Thread: Feedback on website remodel please

So I've had the same look on the site for about a decade and decided it's time for a change. I've already started changing things over but I would really like some feedback before I go ahead and alter everything. Nothing like changing 400 pages only to find that nobody else likes it. So any comments, suggestion, etc are welcome. I've changed over the Before you begin section and parts of the Movements section but the rest is still in the old style (in case you want to compare).

Middle Eastern Dance

(Oh and anyone who has linked to parts of the site may want to update their bookmarks since the urls are being altered as well in an effort to organize things on my end and make it easier to update)

Thanks in advance!

Hi Cassandra. I love your website and I'm glad you're freshening things up! I think you have a really workable design here and that it bring you into current times. Bearing that in mind, I have a few small suggestions...

I love the color scheme and how organzied the menu is. I also like the second-tier navigations. One thing that might be helpful is to bump up the contrast between the font and the buttons on the menu. I'm not sure that light lilac stands out enough against the grey and white, especially when it comes to people who may be visually impaired. I do, however, love the contrast of the main text area with the light grey with purple font. That looks sharp to me.

As far as graphics go, I'm going to get a little nitpicky...The photo of the belly on the banner is not "cut out" well and it looks ragged at the edges. If you have access to photoshop (or the free version gimp) you can easily smooth these out using the blur or refine edges tools.

Another thing is the wallpaper. It kind of bothers me that the wallpaper is tiled and that you can see where the image repeats. The swirls should meet up just like when you are matching a plaid when sewing. If you google "creating seamless patterns" you should get lots of ideas and even free patterns that you can download.

And finally, I personally think that you run the risk of this site looking dated very soon. I hate to have to say that, but it is almost dated now. We don't all want/need the most currently designed sites, but we live in a world of constantly evolving web design. Your design is definately appealing and easy-to-read and it is much better than the older version, but it's not exactly "fresh" if you know what I mean.

You can do two things for now that will help, but I am afraid that the other options are limited unless you want to spend a lot of money at graphic design firms. I would replace the tiling wall paper and the banner with something a little more current. You could hire a graphic designer just for that, which would be a lot cheaper than a complete overhaul.

Other than that you're good to go! Good luck!

I agree with Andalee about the colors on the menu. The lilac on gray is difficult for me to read, particularly if I selected that item in the menu.

In the "Before You Begin" section, I think it would be nice to have links in the page as well as in the menu; links being the words above the descriptions.

The "History" section looks like it's full of great information, but it's difficult to read because the text isn't broken up into paragraphs. Similarly, the "Warm up" section is difficult to read because the text is close together.

I like how you did the Persian classical dance page. It's very easy to read.

It's great site, otherwise!

I'm seeing some pages that are not consistent with the format of others (e.g, "Costuming" doesn't look like "Movements"), and other pages that were not found ("Education" and "Directories") I assume those areas are still under construction.

Mostly, I would suggest when you near the end of your upgrade process that you bring someone with fresh eyes and good editing skills to go over all of the pages with a fine-toothed comb. Even in a quick glance, I found spelling errors (e.g., "easliy," "restructire," etc.) and lots of formatting inconsistencies (sometimes the style changes from page to page). There are also formatting issues that an editor would balk at, like having a bulleted list with numbers in "Cultural No No's" (choose one or the other, not numbers and bullets), and the unwieldy text blocks like your warm up descriptions. There's no sense putting a lot of good information together if people are going to roll their eyes and give it the TL;DR treatment. White space is important to reader comprehension.

The theme is pretty. I might suggest you identify yourself in the banner, though. I can see you are going for a general-interest resource, but it's nice to know who's advice we're reading.

Love the feedback so far please keep it coming. I went ahead and incorporated most of the suggestions put forth so far. However, I'm curious what kind of background would be good as opposed to the (not so seamless) seamless tile that I'm currently using. Any suggestions? I've thought about something like these:
Colorful Backgrounds in High Resolution | WEB BACKGROUNDS
Abstract Bubble Background Set | WEB BACKGROUNDS
but I wasn't exactly thrilled with them either. I think too much pattern and color variation will be distracting when reading which is why I opted for the purple swirl pattern I currently have (although it was supposed to be seamless).
I've also thought about something with a side design like this:
Floral Pattern Twitter Backgrounds, Floral Pattern Twitter Themes

As far as identifying myself on the site that's tricky. First I don't want the focus to be on me because it is a general resource site and I'm not selling my services as a dancer. Secondly as a hijabi Muslima I cannot put pictures of myself in bellydance wear on the page. Is there something you would suggest as opposed to pictures of me? This is why I kind of choose a generic belly picture but I'm open to other suggestions.

The old format has a lot of inconsistency and spelling errors (most pages were made before my web design software had a spell checker... and now I feel ancient) so I'm trying to edit these things as I convert over to the new format. Each page is updated individually so I'm hoping that I will catch most of these already as I go through. Once each section has been updated to the new format there should be a lot more consistency though. Would you say that there is good consistency among all the pages with the purple design? That's what it will be switching to. I'd love to be able to hire someone to do fancy web design, editing, and other development but as a hobby site it does not generate any revenue and because of the fantastic deal I get on hosting so far I can keep going with it but my hosting package limits some of the things I can do. It doesn't have the freedom to use like css styles and advanced web programming. I can't even do flash or silverlight applications or anything. It doesn't even allow use of .png files so it's difficult to do any sort of overlays. The things I normally would do in Dreamweaver or Expression just can't work with this particular site unless I switch hosts which pricing does not allow for now. So any workaround kind of solutions for giving it a more modern look with limited parameters is greatly appreciated.

