I personally don’t mind if some of the sites on BWG aren’t 100% brilliant. There’s still some positive aspects to be taken from this site and at least it tries to go in a different direction and has caused plenty of controversy.
Sometimes we learn more from mistakes than we do success. Showcasing perfect sites on BWG all the time just breeds a whole lot of designers who want to copy the ‘perfect’ designs and the industry becomes stale and boring.
I’ll tell you one thing – I’m glad it’s caused so much debate – to me it must be a good design because of this alone.
We wanted to get away from the standard – a site must be like this or that – we wanted to be different.
The majority of people whose opinions we truly value (not that we don’t value any of your opinions) have said positive things about the design and they’re usually our harshest critics.
Can somebody point out what’s wrong with our font?? Other than ‘ugly font’, ‘poor font choice’??
Why is the design ‘terrible’??
We have no problem people criticising our work – just don’t make a statement without clarifying it?
@renee #11 – one thing we have noticed is that unless you’re an established, well known designer/agency your work will be slated. There is too much back-patting going on in our industry.
@carl #12 why is it a poor font choice? 2 featured projects?? That’s why they’re featured – if there were 20 – they’d just be our projects. None of what you’ve said is constructive – let us know how we could improve it?
@nick #17 The jagged edges are down to the browsers rendering not our work – chrome/safari on a mac seems to be the best to view them – any other browser has poor rendering.
To all of you – thanks for your comments – good or bad?? We appreciate them!
This site is still a work in progress – we’re currently too busy working on actual client projects to dedicate time to this site – our clients like it – we keep getting business – so it doesn’t really matter if another designer doesn’t think it’s perfect – it’s not you who were trying to win over.
@The Designer – I like the design and I think it IS different. I dislike the font though. It’s difficult to read especially when bold and it’s jagged in my browser – whether a fault of the browser or not, it can and should be avoided.
Your featured work doesn’t justify what you say in the title though. Firstly, the iPad site doesn’t link to anything but a holding page and the e-commerce site doesn’t actually link to an e-commerce site, just a catalogue.
You need to back up what your saying to your clients with some evidence.
So basically you’re saying “If you’re not on a Mac, tough”. Do you realise that you’re basically saying to 93% of users out there that their OS is the problem, not your work? Sorry, but if you’re an actual web designer, that IS your problem – to cater to other OS & browsers, not just tell them to bugger off. And if you don’t think it’s your problem, you’re in the wrong job – elitist Mac snobbery gets a FAIL.
I’m on a PC, and your fonts make me feel like I need glasses (I don’t).
Apologies to all for trying to push the boundaries of the web.
#Ian #23 – I agree with the weight of the font we’re currently looking into it. Cheers for the feedback.
We do have loads of projects to push live – we’re just waiting for the approval from the clients. So they’ll update as soon as they can.
The site had a soft launch, unfortunately or fortunately depending how you look at it, our site has been picked up by the majority of major CSS galleries so is getting a lot of viewing – we knew it wasn’t totally ready – the problem is we have too much client work to dedicate serious time to our own site. We do however have a bunch of changes to roll from testing.
As for @Keren #24 – who says we’re being biased towards a Mac? We have a preference of browsers. We also believe in progressive enhancement – so on Win XP IE7 the site will work – it might not look as good as it does in say Win 7 FF or OSX Safari – but it will work
SITES DON’T HAVE TO LOOK OR FUNCTION THE SAME IN ALL BROWSERS!
Otherwise, we’d still be designing websites without any @font-face, CSS3 or HTML5.
I can understanding your defensive response, it’s only natural. It’s not about bashing people to the ground on here and on the flipside it’s not about blowing smoke up people’s backside either.
I thought my listed bullet points where a fair constructive criticism, I actually quite like the aesthetics and approach of your site there’s just the fundamentals that don’t sit right right, that’s all!
With regards to your font choice being poor, it’s purely because it doesn’t seem to have a distinct range of weight and everything seems to be merging into each other, there’s no clarity.
And while you have a client base that are very happy with what you do, in order to expand and grow that client base you most certainly need to increase your ‘featured projects’ ok, you may not want a portfolio of work to be on show (god knows why not?) but if you want to show your best samples at least make sure your links work!
You say the site is a work in progress??
Then personally i’d have kept it from the view of a design community and continued to develop the site until it was fully complete.
Surely being in the industry you understand the processes of a ‘flight check’ and wanting to show off a product to the best of your ability.
