But Vincent Flanders does look like he smells of wee.
cerberus
All right !!!
Yes, a long time ago someone used my vector addition calculator and also commented on how the site design was something less than spectacular.
So, I told him that I may have spent a little more time writing the damned calculator as opposed to what it looked like. Otherwise, his E-Mail would probably have been “Hey Wolf - I got an “F” in physics - but what a kick-ass website design you’ve put together”.
chappachula
Ah ha, you have discovered my website design secret - the site that looks so bad, you’ll definitely remember it.
Seriously, a lot of the comments being made here are being taken into consideration. Still as cerberus has noted, an educational website does not necessarily need to have the hippest, latest high-tech “bells and whistles”. Sometimes I’ll make a minor change to a webpage and I’ll get an E-Mail from somebody stating that a calculator that used to work, no longer works. (Yes, I try to test those things for most browsers but there’s always those few exeptions that might be using an early version of the Opera browser with a Windows Millenium operating system.)
If nothing else, the website is fast-loading. Someone preparing for a final does not want to be confronted with a swirling Moiré pattern that takes a minute to load.
Just wondering. I use Comic Sans font a LOT. It’s easy to read but is that also a web deign faux pas?
Beware of Doug
Yes, Vincent Flanders does smell of wee and his father smelled of elderberries.
wolf, I get the feeling that you aren’t very open to constructive criticism.
Everyone appreciates that your scripts are the main content of your site. The thing is, it doesn’t take much effort to present them in a way that’s a bit easier on the eyes. You have some very nice, functional javascripting there. Great! But why put all that effort into the scripts and then not bother to make the miniscule effort that it takes to make it look nice, too? You may get a lot of hits, but how much of that has to do with the number of common search terms that you have on the front page, rather than how many people look beyond the homely interface? (Or even bother to scroll down to see what you have, instead of guessing that the page was put together by some sloppy kid and moving on?)
You realize that because of your big ugly text, crude markup, and ridiculous misuse of tables, on every single page of your site, a full half of screen is taken up by non-content? On your front page there’s no actual content at all visible above the fold? Your users have to scroll down to get to the goods on every page? Why?
You know that none of your calculator pages contain a <NOSCRIPT> tag, so that visitors for whom your applications simply don’t work may assume that it’s just because you’re a lousy coder? You spent all that time on the javascript and can’t be bothered to include a few lines of HTML to say “Hey, Luser! You need to enable javascript to use this site!” instead of presenting people with a bunch of input fields and buttons that don’t do anything? You took the time to include some error-handling in the javascript, right? Why cheap out on the envelope?
Look, you’re obviously proud of the work you’ve done to make your site, and are pleased when people make use of it. I guarantee you, if you took the very small amount of time it would take to make your site a little bit more presentable, you’d get more traffic.
It ain’t just websitesthatsuck.com – your webpage is used as an example in web design classes.
Care to bet which of the trinity your page has been selected to represent?
Yes, it loads fast. That’s all to the good. Improving the design side doesn’t mean adding a bunch of extraneous crap. Good design also loads fast. Nobody’s saying you should spend hours crafting elaborate animated rollovers with sound for each of your links, or add a bunch of flash. That’s just another kind of suck.
wolf_meister: You could improve your web page design immesurably by removing elements:
[ul]
[li]Remove the images. You don’t need them, they certainly don’t help your calculators any, and they make the pages slower to load. Function over form, right?[/li][li]Remove all ‘font’ tags. Again, you don’t need them and they make your pages look like crap.[/li][li]Remove all text formatting beyond what’s needed to break up paragraphs. This doesn’t mean removing tables, which are an entirely different kettle of fish, but it does mean not centering text and not altering its size and color.[/li][li]Remove all extras from your tables. Beveled edges are ugly and take up screen space that should be used for your site’s only reason for being: the calculators. Colors are simply ugly.[/li][li]Remove the non-content. Nobody cares about how many hits you get, and they certainly don’t care how those hits are broken down by year. Most websites that trumpet their number of hits don’t have anything else to say. Don’t resemble those losers.[/li][/ul]Nobody is questioning your content. Nobody ever has. People are offering helpful criticism about your design, which thus far has been akin to tossing water balloons against a metal wall: Nothing is apparently sinking in.
