Anyone kind enough to beta test something for me?

T

TheBluePill

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Anyone kind enough to beta test something for me?

Hey Ya’ll

I’m building a website to document the house that I’m having built and I’m looking for a couple of folks that would be kind enough to “beta test” it, or at least give it a good look over for glitches. There are several pages and I’ve worked for months on it, but I’m always afraid I’ve overlooked something.

If you have a moment or two, please check it out and let me know if something is not working or looks strange.

I appreciate it much!

http://www.fromplattoplace.com

-TBP
 
I'm not really an expert or anything, but I believe you should be using a sans-serif font like Arial on webpages. Fonts like Times New Roman are only good for printed documents.
I also don't feel very comfortable with the colours, especially the yellow text.
 
Last edited:
TheInfernal said:
I'm not really an expert or anything, but I believe you should be using a sans-serif font like Arial on webpages. Fonts like Times New Roman are only good for printed documents.
I also don't feel very comfortable with the colours, especially the yellow text.
Click to expand...

Ah, Didnt really think of that. I did have to increase the font size to make it as readable as possible. Is it interrupting anything?
 
The text was very readable. It just that it wasn't a comfortable experience. Maybe other folks here might tell you otherwise. As I said, I'm no expert.
 
Consider a different way for the links on the right? Seems like there is a TON of unnecessary scrolling.
 
Yeah, probably try to divide it by phase (several major phases) in the menu, and then when you click or mouseover a menu, the individual steps in that phase show up. Right now it is a bit TMI.
 
Nice site. I really enjoyed seeing the progression and I thought your explanations and summaries for each section were very informative but at the same time personal. I do agree that the yellow font color becomes uncomfortable after a few minutes of reading. My eyes seemed to feel stressed halfway through. It may help to make it a little bit darker. The links on the side didn't bother me much because I just went through each page by clicking the arrow. I do think it should be broken up into sections though with sub sections so there isn't as much scrolling if someone is looking for something in particular.

Otherwise, it looks great! Nice house...congratulations!
 
Thanks for all of the awesome feedback so far!

On the Menu, I could add some more breaks, Between the Foundataion, Framing, Drywall and finishing phases.

The Yellow text was the best color I could find to go with the background, Black works OK, but perhaps there is something Im missing. Im not much of an artist, though all of the site is from scratch.
 
The writing is very odd. It changes perspective from "you" and "your" to "our", then to passive "when" or "the".

The left-hand navigation area is noisy, with the colors and borders, and the backgroud, and the numbers.
 
mikeblas said:
The writing is very odd. It changes perspective from "you" and "your" to "our", then to passive "when" or "the".

The left-hand navigation area is noisy, with the colors and borders, and the backgroud, and the numbers.
Click to expand...

I really do need to go back through and review the writing.. These pages were put together over a 6 month period, as sort of a blog of what i was experiencing. ;)

I added several "breaks" to the side menu in an attempt to keep the left menu from being so long and tedious.

I also have a forum ive added;

www.fromplattoplaceforum.com

I have no users or content there yet.. but wth, right? :p
 
Nice.. esp. from scratch.

Couple thoughts:
1) Links on left I'm hoping are in transition w/ colors and shape. You should consider removing all the noise above and below each and just have them in a order w/o the strange background protrusion.
2) CSS in a file other than the one ending in "html"
3) It doesn't like to be made smaller, and change the font in places as suggested above.
 
1 - Change serif fonts to sans serif.
2 - Left navigation was difficult to follow. Try enlarging header font sizes so they stand out more. Maybe even do a CSS hover menu system, with the root menus of "Rough In Phase", "Introduction", etc.
3 - Page-to-page navigation jumps around a bunch at the bottom (depending on page content). How about putting a second set of forward/backward page links in a set location closer to the top? It'd be a lot easier to skim through the pages than click/scroll/click/scroll/click/scroll/(...)

Looks like the house turned out well!
 
-Your left menu needs work. Its background graphic is not big enough to cover all of the text in there.
-For ease of access I would somehow visually separate the main categories that are at the top of the menu with the numbered elements
-The left menu is a bit long. I prefer to keep any menu no more than one screen length at a decent resolution
-You could benefit from a tree menu on the left, separate sections with expandable sections for easier access- like the files in the left side of windows explorer. You can find a distributable one here: http://javascriptkit.com/script/treeview/index.shtml
-Your main iframe has a visible border. I'd set the frameborder to 0, but its up to you.

Other than that, really like the look of the site- images are very nice.
 
Hey Folks, Im still working on the site;

I haven't worked to develop a collapsible menu yet, but i did make several improvements
to the menu system to break it up a bit.
 
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