Please don’t see this as an attack, I think this site has evoked such a negative response because of the environment that it has been featured in ‘bestwebgallery’.
I guess it mainly comes down to if your bothered about making your site:
a) Pass accessibility
b) Be X browser compatible
c) Cater for the masses
Or, do you want your site to be cutting edge and future proof?… Because at the present moment in time, it is very difficult to have both.
It brings in the whole debate of ‘is it to early to use these technologies?’ and ‘when is the right time to start?’
I say as I mentioned above, good on you for implementing HTML5 and CSS3, if your not bothered about points a – c above then cool.
But as long as you have a fall back that your site looks good on older browsers, as you are seriously narrowing your market by only catering for the people who use FF/Safari etc.
I personally haven’t checked the site in anything other than FF and Safari, but IF it were my site, I would.
Oh and @Keren – Bear in mind those stats are only related to the W3Schools stats, not the global population
“I’ll tell you one thing – I’m glad it’s caused so much debate – to me it must be a good design because of this alone.”
There isn’t really a debate, the design isn’t good. Just because your design led to 30+ comments (most of which were saying the design was bad) doesn’t mean that it’s a good design.
Designer’s and people in general will only write comments to complain. It can’t be that bad – on the day this site was featured – we had over 3000 unique hits to the site. And we had less than people say they didn’t like it.
That’s less than 1% – We’re more than happy with that.
Like I said previously – it doesn’t really matter what other designers think – you’re not paying for our time – our clients are and they like it.
I’m an amateour and to me there is nothing wrong with the design of this site, from the aesthetic point of view. I’ve seen others worse-looking than this one, right here.
Its main problem is functional. I possibly haven’t got it right, but to me the menu “disappears” when any link is clicked, so how are people supposed to navigate it? Clicking the “back” button or scrolling up and down?
36 Comments
I personally don’t mind if some of the sites on BWG aren’t 100% brilliant. There’s still some positive aspects to be taken from this site and at least it tries to go in a different direction and has caused plenty of controversy.
Sometimes we learn more from mistakes than we do success. Showcasing perfect sites on BWG all the time just breeds a whole lot of designers who want to copy the ‘perfect’ designs and the industry becomes stale and boring.
Wow – so many comments – so much controversy!
I’ll tell you one thing – I’m glad it’s caused so much debate – to me it must be a good design because of this alone.
We wanted to get away from the standard – a site must be like this or that – we wanted to be different.
The majority of people whose opinions we truly value (not that we don’t value any of your opinions) have said positive things about the design and they’re usually our harshest critics.
Can somebody point out what’s wrong with our font?? Other than ‘ugly font’, ‘poor font choice’??
Why is the design ‘terrible’??
We have no problem people criticising our work – just don’t make a statement without clarifying it?
@renee #11 – one thing we have noticed is that unless you’re an established, well known designer/agency your work will be slated. There is too much back-patting going on in our industry.
@carl #12 why is it a poor font choice? 2 featured projects?? That’s why they’re featured – if there were 20 – they’d just be our projects. None of what you’ve said is constructive – let us know how we could improve it?
@nick #17 The jagged edges are down to the browsers rendering not our work – chrome/safari on a mac seems to be the best to view them – any other browser has poor rendering.
To all of you – thanks for your comments – good or bad?? We appreciate them!
This site is still a work in progress – we’re currently too busy working on actual client projects to dedicate time to this site – our clients like it – we keep getting business – so it doesn’t really matter if another designer doesn’t think it’s perfect – it’s not you who were trying to win over.
Peace out!
@The Designer – I like the design and I think it IS different. I dislike the font though. It’s difficult to read especially when bold and it’s jagged in my browser – whether a fault of the browser or not, it can and should be avoided.
Your featured work doesn’t justify what you say in the title though. Firstly, the iPad site doesn’t link to anything but a holding page and the e-commerce site doesn’t actually link to an e-commerce site, just a catalogue.
You need to back up what your saying to your clients with some evidence.
@The Designer
So basically you’re saying “If you’re not on a Mac, tough”. Do you realise that you’re basically saying to 93% of users out there that their OS is the problem, not your work? Sorry, but if you’re an actual web designer, that IS your problem – to cater to other OS & browsers, not just tell them to bugger off. And if you don’t think it’s your problem, you’re in the wrong job – elitist Mac snobbery gets a FAIL.
I’m on a PC, and your fonts make me feel like I need glasses (I don’t).