The goal of all this is to make your site even more useful. That is what you want, isn’t it?
Tweek the colors. :rolleyes: 
Yeah, we remember that it sucked and immediately close it down the second time.
This is a massive faux pas on the web and in general. Never use Comic Sans unless your actually making comics.
Out of interest, do you track stuff like the average time and number of pages visited per unique visitor? That would give an indication of how many people genuinely like your page and how many just stumble in from google and close it down before even looking at the content.
**Larry Mudd, Derleth, ouryL, Shalmanese **
I know it might seem that I’m sensitive to criticism (destructive or constructive) but I am taking these suggestions quite seriously.
Really, this is a thread that I thought would never be headed in this direction. (I figured maybe about 20 replies about WPTS are the ones that really suck - big time !!! Yeah they suck rhino.)
I do appreciate the time a lot of Dopers have taken to share advice and suggestions. I have got an easy question - and it would be a good starting point. Don’t name an entire website but what one partcular page seems to you to be a good example of web design? (One with normal colors, font sizes and so on).
Pluck your site out of 1995 by simply removing the textured background image. A change of colour scheme and reduction of the size of the table borders would also work wonders. Steer clear of Comic Sans, it’s completely overused and looks dated. All the stuff about the number of hits you’ve had and so forth may be really interesting to you, but that sort of thing makes my eyes glaze over. It would be better at the bottom of the page if you have to use it. Why not just stick a hit counter on if you feel the need to adversite your popularity.
“Why” do you feel the “need” to “highlight” certain words by using “quotation marks”? Lose that immediately.
>>>Also, I do not need arrows to tell me where to read, nor multiple exclamation marks to tell me what’s important!!!<<<
I cannot imagine that I would ever use your Website Design Tools - does anyone?
It doesn’t need to be fancy but it needs to be functional. First, strip the site to the bare minimum and then start adding things that have a clear advantage. Ditch the 9/11 memorial (or put it in misc), ditch all the exclaimation marks, the hits info and the search bar, move the tables up, thin them out and have them take full advantage of the horizontal screen space. Reduce your email and copywrite stuff to a single line of size 10 font down the bottom and it should all theoretically fit on one page. Now, you have a barebones site and you can start putting some tasteful frills on. Put an immediate blurb after the title telling me what this site is, something like “The webs most complete set of online calculators” or something. For each link, provide another short blurb saying what it is. What the hell is an ultra calculator? I certainly didn’t know and I’m not going to click just to find out.
Add a nav bar, either to the left or to the top. Simple frames is fine for that, nothing too fancy, you can pop the search in the nav bar as well. Build a sitemap so crawlers can index the site easily.
Try playing around with fonts and colour schemes a bit. Pay attention to sites you normally go to and see what schemes they are using. Times is generally not a web font, you want something sans serif (without the dangly bits on the ends of the letters), Arial is standard, Helvitica is popular if overused.
If you do all those things, you’ll have an adequate if not beautiful site. And really, thats all you need.
Sure, that’s an easy one.
Here’s a page that’s a pretty good example of straightforward, elegant design:
It’s clean, easy-to-read, the navigation is immediately intuitive, and most (or even all, at higher resolutions) of the content is right there for you as soon as the page loads – which it does quickly, because it’s very parsimonious with the bandwidth.
There is quite a bit of graphics, but it’s the right sort of implementation of graphics – the icons are distinct, and make it easy for people to find what they’re looking for if they’re returning to the page to find something in particular – no need to read all the links each time. The graphics aren’t particularly stylish, but they work. There’s no pointless graphics-for-graphics’ sake, and they’re all nicely optimized. There are 25 purposeful graphic items, including the Google logo, totalling a reasonable 37k. (For comparison, your front page uses 25% of that for very little practical effect.)
This certainly isn’t a design-heavy page – but it’s well designed: Practical, nothing sticks in your eye, and you immediately know what you’re looking at and where it leads. It’s not a “Gee, that’s pretty!” page, but it’s elegant in that there’s no waste.