Originally Posted by cassandra581

As far as identifying myself on the site that's tricky. First I don't want the focus to be on me because it is a general resource site and I'm not selling my services as a dancer. Secondly as a hijabi Muslima I cannot put pictures of myself in bellydance wear on the page. Is there something you would suggest as opposed to pictures of me? This is why I kind of choose a generic belly picture but I'm open to other suggestions.

Would you be comfortable putting your name in the banner? It's a natural question for a visitor to ask who you are and what your credentials are, especially when part of your target audience is beginners. (A student needs to have amassed a lot of information before being able to tell the good sites from the visually-pretty-but-crazy ones without help.) The primary issues are whether you're a reliable source of information and whether you've organized your material in a useful way. What you look like is less important. On a similar note, I think your biography deserves better than to be buried at the bottom of "Before You Begin" > "Use Of This Site." What if you gave it a separate page that was linked to your byline at the bottom?

Would you say that there is good consistency among all the pages with the purple design?

There's still a little more variety than I'm comfortable with. From a documentation standpoint, once you get more than a few different formatting options per page (fonts, sizes, colors, italics/bold, etc.), it can start becoming cluttered. For example, these two pages are pretty different looking: Terminology and The Belly Dance Movement Thesaurus. Are you using a style sheet? That should help with consistency from page to page.

I'd love to be able to hire someone to do fancy web design, editing, and other development but as a hobby site it does not generate any revenue and because of the fantastic deal I get on hosting so far I can keep going with it but my hosting package limits some of the things I can do.

You might inquire about bartering with someone for web support or editing services.

I'm not really comfortable with putting my name on the banner. I would be willing to consider adding a page specifically for a bio but I'm still conflicted about placing it right on the front page... I'll have to think it over a bit more before making a decision on that.

I am using the same exact template for each page including text. However somethings are unique content that don't exactly fit in with the normal format. The Styles of dance page Shows things in a hierarchical organization which I think needs to be in the kind of outline it is in right now while the Thesaurus is listed only be letters. Now I suppose that I could put the styles in alphabetical order but I think it makes more sense to see them divided out into regions and countries. Is your main issue with the size of the font? I guess I could maybe try to change that a little bit but I think the structure here makes sense for the content. How would you prefer to see those two pages presented to be consistent with the rest of the site?

I wasn't talking about the hierarchy, but the fonts. If I save those two pages from the earlier thread and open them in MSWord, it thinks the Terminology page has the following text formats: Georgia 18 bold/italics, Georgia 12, Georgia 15 bold/underline (but not hyperlink), Georgia 13.5, Georgia 10 underlined hyperlink in blue, and Georgia 10. On the thesaurus page, it says you have Georgia 18 bold/italics, Georgia 7.5 bold/italics, Helvetica 10, Helvetica 10 in magenta, Helvetica 10 underlined hyperlink in gray, Helvetica 19.5, Helvetica 12 bold, and Helvetica 12 bold in magenta. That's 13 different text styles, and that's getting pretty visually chaotic.

You don't have to change your organization of the information, just streamline the number of different text formats. Pick the font size you want for your main text (personally, I'd use Georgia 12 for readability), and then pick a couple of styles of Georgia for your outline levels, maybe 18 bold/italics for your page title, 16 bold for your next level and 14 bold or 14 italic for the level below that. Most of your outline levels are also indented, so you don't need as much formatting to convey the structure of the information. Try to reserve underlining for your hyperlinks. If you need to emphasize something within a paragraph of text, use bold or italics in the same font size.

I'm assuming your ultimate goal is to have information for each of the moves in your thesaurus, since a list of moves isn't particularly useful on its own other than as a checklist when it's your teacher's. To that end, I'd also do away with extraneous formatting and use brackets to designate the "zone," so they aren't confused with parenthetical information. You could accomplish the idea with the same size of text by doing something like this:

3-Step Turn
3/4 Shimmy [hips], also called "Bobble Walk," "Egyptian Walking Shimmy"
...
3/4 Shimmy with Backward Twist [hips], also called "Algerian Shimmy (Moving Backward)," Hagala Shimmy (Moving Backward)"
...
Bobble Walk [hips], see "3/4 Shimmy," also called "Egyptian Walking Shimmy"
...
Egyptian Walking Shimmy [hips], see "3/4 Shimmy," also called "Bobble Walk"

If you feel that doesn't give you the distinction you want, then you could italicize everything to the right of the comma like this:

3-Step Turn
3/4 Shimmy [hips], also called "Bobble Walk," "Egyptian Walking Shimmy"

As it is now, I feel the scheme with extra colors calls too much attention to terminology you weren't emphasizing on the site.

I don't want to keep hassling you with feedback. PM me if you want to talk formatting.