So I crash landed here a couple of days ago when one of you linked to my blog, but I've decided to stick around, so what do you think of my design site?
(please don't mention the IE7 z-index bug though )

Lyrical Media

I LOVE the design!

I'll go more in-depth later.. got to go

Groceries and drinks more important than me eh? Shame on you!

I absolutely LOVE the header and footer.

Not so much the main navigation ... it just doesn't seem to FIT with the beautiful header.

Those round buttons in the footer look like they don't fit either. And they load weird in FF3 on my iMac (see screenshot) .. I would just stick with the spiral thing you have for "The Other Bits"

 Picture_1.png ( 97.74K ) Number of downloads: 6

Yeah that mac FF3 bug has been plagueing me ever since I set the site live, I have NO idea what the problem is - once you roll over them they're fine! But they seem to initally load wherever the hell they want! Sometimes about 3000px below the footer too until you rollover, very weird.

I love the overall look a lot! I love all the little bits and pieces that add interest throughout the design. I also like how you placed an image of yourself. That is awesome!!
The header is fun and exciting!

I'm 50/50 on the navigation. I think it's too much... but the site rocks!!

average CPU load while navigating your site: 80%....
don't say my laptop is old...
you've got a lot of jQuery on the site....

but i luv the design! really well done!

Thanks guys! I still have lot to learn but I do feel like I'm progressing
As for you punky, the ONLY jquery on the site is on the navigation, get yourself a new computer sir!

this site leaves me torn. I love parts of it but hate others.

For example I love the background image but the navigation feels forced, out dated and just doesn't work with the site. You've got a good site cooking for sure but you need to look at the whole thing from a step or two back and think about what you could do to bring all elements of the design together.

Good work so far.

I think it's fan-bloody-tastic! I'm probably the least technically knowledged person on this forum, (I just hang around because I like the people really and they seem to tolerate me doing so!), so I'm just looking at your site from a consumer point of view and I would definitely be impressed if I was browsing for a web designer, it looks modern and funky, but also professional and slick. Nice work

Thanks Vanessa

As Dan said, this is a mixed design. The background/header stuff is great, but the top nav is annoying and slow (even in the rocket-propelled javacript beast that is Chrome). Firefox is currently using 50% of my processors (I have a dual core). I guess your top nav jQuery is re-evaluating at an aggressive frequency, and causing a huge javascript processing burden. This is highly user-hostile and you really should stop it.

The footer area is splendid too, but you need to stop those verylonglinksfrombreakingoutoftheframeandobscuringyourhandsomemug. They break correctly across lines in Firefox, but not in Chrome. I would recommend using link text instead of the full URL.

The weird "huge gap at the bottom until you mouseover the button" bug appears in FF3/Win too. You do have some invalid XHTML so I would try fixing those errors first. Otherwise your code looks fine.

Your file size is heavy -- the heaviest I've seen in quite a while: more than 1 Mb for your homepage! It's hard to set limits, and it depends on the site; for me, this seems about 9 -- 10 times too heavy. Almost all of this is images. Your header.png is a huge image, which you could consider splitting into smaller images (for example, the gradient could be separated from it). I'm not sure why you need an alpha-transparent PNG here. If at all possible, use PNG-8 instead (you don't have many colours, so that should work well).

Your Yslow grade is 43%, which you could improve a lot without much work. But the main problem for your site's speed is the file size of your images.

Overall, I really like your design. Unfortunately, as a user, I am driven to murderous thoughts by your heavy page weight and punitively processor-hogging scripts.

Ok, I'm back, awake, had a few drinks, waiting for my next meeting, so I'm ready to look at your website now

Like I said: I love the design (that didn't change), but I'm not to keen on the menu. The glassy bubble buttons don't match the rest of the site (that goes for the ones in the footer as well).

Other than that, loving the design.

Wow, bit of an onslaught there!

I've noticed that the nav is slow once in a while but it's never significantly slowed anything down for me across maybe 12 browsers on 3 differnt platforms. Maybe I need a slimmed down version of jquery.

No idea what you mean with the long links, got a screenshot?

FF3 Mac bug mentioned above already in this thread, any suggestions welcome. xHtml is actually all 100% valid it's the javascript feeds from other sites that throw it off, click the link you posted and you'll see.

And yeah it's certainly a big chubby girl of a site, no getting around that - need alpha transparency because I've got a gradient on top of a diagonal texture which expands both top and bottom, so it was the only way I could think of doing it. - Its just the header and footer images which are big, and I figure that they get cached for most people after the first page load anyway. - Not something I'd do on client sites but on my own I'm not particularly picky.

Thanks for all the feedback

Thanks Mark

I noticed the long links, see here:
 Lyrical_capture.png ( 138.44K ) Number of downloads: 6

ah I see now, yeah there are quite a few little bugs that I should probably look into some time soon.

though if you want to see a REAL heavy javascript site checkout one of my best friend's (rather cool) websites http://youlove.us

hey John, I love the site

I don't really have anything else to say about it... other than, I really like it, and keep it up!

Well, I tried it again and found that, this time, the problem only occurred when I touched your top navbar. Almost immediately, Firefox takes up 50%+ of the CPU. This rapidly drops off when my cursor leaves the navbar (although it didn't last time, and my system started to choke).

jQuery in general is fast, but any function that requires continuous evaluation (as does your nav when active) can impose a significant processing penalty.

Your site also scrolls jerkily, to the extent that the background "detaches" from the content area for a moment before catching up again.



Fair enough. My approach, were I faced with the same situation, would be to change my design so that I could use smaller images. This is a fundamentally different way of thinking about websites: I prefer to think about what the user wants (good content, speed, ease of use), rather than what I want (pretty graphics, a design plaything).

Moreover, you can sometimes improve the graphical appeal of a site even while redesigning it to be more efficient. Sometimes it just takes a change of perspective -- a willingness to consider alternatives that are more constrained in their use of large graphics.

Of course, it's a matter of balance, and there's some merit to making designer portfolios more graphically intensive and show-offish than typical websites. I often suspect, however, that the designer has not even asked himself the question, "How much prettier am I making my design by using this huge image, and is it worth the added file size?"

Completely agree with you - and I definitely did want to make a "show off" site - you should have seen my last one! I get better with each new one so no doubt the next one will look good AND load quicker