Morko Products

Good Morning!
Redesigning a site for a partner company and would love your critical feedback as usual! (I might start reviewing other people's as soon as I get a bit more time!)

Anyway, it's just the front page, the links don't go anywhere, the xhtml validates as does the CSS.

A rating out of 10 would be cool as well lol, some of you guys do it already!

www.designcreek.com/morko

Craig

Sometimes I don't know whether no replies are a good thing or a bad thing! :P

Hey Craig, didn't mean to ignore you...

For some reason I always like your sites... I love that you are fearless with color. With that said...
I'd really like to see you match the content block color to the swirls in the logo. Did you design the logo?

I don't get that vertical stripe pattern at the top. I think it's a little circus looking.

The spools image has a different effect placed upon and it I'm not wild about it.

Lime green links are hard to read on my monitor.
Missing an h2 but you have two h3's. h1 should never say "welcome to"
It should say something to effect of " Morko Home Embroidery Products"

Love the sliding navigation alot.
Love the embroidery background behind the text. Nice touch.

Design 4/5
accessibility 4/5 due to lime green link
seo 2/5
overall 3/5
(hope I did that right)

Overall, not bad.

• I agree with Linda in that I don't like the colorful bar at the top of your page.
• I love the header, but you really need to clean up the logo. It's all pixely and poor quality.
• The image on the side bar looks bad to me. Probably because a flash was used. Spend a few minutes in Photoshop softening it up and it will flow with the page a lot better.
• The animation in the nav is ridiculous. It's also highly annoying for me. It's been said by Minute a million times, but navigation is a basic part of your site and it shouldn't scream, whistle, jump or sound an alarm. Focus on the content.
• Why aren't the nav links capitalized?
• The accesskey spans are a waste of code. Use li:first-letter. It's not widely supported, but all those spans are a bad way to harm your good content to code ratio.
• Remove this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
• Navigation and Random Product should be <h2>'s and you should have an <h2> for the content part of your page. Yes, both an <h1> and an <h2>.
• You organized the content somewhat like I do. Hopefully it will be as good to you as it has been for me
• Linda's right about the <h1>
• Meta tags? You need keywords, a description and a charset.

And what is this?

Code: Select all

		<div id="divider">
			<p class="left"><span>&nbsp;</span></p>
		</div>

Looks rather pointless to me.

Anyway, down to the numbers:

Design: 4 out of 5
Code: 4 1/2 out of 5
Functionality: 3 out of 5
Accessibility: 4 1/2 out of 5 (I agree about the lime green, by the way)
SEO: 3 3/4 out of 5

Thank you so much for that.

I'm gonna leave the colored top in for now, until the person i'm designing this for has seen it, to see what she thinks.

I don't have the original logo which is why it looks grainy, when I do get my hands on it i'll revert to that one. I also didnt design the logo.

With regards to the code, I've taken out the unnecessary <span> tags, and changed the <h3> to <h2> and added an extra <h2> in the content (I purely just took the content from the original site!)

I understand what you mean about the code to content ratio, but for that small difference i'd rather use code which is widely supported rather then using the psuedo element.

I also changed the lime green and made it slightly darker, is this any better, or do you still think it needs to be darker?

Added the meta information at the top, I didn't forget about this, just hadn't added it yet as I just just focusing primarily on the design.

The sliding navigation was something I added as think it adds to the experience and is just something a little extra. Of course, it won't be to everyone's taste (design never is lol), I like it a lot, Linda does, but for some people I can understand why they won't. It doesn't beep annoyingly, and degrades perfectly when JS is disabled, if it didn't I wouldn't use it.

Finally i'll retouch that image and see what effect it has!

Thank you very much, you gave me somethings to do for 10 minutes and they really do make a difference, cheers

Craig

Ok, I'll keep this short and sweet: 10 out of 10.

I had to find something to critique so get rid of this tag:
<meta name="robots" content="all" />

I really love this design. Fantastic and vibrant colors which emphasize the websites colorful and calm sewing message perfectly. Well done, you are truly a great designer.

Thank you for the kind words!

I've changed the design ever so slightly, well quite a bit actually.
The coloured bar has moved to the bottom, i think it works better there.
The colors have changed slightly to fit in with the brand of the logo.
The header has changed to match what is on their current packaging.

All in all I think it has changed for the better

http://www.designcreek.com/morko2/

The original can still be seen at

http://www.designcreek.com/morko/

Many thanks, and still the comments are welcome!

Craig

Craig that is awesome! Now it is top notch!!!
You've got talent!!! That's so so so much better!!

The header is amazing! I liked the last one, but this header beats it hands down. Now: I shouldn't be talking about too much red... but I must. It just doesn't look right!

Craig, Your changes rock. Exactly what was needed to give the site...WOW. You should be proud.

Might I suggest my sticky footer? Looks funny with the shadows going down without the white background.