefite feedback and advice on this one.

I had a bit of trouble getting things where I wanted them in IE, and I ended up using a commented out style sheet - which seems like not a very tidy way of doing things - is there any way around that?

This was my first time using jQuery, and I'm really pleased with the pages that used that - If you can suggest a plugin for the Listings page that would do the job of the moreinfotoggle.js in a more attractive way - I'd love to know about that.

Also, a couple of people have mentioned that the navigation bars moving around is confusing - do you agree? If I've get strong opinions on that I'll change it.

Thanks!

posted by featherboa (1 comment total)

Glad to see you used IE conditional comments, but then you also negated their purpose by having the IE-specific hack at the beginning of the HTML.

Your site may be different, but it's a pretty safe assumption to ignore IE 4, 5, 5.2, and 5.5. Microsoft doesn't support them anymore.

Fixing IE bugs will come more easily as you understand CSS better.

It's often easier to find and correct IE discrepancies when your HTML validates (Whether or not to validate is another issue. For every page I write that doesn't validate, I know exactly why, and have a logical reason to keep it that way.)

You have at least one mention of an <h7> element, which doesn't exist in HTML, and frequently have elements inside of alt and title attributes, which is not allowed; each browser will decide what it wants to do, and results can be odd.

I do find the navigation odd. I don't think I can say that I've ever seen anything like it before. I probably would've tried to lump all the navigation into one tier, or have section-specific sub-navigation.

As for the graphic design of the site, I've always felt that if the client is happy with the result, and I'm happy with my effort, then it was a successful design exercise. (Of course, it doesn't mean that you won't have to change something for the site's users once it's gone live.)

Feel free to me-fi mail me if you have specific questions.
posted by BarnacleKB at 9:21 AM on March 3, 2009