@Karen – only 7%?
I don’t know what everyones bitching about. Its worthy of a place on bestwebgallery.
Yep – see http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp
Apologies to all for trying to push the boundaries of the web.
#Ian #23 – I agree with the weight of the font we’re currently looking into it. Cheers for the feedback.
We do have loads of projects to push live – we’re just waiting for the approval from the clients. So they’ll update as soon as they can.
The site had a soft launch, unfortunately or fortunately depending how you look at it, our site has been picked up by the majority of major CSS galleries so is getting a lot of viewing – we knew it wasn’t totally ready – the problem is we have too much client work to dedicate serious time to our own site. We do however have a bunch of changes to roll from testing.
As for @Keren #24 – who says we’re being biased towards a Mac? We have a preference of browsers. We also believe in progressive enhancement – so on Win XP IE7 the site will work – it might not look as good as it does in say Win 7 FF or OSX Safari – but it will work
SITES DON’T HAVE TO LOOK OR FUNCTION THE SAME IN ALL BROWSERS!
Otherwise, we’d still be designing websites without any @font-face, CSS3 or HTML5.
@thedesigner
I can understanding your defensive response, it’s only natural. It’s not about bashing people to the ground on here and on the flipside it’s not about blowing smoke up people’s backside either.
I thought my listed bullet points where a fair constructive criticism, I actually quite like the aesthetics and approach of your site there’s just the fundamentals that don’t sit right right, that’s all!
With regards to your font choice being poor, it’s purely because it doesn’t seem to have a distinct range of weight and everything seems to be merging into each other, there’s no clarity.
And while you have a client base that are very happy with what you do, in order to expand and grow that client base you most certainly need to increase your ‘featured projects’ ok, you may not want a portfolio of work to be on show (god knows why not?) but if you want to show your best samples at least make sure your links work!
You say the site is a work in progress??
Then personally i’d have kept it from the view of a design community and continued to develop the site until it was fully complete.
Surely being in the industry you understand the processes of a ‘flight check’ and wanting to show off a product to the best of your ability.
Please don’t see this as an attack, I think this site has evoked such a negative response because of the environment that it has been featured in ‘bestwebgallery’.
Hope all this helps.
Back to work for me
@Carl #28
As mentioned previously we’re looking into the weight of the font.
We don’t see it as an attack – we wouldn’t have minded any points that expand on what they mean – like you have here.
The points that are ‘I don’t like it’ – are a waste of a post. That’s all. They don’t help anybody.
Cheers for your response.
I guess it mainly comes down to if your bothered about making your site:
a) Pass accessibility
b) Be X browser compatible
c) Cater for the masses
Or, do you want your site to be cutting edge and future proof?… Because at the present moment in time, it is very difficult to have both.
It brings in the whole debate of ‘is it to early to use these technologies?’ and ‘when is the right time to start?’
I say as I mentioned above, good on you for implementing HTML5 and CSS3, if your not bothered about points a – c above then cool.
But as long as you have a fall back that your site looks good on older browsers, as you are seriously narrowing your market by only catering for the people who use FF/Safari etc.
I personally haven’t checked the site in anything other than FF and Safari, but IF it were my site, I would.
Oh and @Keren – Bear in mind those stats are only related to the W3Schools stats, not the global population
AHA!! “best”…
I cant believe…
@The Designer
“I’ll tell you one thing – I’m glad it’s caused so much debate – to me it must be a good design because of this alone.”
There isn’t really a debate, the design isn’t good. Just because your design led to 30+ comments (most of which were saying the design was bad) doesn’t mean that it’s a good design.
So reminds me of a Clif Bar package.
http://www.fleetfeetsyracuse.com/images/clif-bar2.gif
@Jeremy #32
Designer’s and people in general will only write comments to complain. It can’t be that bad – on the day this site was featured – we had over 3000 unique hits to the site. And we had less than people say they didn’t like it.
That’s less than 1% – We’re more than happy with that.
Like I said previously – it doesn’t really matter what other designers think – you’re not paying for our time – our clients are and they like it.
I’m an amateour and to me there is nothing wrong with the design of this site, from the aesthetic point of view. I’ve seen others worse-looking than this one, right here.
Its main problem is functional. I possibly haven’t got it right, but to me the menu “disappears” when any link is clicked, so how are people supposed to navigate it? Clicking the “back” button or scrolling up and down?
Very interesting post you made. I want to read more!! <333 I will check back frequently!