Joe Levi:
a cross-discipline, multi-dimensional problem solver who thinks outside the box – but within reality™

Twitter Updates for 2008-06-07

  • at McDonalds for breakfast #
  • watched a couple come in mcdonalds, order, stand around waiting, pick up their order, walk out, get in their car – & remove handicapped ID #
  • didn’t know you could get a handicapped plate/hanger for being stupid. handicapped in the brain, maybe? #
  • anyone want to critique a website for me? constructive criticism please: http://prototype.lifetime.com #
  • @fuelfrog 288.1 3.859 6.764 #
  • ran out of gas on the way to the movies… first time in almost 16 years of driving… #
  • at the movies, saw @mikedopp and his family there #
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4 Responses

  1. aswitzer says:

    A belated critique on your website at prototype.lifetime.com. I love nearly everything about it. Great use of flash, well crafted menus with secondary level that works well even over flash. About the only thing I’m not sure about is the location of the Customer Care menu item. I inadvertantly activated the drop down before I actually noticed that it was a right-aligned navigation item. Anyway – brilliant job on the site!

  2. Joe says:

    @aswitzer,

    Thanks for the feedback! The 3-level menu was quite a challenge (and unfortunately driven by the Designer who dictated the top-level items be graphics instead of text). Much thanks to GRC and the community for the menu… no Javascript at all! Wahoo!

    The “Customer Care” menu item was a design element that I questioned as well… They wanted it “over there” to “stand out” from the other menus. Not very consistent, but 100% true to the original design.

    Keep picking!!! Dig deeper! Your feedback is VERY appreciated!

    http://www.Joelevi.com (for http://prototype.lifetime.com )

  3. aswitzer says:

    You are welcome. Alright, I’ll have another go.

    I’m even more impressed by the upper menus now – to find out they are done with no Javascript. Gotta love pure CSS. Hadn’t noticed the semi-transparency in FF3 – another nice touch.

    Your consistent use of colors is nice in the different areas of the site – carried into the left menus on some pages, or from the jump link buttons to the subsection titles below. The yellow that you use
    on the Products->Trailers is a little tough to read when its on the white. Also, the Products->Basketball color usage is inconsistent with other pages – using the orange in separators and subsection titles, but not matching the font color in the jump link buttons. Also, you have a lot of different separator types going on, maybe focus in on one consistent look and vary the color. Another separator related idea is to use the same separator type that you use overlaying the main image in the rest of the Products->Tables and Chairs page – the rest of the separators are dots instead of the open circles you have up above.

    Lastly, the placement of the Buy Now graphic doesn’t feel quite right. Might have more impact to the right of each product name… my eye does not immediately go to the graphic button you have under the product photos, especially when its left aligned.

    Hope that is helpful! Again, I love the site, and its hard to find much to change with it overall… Was the client happy?

  4. Joe says:

    @Aswitzer,

    Thank you for the continued feedback!

    The menu is based on the Script-Free 3-Level Menu 1.2 (Lifetime.com variant) which is based on GRC’s multi-level script-free pure-CSS menu system (with thanks to http://www.CesarDaniel.info, Steve Gibson, and the GRC newsgroup community). It’s really an elegant solution, though someone difficult to modify to the extent that we had to for this project. On any one Web 2.0 site, this menu framework really shines, I highly recommend it!

    The translucency of the second- and third-level menu’s was written with “progressive enhancement” (and a little MSIE proprietary CSS rules) to allow browsers that support the opacity property to show it, and those that can’t don’t. 🙂

    Now we’re getting into the colors and dividers and whatnot… I am PAINFULLY aware of the inconsistencies in colors and dividers among the different product pages (Trailers to Basketball to Tables, for example); I would have liked to re-use one set of CSS rules and simply swap out the color values for the different product pages, but the design called for something different. The way the site is developed is consistent (almost to the pixel) with the design. I’ll pass this on to the project manager and the designer.

    The Buy Now buttons, I think, were an after-thought, thrown in just because (actually, all the content on the product pages was an after-thought, originally the pages were just going to feature a big flash piece on the top — still waiting on the .swf files — what you see now is just what people without flash will see when they come to the pages: graceful degradation).

    A note about the Buy Now buttons: they’re actually text, block displayed, with a negative indent and a background image of the button; search engines and screen readers will see it as text. 🙂 That goes for about 95% of all “graphical text” on the site.

    Thank you again for your feedback! I should have a meeting with the client (my full-time employer) later today, I’ll make sure to include your comments! They’re greatly appreciated!

    http://www.JoeLevi.com

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