Hi,

Its not magic related or selling anything to anyone here, so I guess its ok to post. Unless rules have changed.

www.llcamps.co.uk

So, how is it? How could it be improved?

Thanks

I personally am not a fan of the american flag background, seems a little cheesy to me. Plus I'm assuming the thing in the middle is supposed to say "Amazing fun for 4-14 year olds" but it is cut off, possibly by framing issues.

Additionally, you seem to be using too many different colours that, while may contrast, do not go well with each other or are hard on the eyes. Try to use colours found in nature. That is, find yourself a picture of a forest or something, and pick the colours from there.

Your links to "Book Now", "Download info booklet" and "Broadway in Bushey" are poorly built as they go off of the box and do not cover certain sections of the box. This can be easily fixed by making an image link (not sure what you did here for it because I didn't check your source code). Or you can also make a link around a frame or button depending on which you've used here. That should give the link the attributes of the frame or image and not have it go off elsewhere. Also on this note, if you're worried about the "click here" text not being clickable because of this, make that text a link and you can also google how to make it different colours, not outlined, etc. in order to make it look the same as it does now.

Your copyright notice at the bottom should be either a different colour or set into a frame of its own because it is difficult to read as it is.

I would suggest not colouring the "USA" text on your homepage. While American-y in nature, it looks odd, and should probably just be the regular text colour. Additionally, under the "About" page you do the same thing. Again, changing the text colour mid-page is not necessarily a good idea. In this case, the colours aren't as bad, but a page looks more professional with only one colour of text on it.

The "Activities" page seems pretty well built. Although it looks as though you may have had an issue with spacing on the top left cell of the table. I'd suggest putting the smaller text on a new line instead of beside the bigger text.

The "book or contact" page looks okay, but again, might look better if you didn't use orange and green boxes and stuck with one colour.

The table under "dates and prices" is hard to read when the cells are dark blue in the background. Again, I'd suggest using one uniform colour. It is okay though to have your summary cells a different colour as they highlight the information you would like people to be looking at.

The "FAQ" page isn't bad. The changing in text colour here isn't as tacky as changing a whole paragraph. The header is fine to change so that people know the division in questions/sections.

No problems with the "Jobs" page. Looks fine.

The "Speciality Camps" page has the same changing whole paragraphs of texts colours problem. Additionally, your headings keep changing text size. It looks as though the heading "what speciality camps are available" should be bigger as in the green text "what is speciality".

Finally, the "theatre camps" link. It is a little difficult to read with the shadow text as well as the purple colour on the green background. I'd suggest changing that. The PDF itself doesn't look that as bad as you're supposed to have those flyers all flashy looking.

Hopefully this doesn't come off as mean. I'm not trying to be. I simply have taken a lot of web design courses in my schooling and those are the things I'd change. That way you'd look more professional. I do realize you want the page to look fun and colourful. But there's a difference between being colourful and too colourful. To me, your page is too colourful. Tone it down a bit and I think you'll be fine. Again, I'm not trying to put you down completely, just trying to give feedback. I hope it helps.

i also dont understand the American flag when the domain is .co.uk suggesting United Kingdom.

Benji or Paddy or DerZauberer will probably jump on this topic and give you great feedback about marketing and selling yourself.

However i can give you feedback on design itself rather than content as i've worked in a design field for years.

-Background needs to be more neutral and should not over power the foreground. Either have a plain colour or a texture that is seamless cause the flag repetition is not professional looking.

- Colour scheme. Stick to one. You dont really have a colour scheme, its green for the buttons on top, blue for the page and various other colours appear in boxes and in fonts. Its very chaotic, no sense of continuity. Having a colour scheme makes it look more professional.

- In terms of html code (which i'm not a expert in). Your page refreshes each time taking longer to load. As oppose to having the buttons remain the same and not have to refresh when you click it. If that makes sense.

my website is an example, not necessarily the best, take a look anyway http://www.thatmagicdude.com i've kept it simple and monochromatic. Probally too simple and too monochromatic for some. Could do with more graphics and content.

I do understand the American flag background as it is advertizing 'American style" day camps. Very good layout and information there.


Derrek, one suggestion on your contact info it goes to a hotmail address. Can't you use your site as an address i.e mine is (changed for obvious reasons) Paddy@Xx00-Xxx.com Looks better than an anonymous webmail site like hotmail.

Yes I have a Live.com address when I want to stay anonymous myself, just don't use it for business.

Unfortunately I've struggled to try and change it. I can put iinet instead of a hotmail domain but if i change any of my email domains i cant really forward emails automatically too my hotmail. So i'd have to start using Outlook and multiple email accounts. Might do that in the future though.

We are considering a change to this design: www.llcamps.co.uk/test

I wondered if anyone had any more feedback. It is just the one page at the moment.

In my opinion the first one is better. The second one is too colorful and it gets distracting. I get that you are trying to be playful since it is a kids camp...but it still needs to look professional which the second one doesn't. In either case, I know its a small detail, but i would recommend adding "#navbar(or whatever you are calling your navbar div) a:hover{" line to your css script. Give it a small highlight. Nothing too flashy, but a little something. Its add so much to the site.

OK sorry for the double post...but I think I may have spoke too soon. It may be just the grass BR that i don't like on the second one...

thanks.

dates and prices page is up although not complete.

As a professional web developer, my first thought was, "Oh, no, table layouts: it's the 90s all over again!" And then, when I viewed the source code, "Aagh, he's used the 'Save for Web and Devices' feature of Photoshop: run for your lives; there's no saving humanity!".

That aside, there's not a lot wrong with the visual aspect of the site. Okay, it's not exactly shiny and modern-looking, but I've seen much worse. Overall, it's not that bad. I like this version better than the older one, because it's livelier.

Practical criticism time:

1. For anything other than a prototype, PhotoShop's 'Save for Web and Devices' should never be used to create your HTML code. For saving the image slides, certainly; but the HTML, no way. This leads me on to:
2. Because you've saved everything out as images, a lot of the text on your site isn't actually text: it's just a picture of some text. This brings about a couple of problems, like Google not being able to index it. There is a technique called image replacement, which allows you to have the text be in your code, for robots to read, but an image of that text appear on the screen for people to see.
3. Biggest problem is the size of the page: one-and-a-quarter {i]mega[/i]bytes! About three quarters of that size can be attributed to the large grass picture you have as a background, but a lot of the images in general you could compress more than you have. I reckon you could shrink the size of the page down to about 400-500KB with good image compression, and using CSS to fill areas with solid colour, rather than having an image do that job.

Hope that helps you on your way.