Hi Guys,

I would appreciate if you could please review my website about the city of Bangalore. I need opinion, comments, suggestions for improvement, more particularly about the design, colour etc. thanks for your time and your comments. www.discoverbangalore.com

Your views are very important to me. I mean it.


Ravi


<Mod edit to comply with Site Review Rule #1 - Syren>

Hi Ravi

Let me start by saying you have a very informative site, there is lots of information there for the viewer.

Now for the critique,your index page with the nicely done flash intro took a while to load for me.

On the website it's self you have far too many colours on the same page, also the text is in bold and italics makes it hard to read. I would also change the font colour. Some one once posted a story about how customers are affected by colour. Maybe if they read this they could post the link again for you. You have information of the first page that really should be on your history and geography page, as it makes the first page too long and requires too much scrolling.

The navigation menu on the side is very nice and while functional should not rotate from page to page, it can cause the view to fell lost and require them to do too much saerching on how to get to the next page.

I would also recommend that you drop the font size down to 2 as to reduce the amount of scrolling required.

I hope this helps and I do agree Bangalore is a very beautiful city.

Greyhawk

What graphics design package are you working with?

I ask because a simple trick to improve looks & readability in graphics such as the 'discover bangalore' at the top of your page is to 'antialias' the text. In plain English, this means that it is simply smoothed out.

I would suggest a more conservative color scheme....but I'm not a color guru....what does everyone else think?

I'd be interested to know everyone else's thinking about your use of animated GIF's. I despise them personally, and try to use them as little as possible. But others might have more illuminating commentary on that aspect of your design.

Finally, I would ask you what your ultimate goal is regarding the site. This seems like a pretty ambitious project.....are you trying to promote travel & tourism, promote business opportunities, or simply provide information? Do you know how to use PHP? If so, PHP would provide a simple method to increase interactivity on the site, if your webhost allows it.


Later
B

Brandon and Greyhawk,

I really appreciate your efforts and time taken in reviewing the site and giving your views.

Greyhawk, you say too many colours on the website. Could you be more specific, because I was thinking that I used the minimum colors. I will look into the font color, bold and font size. thanks

Do you think the navigational menu should not rotate on going to that particular page. How do you feel if it rotates when clicked before going to the clicked page ?

thanks for your opionion about the city.

Brandon, do you also think that all pages should have minimum color and uniform color ? To start with, this is only an information site, maybe depending on its popularity I might exlore other possibilities. By the way how does PHP work ?

Thank you guys, once again.

Hi Brandon,

The navigational buttons were made in Ulead 3DCool, some of the collages were made in Microsoft's Picture it Publishing. Do you suggest something else?

Ravi

I really like your logo... I like the two colors... and the design.
Now, for the negative... your font styles and colors are not consistent throughtout your site... the word "bangalore" should not be a different color and font than the rest of your text... greyhawk is right about the italics... try using "Verdana" throughout your site.. it is easy to read. Although I have done a site using green text, I tried to use the darkest possible green... whereby you can still carry your color scheme through the site, but it looks easier to read.
I can only repeat what was said about the text on your index page.. too much... put some of that on a separate history page...
the site to go to about the psychology of colors in a website is:
http://www.templatesresource.com
look for the link about articles and scroll to find the one about colors. Pink is just not a professional looking color... try using only green and blue, which makes for a great combination.

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Mary Ann
Affordable Websites Designed - www.m-goret.com

Thanks Guys,

I had another question. How do I make the site look the same in all browsers. I find that some of my pages are distorted in Netscape and while I have designed the page for 3/4th of my 17" monitor, I find that the page is beyond a 17" monitor (both horizontally and vertically) in some other computers. How do we fix this.

As suggested by you guys, I am making the font size, color, style the same throughout the site. Thanks

Any help

Thanks

Ravi

I notice your Flash intro resizes with the browser window. If I were you I'd fix it at 800x600 (so 740x400, say) so it looks the same for everyone.

Your Bangalore logo is HUGE - nearly 0.5MB. I'm surprised no one saw that, unless it didn't load for them :)

I can see why - it is actually 3351x1529 pixels, but manually resized to the smaller version on your site.

Try this one instead (it's only 10kb)



You can also make your buttons more readable like this (and smaller - only 876 bytes):



Remember that if you manually resize an image it will look much worse.

