New Website for East Dulwich Feedback Needed

[mrcee]

Use wordpress

[Alex K]

Better, certainly, than lordshiplane.co.uk, which lists the East Dulwich Garden Centre as still trading.

[Anstergirl]

Hi Dulwich Fox,

I looked at this today on iPad, sadly agree with all comments above re being old-fashioned. To help you hear and accept all the comments above I suggest you remove yourself personally from the comments and think of yourself as the editor, you now need your techy person to help your idea/company flourish. Many comments above will help your techy person succeed and therefore your concept and the success of this site grow. Don't take it personally and it will be a success, take it personally and change nothing and none of us will ever use the site as it's not appealing.Additionally, all web pages need to work well on mobile technology or won't be used. My comments are supportive and I hope they read as such.

[Rolo Tomasi]

I will not be using this.

[a_book_for_life]

Hi Dulwich Fox,

I am a professional web designer and thought I would offer you some tips - I hope you don't mind.

First of all, I don't think you need a totally responsive design for a website to work on tablets and phones as well as desktops. This site (EDF) for instance is not responsive but many people use it from phones. The crucial thing you need to do is to make your site portrait, not landscape. It should scroll down rather than fill the browser window sideways. This single change will make your site more navigable on smaller devices.

Also I'm guessing that you are hand-coding every page. If so you will soon be overwhelmed by the amount of updates that you have to make every day and the time this will take. You really need to make use of one of the content management systems out there - Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal are the most well known - to help with the maintenance and updating of the info and make your work easier. People will not visit a directory site that is not up to date so you could be putting a lot of work into your site to find that no one visits it. If you know CSS, HTML and PHP already then I think you will find Wordpress or similar easy to get to grips with.

There are a few tweaks you can do to your CSS to make the page sit more comfortably, particularly when you resize the window. You are setting some of the boxes in an absolute position and so they are not resizing at the same time as other boxes so that they appear to spill out of them. I suggest that you take a look at lynda.com for some training which will show you how to use CSS. It really is an excellent resource. It is clear, well put together and comprehensive and all for a very low fee. I highly recommend it.

As for the aesthetics of your site, I would not take all the negative comments to heart. If your website delivers what it promises to deliver then people will use it.

Good luck and enjoy working on your project. It really is satisfying when it comes together.

[Jeremy]

I agree about the relative positions... the site looks a bit broken when maximised on an HD display. Should be an easy fix.

Aesthetically, as other have suggested, you could get a quick improvement by picking a nice looking font and sticking with it throughout.

Also you mentioned something about showing pharmacy opening times, but I couldn't see that.

Good luck fox!

[binary_star]

+1 for wordpress...which you can find lots of free responsive themes for should you wish to (this forum is not responsive but it is quite cumbersome to use on smartphones and there have been threads asking for a mobile friendly version/EDF app).

[El Pibe]

Foxy, you don't go on somewhere asking for feedback (which will usually be critical, though it's all been positive useful criticism), and get all defensive.

It's early doors for what I guess was largely an intellectual autodidactic exercise anyway.

Fantastic what you've achieved technically, so now it's time to get your design hat polishewd (I'm terrible at design I'll admit but have an idea what works and what doesn't).

I'd echo many of the comments, but a great starting point would be to get a simple elegant sans serif as your font, serifs (times new roman?) do look terribly 1995.

Also try less hard to get flashy stuff at this stage and just try for the moment to get your layout right.

Design it on paper, consider that people will be on differnt browsers on different devices, not everyone has a browser opened at full screen either.

Do it on paper, work out your divs and spans and get a base template working for your site. Remember, reuse reuse reuse.

[Seabag]

I spent a few minutes on there from my ipad. It's dull and lacks any pop and I jumped off it

As others have said, it looks and feels a bit old and clunky already

I won't be using it I don't think

Sorry

[Loz]

binary_star Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> +1 for wordpress...which you can find lots of free

> responsive themes for should you wish to (this

> forum is not responsive but it is quite cumbersome

> to use on smartphones and there have been threads

> asking for a mobile friendly version/EDF app).

Wordpress is very good for blog/news type pages (for which it was made). For other types of websites it feels more like using the wrong tool. Joomla is better for non-blog websites (but not so good for blog/news type stuff), but far more complex to set up. There are lots of lighter CMS's out there. I've had a play with Silver Stripe which rather nice, but lacks much in the way of third-party development.

[DulwichFox]

I use Dreamweaver 6.

New Fluid-Grid site is currently under construction and some pages have been tested and working

on PC/Laptop / Tablet / ipod / Windows Phone. Not currently published.

Foxy.

[monica]

The site reminds me of Lordshiplane.co.uk, dont know if anyone remembers it, but it did not really take off, then the EDF was founded. Personally I dont think its going to work, but hey thats my opinion.

[binary_star]

Loz Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> binary_star Wrote:

> --------------------------------------------------

> -----

> > +1 for wordpress...which you can find lots of

> free

> > responsive themes for should you wish to (this

> > forum is not responsive but it is quite

> cumbersome

> > to use on smartphones and there have been

> threads

> > asking for a mobile friendly version/EDF app).

>

> Wordpress is very good for blog/news type pages

> (for which it was made). For other types of

> websites it feels more like using the wrong tool.

> Joomla is better for non-blog websites (but not so

> good for blog/news type stuff), but far more

> complex to set up. There are lots of lighter

> CMS's out there. I've had a play with Silver

> Stripe which rather nice, but lacks much in the

> way of third-party development.

Joomla is fine but requires you to be a it bit more tech minded which can put people off. From memory it's also pretty cumbersome to customise but must admit haven't used it for about 6 years. Wordpress has grown far beyond its initial blogging platform days and given the documentation, usability of the admin interface and sheer volume of plugins/themes/support available it's still on of the best out of the box freebies out there.

There are literally hundreds of free CMS products out there that are far more scalable (and probably more stable) than trying to code your own from scratch. Probably best to try out a few and see which one best suits your needs.

ETA:

Some Wordpress examples here (incl. Harvey Nic's): http://www.creativebloq.com/web-design/examples-wordpress-11121165

And here (incl Google ventures and Facebook newsroom) https://wordpress.org/showcase/