I picked this page because there’s a certain amount of analogy with the sort of thing you need on your front page – ie; a bunch of links that lead to other pages. When this page loads, most folks are are looking right at twenty-five or so links that are either self-explanatory or have concise descriptions of what they’re for. (The icons are a bonus for making the page easy for repeat users to find their way around, but maybe creating or finding appropriate ready-made icons for your purposes is a bit more ambitious than you want to get into.)
Anyway, the purpose of your front page is to present 15 links. When you look at what the Google designers were able to do, you can see that it’s easily possible to put them right up front, with helpful summaries of what they’re about, without requiring your user to scroll around to see if there’s anything appealling on offer. Subtler colours and the absence of a distracting background tile make for a more appealing page. Note the standard-sized text, decent font, and most importantly, the total absence of ALL-CAPS text, inappropriate punctuation, and “decorative” ASCII characters. You have 15 exclamation points on your front page! 15 exclamation points is a bit much for anything outside of a three-page piece of hate-mail written by a fourteen-year-old girl. They are extremely misplaced on a practical web resource.
If you were to give 1728.com the smallest of overhauls, and just lose the superficial dross, you could transform it from being a useful site with an embarrassing appearance into the Rock God of internet calculator resources. Seriously, that baby of yours is Brad Pitt in parachute pants, a Twisted Sister concert shirt, taped-up glasses and a Budweiser cap. There’s a lot to look past. Ditch that stuff and throw a white t-shirt and jeans on it, man! You’ll be glad you did.
I just redesigned your front page into something a little more pleasing. Though admittedly somewhat dull.
That’s muuuch better! Would it be possible to make the tables smaller though? I’m thinking something like google where it’s thin and in the middle of the page instead of a long box with a word in the middle of it like you’ve got it there.
It’s not my site, I’m just playing around to show an example.
I know, I was asking if you could do that where you’re playing around. If you don’t want to 'sall cool.
Rule #1: Tell people what you have and what they’re looking at. Otherwise they’re likely to look elsewhere.
I had no idea what http://www.1728.com/ was when I went there. The first page didn’t help any. It told me it was popular, and it had links to something called “Calculator City”. Is this “Calculator City” part of “1728 Software Systems”? Is it some where else? What does it mean by “calculator”? What’s this city refered to? Is that a real place like “Motor City”? How does “1728 Software Systems” fit into things then? 
All this would be solved by a single explanitory paragraph at the top. But instead I have to scroll before I even start to figure out what’s going on. And scroll. And scroll. Why are there acres of empty space filling my monitor?
And then we get on to the calculator pages. Why are they designed so that if I want to read how to use them I have to scroll down to the bottom, read, scroll back to the top, fill things in, scroll back to the bottom, read a bit more, scroll back up, hmm, no hang on, scroll back down again, read some more, scroll back up. It’s almost as if you were deliberately making it difficult for people. The actual calculator is tiny in comparison to the text. So even an ultra simple design of spilt frames would do the job. Put the calculator in the top frame, text in the bottom. Then you can scroll through as much help text as you want, without ever losing sight of the calculator.
So, yeah, the web site does suck. Excellent content. But the design really sucks.
Bet you’re sorry you asked now… 
You’rew kidding, it’s bad for a website designed in 1895.
Wow, well for once WPTS was right.
Problems I see:
Colors are painful. They hurt. Take Art101 and learn about which colors accent another, rather then make your website look like a spray of ketchup and mustard.
Format/styling is from before there was any formatting available in HTML other then hr, br, img, font and p(aragraph).
This webpage has some great information on it, and if you fixed up the styling a bit, it’d be a lovely website that would generate even MORE hits.
I’m a hardcore geek with nerd tendencies, but I can still make a site look decent with a half hour to spare and an colorwheel.
Holy shit! I’ve had your site bookmarked for over six months!
I’m an engineer, and have used your calculators on many, many occasions. I don’t care what it looks like. Keep it ugly. It keeps the rest of us geeks pure.
Dude, I had no idea you were working those sites.
Tripler
I feel so dirty now. You were “working” those sites.
“hits” is the only measurable unit - unless you’re requireing personalized logins, you won’t know. Any “measure” of visits/visitors on an anonymously accessible website is hardly more reliable than “html hits / some constant”.
True enough.
Wolf, you owe this man a big thank you.