Re: http://www25.brinkster.com/gemgirl/main.html

You've got a nice start. The site degrades to lower res nicely.

I like the colors mostly but the layout bothers me a little.. my fault. I
like my navigation at the top or right side. I think left to right and top
to bottom and read that way as well.

Lose those Horizontal Rule bars. I know that HRs are easy and I know they
work, but they're tacky and ugly as well as totally not needed.

You don't see horizontal bars in books, magazines or ad copy. You only see
them on the Web. The reason for this is that in print media, we use an
indent to separate a minor change in direction. We call it a paragraph
break. We skip a line at more major changes in thought and change a chapter
or title sub-headings on even more changes in direction.

The problem with the Web was that there was no easy way to indent for a
paragraph. People had to skip a line. That left no easy way to designate a
larger change in direction so they used the horizontal rule bar. There is
even an HR tag in html.

Either way, its just plain poor design, usually seen on Geocities and
AOL-type personal sites. Instead, use white space, bold text, and other ways
to designate a change of thought. It creates a much more professional
design. Keep the HR around for major low bandwidth dividers to possibly
separate the bottom address info from the rest of the page and do that very
sparingly.

Unless required by some instructor type, I'd lose the validation icons at
the bottom. They're a waste of time and useless to the client and visitor
alike. If you want to comment it in your source code if you need bragging
rights, so be it.

Never use "Click Here" type remarks. If you have to say "Click on the title
to be linked to the associations web site" then the links aren't obvious
enough.

I also advise sticking with standard link and visited link colors. It's less
confusing and easier for the casual surfer. You don't need that "click here"
stuff.

Just my opinion, but I would never title a page "Links." A whole page for
links sounds like a whole page devoted to inviting people to leave. If you
must have links, call it resources and let it open a separate browser
instance, possibly.

I'd like the Cal State seal bigger and somewhere else.

I'd add more contrast to the yellow in that imagemap or stroke it, maybe.
That yellow is hard to read for these tired old eyes. Sorry.

Overall, I liked it and think you have a good start. Good luck.

Craig T. Harding MS
Association of Computing Machinery - ACM
Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers - IEEE
President - GuideNet.Net
(all outbound email scanned by Norton 2002)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gayle Monroe" <gemgirl(at)sac.sticare.com>
To: <hwg-critique(at)hwg.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 07, 2003 3:10 PM
Subject: Critique Request


> Please take a moment to critique this site
> http://www25.brinkster.com/gemgirl/main.html
> It is a project for the HTML 2 class but will be a working page when
> finished.
>
> Your comments are greatly appreciated.
>
> Gayle Monroe
>
>

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