:D

Well that was a week from hell! Started treatment on Monday for my kidney disease (Steroids for 1 month, then Chemo drugs for 1 month, rinse and repeat for 6 months, which is nice) The steroid treatment has buggered up my blood levels so ended up in hospital from Monday to Friday at various times of the day.
Oh and I seem to be getting roid rage, especially when driving and at work, its like being on coke but without the happy buzz, really, really horrible.

 

Anyway, I managed to sit down for a few hours tonight to start this bloody site (wish I said no now)

 

http://www.beautyattiffanys.com/wip

 

Be gentle, its not like I am at all skilled in anyway at this sort of thing. The site template is ripped from a pre made and bashed around a lot by me, I even created new images for the title and back ground (Can you tell?) The site needs nothing whizzy, just the basic info about the salon so I think I have created a good looking simple design to work with. And no animated GIFS anywhere!

 

I still don't know how I want to display the price list but I want something easily editable for quick updating.

 

So tips and advice please teh!

{{Wattsy}}

Looks good and the images are working here. Few tweaks and I think you'll have a decent enough website knocked together in double quick time.

One thing that might work better is to move the menu. At the moment it looks a bit disconnected from the rest of the site. It would possibly be better as part of the main header, but below the Beauty at Tiffany's text.

Speaking of the the Beauty at Tiffanys text, make it an actual image and choose a decent font. If they already have a designed logo for the business, say on business cards, shop frontage, use that. If they don't have a logo yet, make one and get them to reuse it on their business cards, etc.

You'd probably want to make the contact information (phone number at very least) more obvious too. Stick that at the top of the page, where the menu is now, but reduce the margin so it only just sites above the header.

Other than that, you should really resize / crop the images in the slideshow. At the moment you're serving up various sized images and squeezing them into a 200x200px element, which makes them look wonky. Get your photo manipulating software of choice out and resize them. If the photos are used elsewhere on the site, keep separate copies for the slideshow.

I hope you get better soon. If you need any help with the site, just shout, mkay?

I was expecting worse. Especially after you saying you're an angry drugged-up psycho. :P

(That's a compliment; don't attack me!)

Anyway, some suggestions/etc.

Bigger text. 11px is too small for normal body text.

Opening Hours - be good to align the times instead of having them wiggling.
(It's ok to use a two-column headerless table for this, although a dl might be best fit.)

The contact us link at the bottom has Inquiry spelt wrong.
(Also, personally I prefer a "Contact" page that summarises the different methods instead of a direct email link - dunno how others feel about that.)

The copyright text is grey on darker grey. Since it doesn't actually serve any legal purpose (the content is automatically copyrighted, such a notice is simply a polite reminder) if you don't want it there you can remove it entirely; but otherwise make it more readable.

Treatment and Price list links don't work?

On the "About us" page, the "What we can offer" section seems like it would belong on Treatment page?

The way the text wraps means it says "surgical facelift to rewind the years" underneath the picture of Maggie, which is possibly insulting? (Drop the line-height to 200% and it avoids that, along with making the text more readable. Also didn't Caer suggest an optimal line-height in another thread recently... was 1.5 (150%) if I'm not remembering wrong.)


Did someone mentions CMSs before? You could definitely convert what you've got to a CMS template, and basically give them an area where they can edit the price list themselves.
It'd mean a bit more effort now, but may means less effort in future (particularly if you don't want them bugging about changing pricelists on a regular basis), so depends how you feel about it.
(But if you do go that route, don't use WordPress because it's crap and insecure.)

Oooh, the server says it's running Apache 1.3.29 ? That's relatively old now (7.5 years), so you probably want to upgrade to 1.3.42 to make sure any security holes are fixed. (The latest version is 2.2, but I don't know if there's any specific benefit for such a simple site; the 1.3.x stream still has security issues patched.)


Oh, one more minor thing - worth considering a one pixel border around the images (not the slideshow ones, the other ones) - helps the light edges stand out from the white background.

And now being really picky - the staff photo - crop the right hand side off. It serves no purpose and the bright white form thing is (photographically) offensive. :P


Ok, I'm done now. Hopefully that was mostly constructive. :)

>It'd mean a bit more effort now, but may means less effort in future

 

No, it means you'll spend more time training them how to use the cms to make said updates without fucking up the whole site than you would need to spend on ten years of manual updates and trying on aurora's underwear.

Maybe.

Depends on the person.

Peeb has summed up what I was going to say.

