Wow! I've never received this many responses to a critique request before.
Thanks to Killian, Mike, Franz, MyHtml (!?!) and Walter for your feedback.

Killian: yes, the little nav buttons are a bit fuzzy - the result I
suspect of reducing the number of colours too drastically.

Mike: perhaps my aversion to the colour scheme is because I am forced to
use it all the time. It gets tiresome rather quickly. I hadn't expected
the download time to be so long, but it is sitting on a server in
Johannesburg after all. The photo in the top left corner is from one of a
series of print ads (everyone probably saw a different photo) - I think
they are too small to see any detail, and used out of context, I'm sure
nobody knows what they are.

Franz: re the yellow background, I suppose it just becomes too much when
you have to look at it every day. I find that white works well for many
sites (I'm not equating it with professionalism, but it's harder to make a
mess with white), but since most people like the yellow, perhaps it should
stay *sigh* Most sites do have the logo at the top of the page - not sure
why this one doesn't. My objection to the 2-column thing is that unless
the info fits onto the screen, you end up scrolling down col 1, and then
back up to the top of col 2 (or am I misunderstanding you?).

MyHtml: it's not the company that wants a change, I'm just tired of
maintaining someone else's design. Guess I'll have to think long and hard
before I make any changes though.

Walter: I also find the navigation confusing - the information is not well
organised.

Thanks all for your very helpful feedback.

My own critique of the site would have included:

- what are those funny photos in the top left? (since they only make sense
if you know the print advertising)
- why such long page footers?
- the home page is too long, too many links, without any real info about
the company.
- too many different sections on the lhs.
- no second level navigation.
- the lhs navigation buttons "invisibly" extend about 60 pixels to the
right of the visible button - making it very easy to accidently click on a
link you can't see - my *least* favourite aspect of the site.
- the green mouseover buttons are awful.
- too much yellow, aaarghh! this colour scheme is really too much for me.
- some of the copy is very clumsily written.

When I've plucked up the courage to work on a redesign (it seems a much
more daunting task now!) I'll submit it - until then, happy HTMLing!

- Lynnsey

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********

On 1/4/99, at 3:46 PM, Lynnsey Skliros wrote: 

>Hi all,
>
>I've recently taken over maintenance of a website belonging to a large
>mobile phone network company. I'd like to redesign it. Please take a look
>and offer me your honest opinions. Killian, feel free to reply, I'm too
>old to cry when people are mean to me ;)
>
>The colours are rather vile, but they're the official colours of the
>company. The redesign will have a *white* background, if I have anything
>to do with it. The site was designed to download quickly and look okay in
>256 colours. I'm primarily interested in feedback on the design and
>navigation.
>
>The URL is http://www.mtn.co.za/
>
>[The busiest part of the site is the web-to-SMS service which lives at
>http://www.mtn.co.za/sms/ It's not working at the moment - the maintainer
>has yet to return from his holiday. You may wonder why the "not
available"
>message only appears once the form has been submitted; it's not ideal,
but
>because the page is cached all over the place, putting the message on the
>actual form page is ineffective. If anyone's a real JS wiz, perhaps you
>could look at the counter script and figure out why it's not working on
>Netscape 4...]
>
>Cheers all, and have a happy January
>- Lynnsey
>
>
>l y n n s e y   s k l i r o s
>                      m o b i l e   t e l e p h o n e   n e t w o r k s
>
>Morality is your agreement with yourself to abide by your own rules.
>-- Jubal Harshaw (Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land)

l y n n s e y   s k l i r o s
                      m o b i l e   t e l e p h o n e   n e t w o r k s

The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you
pour upon it, the more it will contract. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes

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