Drupal Site critique...
April 2, 2010 - 12:57am
I like it
Tony,
Generally, I like the design. It's nice and clean.
A few comments, in no particular order:
- The script "West Central Ohio" in the header has a very light stroke. It's a little hard to read. Also, the characters in "FOUNDATION," especially the right stroke on the "U" are also very light and a little indistinct. If you can, I suggest looking for fonts that work a little better.
- I think I'd make the body text a little larger; the line spacing is good. This may just be my personal preference because my old eyes tend to like larger text.
- I don't know how many events this organization will have each month, so take this comment with a grain of salt. The calendar block doesn't add much value. The upcoming events block is much more useful.
- Sort the upcoming events in ASCENDING order by date!
- I'd be inclined to present some/most/all blocks only on the home page. Forums, especially, might benefit from the added horizontal real estate.
- The background image, pretty as it is, is awfully large (147KB), especially for the value it adds to a 1024px wide screen. I'd try compressing it more to see if I could make it smaller without reducing quality too much. Also, consider making the center of the image, that part that gets covered by the body, a solid color to aid compression.
I hope this helps, good luck,
Curt
April 2, 2010 - 7:40am
Thanks Curt!
I'll see how the body text looks larger. The good thing is, it's all ems, so a user could just ctrl + the thing, but I'll give it a look.
I'll see what the client wants to do about the calendar block.
See, that's why i come here... nice catch on the event block sorting! I didn't even notice.
I had the middle section at #FFDD00, but on some display resolutions (1440x900, for example) the sun bursts made it all the way up to the primary navigation, so it looked a little funny to have the sunburst cut off suddenly like that. I suppose i could optimize the background for 1440x900. That would also reduce the file size. I'll give that a shot, and see what happens
Thanks again!
Tony
April 2, 2010 - 8:16am
Message Board
I like the change to the message board... but is leaving the breadcrumb trail enough for the average user to navigate the message board? I've never used Drupal Forums before. Is there a navigation block somewhere that can be displayed on the message pages?
Hey guys, can somebody help me out and just nose around this new site I've built? It's for the West Central Ohio Paralysis Foundation. It's not "Live" yet, it's still on a staging server.
http://www.corysfoundation.org...
It's using Dreamhosts' free non-profit package. Anyway, it's a really quickie I'm doing gratis, so I haven't spent a WHOLE lot of time on it, but I still want ti to be nice and professional, and functional for them. I'm hoping in the future they choose to have a community oriented site, and budget for it. Anyway, right now, it has the following content types:
Event
Uses CCK, Views, and Date
Message Board
Drupal Forums, but these are private, for communication usage between board members and staff
Polls
Drupal Polls
Page
The standard Page type
The site is using CKEditor as a WYSIWYG editor, and IMCE for file browsing and inline images. In addition, the MediaEmbed plugin is installed on CKEditor, allowing video embedding from youtube, vimeo, etc, right within the WYSIWYG. The Filtered HTML input format has been adjusted to allow for this and inline images.
It's not a great solution, but it was cost effective, and very intuitive for non-techies.
The theme is a modified version of Marinelli. I edited the page.tpl.php file to enforce a single sidebar, and widened that sidebar to 290px. i edited the stylesheets and changed the color scheme to a "citrus" style, and created a big, fixed bg image and attached it to the body tag.
That's about all i did. according to Basecamp, I'm about 16 hrs in to this, 4 hours of which was spent messing around with the client's current Webhost and getting him an account with Dreamhost.
Please check out the site as an anonymous user, then again with the testing account I set up for you:
Username: Board Member
password: board
Please, feel free to post new events, polls, and forum topics. Tell me what you think! This accounts will be open until Tuesday, April 6th.
Anthony Pero
http://www.myspace.com/anthony...