 

Opening times should be lined up, and make the text on the About Us page not just go under the photo with half a line. If there was more text it wouldn't look as bad, or make it a single column, or increase the text size so more ends up underneath so it looks like it's wrapping around the photo properly.

Has the spell-check been done yet? It needs one. Other than that, though, what the others have said.

s'looking nice, well done.

I would move the menu below the header, as Matt says. The darker pink line could be wider and have the menu in it, for instance. I reckon the menu buttons themselves might look nicer if they changed shade on rollover, rather than the text.

Thank you guys for the advice and encouragement. I will take on your pointers and change the site accordingly.

Pete, there are two pages missing due to them no being created yet, I didn’t want to get too far into it and then find the site sucks balls and I had to start again.
The About Us page is just a quick mockup and will contain the primary contact and information details, the rest of the info will go into the treatment section. I will also crop the staff photo as suggested (these are professional photos the owner paid for)

As for the logo, I designed the original, and I hate it so I really didn’t want to reuse it. I will have to do a new one but let’s see what the client has to say first.

As for the apache server version, it’s on easily.co.uk so I guess I will need to contact them to upgrade it!

Let’s see what I can do tonight after dinner.

Cheers all

Oh and the roids are really kicking in today, just had to tell HR and my boss about whats going on, not the best of meetings, I felt like a druggy being interrogated by the police :|

Hello lovely peeps, the drugs have worn off and I feel almost calm.

So, I made the sugguested changes and now I am rather happy with it
http://www.beautyattiffanys.com/wip

I need help with the opening times bit,


I expect its simple but I a bit of help would not go a miss.

I updated the about us page to reflect what I really wanted on there. Cropped the slide show images and added the 1px boarder to the two photo as PB sugguested, oh and cropped the staff photo, which looks loads better now but I can't get it to centre. I combed through again for spelling but I expect I have missed something.

I still need to decide how to do the price list and treatment pages. The price list is the one I am finding hard to decide what to do, I really just want a page of prices but that might look a bit cluttered.

Thanks again for the help, I really hope this is what she is looking for.

S'alright is that.

Lose that horrible typeface on the phone number if possible. Too many fonts clashing - sans, serifed and script. Too much. Italicised sans would look nicer I think.

As for the opening times. Just a good old fashioned table. It's tabular data so even PB can't complain.

 
<table>
<tr>
<td>blah:</td><td>10pm-yes</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>blah2:</td><td>yes-yes</td>
</tr>
etc.
</table>
 

If you don't want to do that just use divs of a fixed width for the day column.

Oi! I was the one that suggested it, why would I complain?

The "most correct" markup is probably a definition list (it's defining opening hours), but it can also be seen as tabular data, which is what the table tag is for, so it's perfectly fine to use.

Meaningless Divs would make me smack you in the face though. :P

Personally, I would change the opening hours HTML to this:

<li>
  <h2>Opening Hours</h2>
  <ul id="opening_hours">
    <li>10am - 4pm<span>Monday</span></li>
    <li>10am - 8pm<span>Tuesday</span></li>
    <li>10am - 8pm<span>Wednesday</span></li>
    <li>9:30am - 8pm<span>Thursday</span></li>
    <li>9.30am - 6pm<span>Friday</span></li>
    <li>9am - 4pm<span>Saturday</span></li>
    <li>Closed<span>Saturday</span></li>
    <li><span>Reservations Advisable</span></li>
  </ul>
</li>

And add the following CSS rules:

#opening_hours li {
    text-align: right;
}
 
#opening_hours li span {
    float: left;
}

Everyone will have their preferred methods, that's what I tend to do where you want a simple left and right aligned text on the same line.

Cheers Matt, I used your code as it helps me understand the CSS a bit more. I don't know why the bottom # Reservations Advisable is striked through.

It's not striked-through, it's the border on the list-item. You can "fix" it by putting a clearer inside that last list-item. It's odd that it didn't do that when I tested the code before posting it. Ho hum.

<ul>
  <li>
    <span>Reservations Advisable</span>
    <div style="clear: both"></div>
  </li>
</ul>

Also, I've noticed you've got an empty list and list item below the opening hours which is making Firefox 4.0 show an empty white box with the list icon in it.

that slide show on the 'home' page is a bit jumpy, like 1 frame is out of alignment (vista, IE8)

 

[edit] it's every time it does a transition, the whole image jumps up left - looks like about 1 pixel

Don't know if anyone else has pointed it out, but you are both open and closed on Saturday.

That's probably my fault. Supposed to be Sunday.

D'oh.