Please help test my son's movie site for school

Cafe Society
21

I haven’t seen any of those movies because I’m a big loser, so I wasn’t able to add a review…

But, I’m a professional Web designer so I’ll throw out a few tips.

  • The justified text alignment in the left nav is not going well. See “Alvin & the Chipmunks” and “Percy Jackson” There’s no reason to use that alignment unless you’re expecting a paragraph of text. You don’t expect a paragraph in a list of titles.

  • There needs to be a little padding at the bottom of this page. There really should be a footer at the bottom of every page with links, so I don’t have to scroll up to get back to navigating. A footer also helps encapsulate the content so that you know that the page is “over” and there isn’t an error keeping the entire page from loading.

  • He could stand to style the textboxes, select boxes and buttons. His graphics scream “I just found the Photoshop filters!” but that’s ok because it’s dead hard to just wake up one day and be a graphic design expert. However, if he took a little time to style form elements his presentation could be kicked up several notches and bring him in from the 90’s.

  • The use of user avatars is confusing. I don’t know what the default avatar is supposed to be…it should be a logo representing the site or something. On Firefox, the avatar has a yellow border around it that is a different yellow than anywhere else on the site (other than the corkboard). If he insists on putting them in the text, he needs to put a margin around them so the text isn’t butting up against them.

  • The ads are image links and have borders around them. They need to not have default link-colored borders. Set the image to have border=0 and, if they look bad, make a style with a border for the ad that is not “default link blue.”

  • The movie pages need a little bold here and there to differentiate text, such as “Directed By:” and “Theatrical Release:”. Otherwise, reviews and movie info sort of just run together.

  • The corkboard style on user pages is completely off-putting. It looks like he found some code on someone else’s site and pasted it in, and didn’t have full control over the style. But he does. The site is dark and the corkboard is just BAM in your face. It needs to be styled to better suit the site.

  • Also with the corkboard I think he needs to style it with a div inside of a td, instead of styling the entire td. If you look at his user page, the corkboard background runs the full height of his reviews, because the height of the corkboard td matches that of the height of the td to its left. If the corkboard was its own div, it would only be as high as its content.

  • One last thing to think about is design concerns as the site grows. Right now, the “Entire Movie Database” page is manageable because there are only so many movies. Once you get to a certain point, it’s going to be unwieldy and no one will be able to find movies other than the most recent ones in the left nav. The same goes for user pages. Aroniak’s page is already getting to be too long.

A search feature would be nice for the “Entire Movie Database” but that’s probably not do-able by Monday. A scheme to divide/link by titles, alphabetically could work. Or, having lists of movies by genres, by title, by year (each on a different page) could be beneficial to make the site seem like it has more movies than it really does. Then, as the lists grow, they won’t be overwhelming.

On the user page, a list of their reviews with links to the reviews might be more useful than having their actual reviews. And, making users click out to reviews would be beneficial to the advertising scheme (more page views).

So, I’m trying not to be too nit-picky but hopefully these little tips can help clean up the site a bit and make it look more pro for his presentation.

22

That site really hurts my eyes, and is confusing to a non techie old fogey like me. Way too much duck sauce.

23

I haven’t read the other comments, so these may be redundant:

  1. The color scheme is *really *uninviting (i.e., ugly), and it’s way harder to read than it needs to be.

  2. Not sure where he’s getting his list from, but I saw more than 20 movies in the theater last year, and a whole lot of them were not on this list – (500) Days of Summer, The Road, Slum Dog Millionaire, The Wrestler just off the top of my head. Yeah, I see a lot of indie films – but the latter two were Oscar contenders/winners.

  3. If there’s a way to add a movie to the list (see #2), it’s not at all obvious how you do it.

  4. In the column on the left, he should probably not try to right-justify multi-line titles … looks funky.

24

Like everyone else has said, he needs to lose the GeoCities look.

25

Agree with most everything **ZipperJJ **said. I will add:

How many different fonts, font styles, and font colors do you need? The whole thing would benefit from greater style consistency and reduction in the number of different stylistic elements.

On the other hand, if he is deliberately going for that 90’s retro style GeoCities look like **Palooka **mentions, he needs to add some animated GIFs and implement frames. He is so close already–that might be the easiest path. :smiley:

26

I signed up and rated the movie I had seen - but out of the list of movies in the database, I had only seen one. I think I may not be as hip as some others that were on there though - we don’t go to see movies in the theater at all, just get them from netflix…

Brendon Small (mcnallybm on there)

27

Thanks to all who participated. The feedback really helped him, and he was up late last night locking in the changes. He didn’t feel comfortable changing the whole look and feel last night (color scheme, etc.) in case he broke something before deadline, but he implemented as many of the other changes as he could.

If he does well at State competition, he’ll have another chance to work on it before submitting for National – he could change the color scheme and other aesthetics then.

Again, thanks for helping. He really appreciates it.