vbDesigners.com ready to rock :D.

[Xtrato]

hello people , well i just finished my new site, and i want you guys to take alook , and possibly , advice on services and what not.

Well the primary objective of this community is to gather the most developers graphical and other as well to provide some good services to people :D .

of course cant beat vb.org on developers etc, but in graphic terms i want to create a huge community that will allow designers and developers share ideas and what not.

I hope you guys like the new site , and let me know what are your thoughts.

Best Regards to all.

Site : www.vbdesigners.com

[Xtrato]

:( no one likes it ,,?

[SEOvB]

your drop down menu's don't line up in the header

looks "cartoonish"

report a bug link goes to invalid forum

"legal" link is invalid

Its not bad, but its not great either

[gfxhelp.com]

It has the "technology" look which many people like such as gamers etc etc. From a business standpoint I would find a more neutral theme in the sense that if someone looking for a clean conservative theme comes across the site they may leave. If you decide to leave it as your standard theme just make sure to show to other type of themes such as the "clean and rounded corners" style and so on.

Also, the drop down menus are a little chunky, the font is a little too bold and big in my opinion. I would probably just use text instead of images, it will compress everything a little and will be better for seo / load times anyways.

[Xtrato]

Thank you guys! , i will implement the ideas you guys share , also , FRDS , what browser are you using ? it seems to work correctly on my IE and opera.

Regards.

PS im working on a font page right now.

[nexialys]

Xtrato, if you base your designing skill to the good usage on IE or Opera, you forget 75% of the internet market...

Work with Firefox even if you don't like it, because the internet is not coded based on your taste but on the entire community compliances... IE and Opera are not even compliant with the basic W3C rules...

anyway, my review:

the basic elements of your style is clean and crisp, the green over the silver is good, not too proeminent. maybe the dotted bars is not the best, i would have made id shaded instead of fully dotted. what bug me is the load of completely useless icons everywhere... the flash, photoshop icons just before your phone number, not good... also, showing your phone number directly on top of your site shows a lack of professionalism... contacts always have to be via a private form when you really are a internet worker... everybody knows it... because now, your phone number is listed for phone spam.

using unrelated icons is not pro... you have a distorted xBox icon for about everything on your site... relating your design to microsoft will not give you anymore power.

in the footer, there are spaces related to IE css coding that would be avoided if you follow CSS2 compliance... (use Firefox to see the errors)

if you really are a designer, design your posticons, your forumbit icons and all your function icons instead of taking 3rd party related icons anybody can find on themesbase.com

[Shelley_c]

I couldn't quite put a word to it to describe your style which is why i refrained from giving it a critique. So, I'd agree with what one of the members (further up this thread) said that the style and images look cartoonish, somewhat chunky which I personally feel doesn't look to good on a designers forum. Did you actually designthe icons and images throughout the board? Because It's always good practice (especially if your a graphics orientated site) to design your own icons and images) and I'm sure these icons (esp on the navbar) are pre-made.

With regards to the style, It looks nice (if you were a console based site) It looks the type of style you would use on an xbox site and It doesn't feel like a graphics site.

Reviewing the icons in the dropdown menu of the navbar. The icons look blurry and could be a lot crispier/sharper. I sense you didn't design these? Reason for that statement is because when graphics are scaled down they loose quality (unless your dealing with vectors) which i use to desgn images/icons. I'd suggest designing some icons (try using the Pen tool) and see the difference bewteen the quality of icons that you could potential produce.

I find the forum staus icons (again as stated above) blurry, visualy quality being mediocre. I'm not sure they suit a designers site and would be mistaken and related to an xbox themed style. Again, with the images, (what's going on area) it's hard to view the icons and being crammed in such a small space inside the "X" the quality looks mediocre.

It's not a bad style, just could be sharper/crispier with regards to the icons and images dotted throughout the forum.

[Xtrato]

ah , nice , good shower of criticism , :) , nice , i will sure implement all of your ideas , good stuff, i find it very nice and good to hear all of this..

Also ,i meant to say Firefox Nexialys , IE an FF . so now as far as the X, well those icons are from my other site , Xtrato Designs , so the X had to do with the X being Xtrato , i do need to change those however.

and I will now then change the icons on the header to HTML based , or simple ones rather.

The only icons i didnt design were the ones on the nav too ,s o i should be able to replace those and practice some designing on icons, should be a good warm up once again.

So i will change the X once again to vBD or similar, just for the record , im not affiliated with Xbox haha :p , well , thank you guys so much for these constructive criticism , i will implement what ever is necessary to improve the site , back from pause need some good work out.

I will update you guys soon as i re-design and or change some things around.

thanks again !

[Shazz]

Shelley and nex have already explained it but yea I thought it was a game site :o

[KTBleeding]

Opera are not even compliant with the basic W3C rules...Perhaps I misunderstood what you meant, but Opera is hands down one of the best followers of standards compliance. It is, and has been ahead of Firefox for some time now. If it wasn't for the plugins, I would use Opera over FF any day.

As for a review: Redo the menu. I'm not talking about design here, if you want to keep the "cartoonish" feel to it, have at it.. but you will find a much better cross browser performing menu if you use semantic markup. You used custom code outside of vB anyways, you may as well do it correctly. ;)

For the record, I'm using FF3 and the drop down menu is not functioning..

[Infopro]

I like it. I think the fonts and icons are too big in the navmenu(s) and the dark bold border on everything really darkens it up. a bit too much... But the cart and support areas work nicely on the layout. (although the colors might match a bit more closely)

Web Developer plugin for FF points out several issues that appear to be easy fixes. (and probably should be as this is a designers site) ;)

Nice job.

[M-Tuning]

Doesn't work correctly in Firefox 3.0

[Xtrato]

It should work now , i updated my firefox and it seems to work correctly , also guys i tried it without icons and it looks VERY empty, so i will design some unique to site to better fit the design , i will implement more ideas as well, as of now im working on the shop cart, later i will work on downloads for some incredible skins we will be releasing , but remember, dont miss your opportunity to grow with the community :D

[Digital Jedi]

The Forums button doesn't actually do anything when clicked, and the Home button actually takes you to the Forums. I believe that might be something you'd want to look at.

[SCRIPT3R]

Just some random thoughts after a quick glimpse... xBox-ish, mech-ish, game site?, too skinny, drop menu's don't work completely... but at least it's up and started, kudos!

[Xtrato]

thank you all! , i will be doing some edits , updates and what not , then will show you guys once again :)