You spelled 'accommodation' incorrectly - you'll have to do that graphic again.

Italics are considered taboo on the web - but it IS a personal choice :)

I notice that most of your graphics suffer the same as I described above - that image under 'History' is over 40kb, but you could get it down to 5kb tops, I'd wager.

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Sualdam

nice site, everthing seemed fine except your pages take a while to load , especially the index page.

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|- >(^_^)> | (t^^t) | <(^_^)< -|
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That's because of the graphics - they're all at least 10x bigger than they need to be, so hcravi will have a pleasant surprise when he/she changes that and gets the download time right down.

:)

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Sualdam

Thanks Sualdam for your comments and the graphics. I did not realize the time taken for download, because I am on DSL and it loads faster in my PC. Thanks for the tip.

And thanks for correcting the spelling. I have also misspelt entertainment. I will fix both.

Ravi I would stick to a maximum of three colours on a web page, and Mmaybe two font styles at the tops. Try to keep it all looking the same through out. As for the menu I would like to see it not rotate but that is a personal thing for me (I have had people coment when I used the same type of thing).

After viewing your site for the review I went back as a potential client, and it made me want to go back for another visit, GREAT JOB.

As for the photo editor, as a photographer I prefer to work with Photoshop 7, as a web designer, I like to use fireworks ME.

Oh Greyhawk......You have made my day. I was waiting for such a comment for all the hardwork I put in, in collecting information, designing the website and offering it to the webworld.

Thanks so much. This has indeed boosted all my spirits.

Have a Good Day.

Ravi

[Duplicate post removed by brandon1978]

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Brandon Dawson / WPW: Ender
http://www.athenainternet.com
brandon(-at-)athenainternet.com

PHP is a scripting language. You're using dayana networks, right? They seem to allow it. Go to one of the following sites to see what is available that might fit your vision for the site:

www.hotscripts.com
php.resourceindex.com

What I would do with your site is add the following features:
1.) Some sort of script to recognize frequent visitors.
2.) Possibly a members-only section
3.) A newsletter feature, which would help to remind people when certain major events are happening in Bangalore and when it's best to travel there.

Next, I'd seek to make the site more "idiot Westerner friendly". We Americans are pretty ignorant to begin with about the subcontinent,
We know that celebrities like to travel there, such as the Beatles in the late 60's, but we don't know why. I would seek to battle prejudice on this account as much as to inform: for instance, I like your emphasis on Bangalore as the 'silicon valley of India'. Why not have a whole section on what major western businesses have outsourced data/call centers to Bangalore? Another heavy scripting feature that might be worthwhile is a classified ads section...to help match Bangaloreans with the tech companies.

I would 'compartmentalize' the pages a little more. On your 'general information' page it goes from talking about Bangalore's status as a technological and cultural center to talking about the city's past as a center of plague. This doesn't help the message you're trying to spread.

Finally, I would seek to have the site translated into as many languages as possible, and possibly look for a partnership with a local travel agency who would give you some kind of commissions on folks who book their travel to Bangalore based on referrals from you. With refinement, this could be a nice little revenue-generator for you, as well as a fantastic resource on people looking for new and exciting places to travel.

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Brandon Dawson / WPW: Ender
http://www.athenainternet.com
brandon(-at-)athenainternet.com

Hi Brandon,

I like all your suggestions and try to see how many would fit my site. I did not understand why I should make it members only. This is an information site about the city and I do not have anything exclusive for a particular set of visitors. Anyway let me explore that possibility. However I appreciate your efforts in going through my site in detail and given your opinion. For that matter everyone who has reviewed have indeed gone into minor details, which I very much appreciate. Thanks guys.

By the way Sauldom, how did you make the logo into KB. As you suggested I would like to do the same for other pictures as well. Thanks for your comments.

Take care

Ravi

I welcome more comments from other web pro members.

Ravi

Whenever you have an image you want to use, it is always best to do things in this order...

1. If the image is 'raw' - that is, you only want a part of it - you need to crop it. Crop it to the same aspect ratio you want in your site, so if the final image will be say 200x150 pixels and the main image is say 3000x2000, crop it to 2000x1500.

Your buttons are like that. They have a big block of redundant white so I cropped that off in the example above.

Obviously, you throw part of the image away, so the file is smaller already.

2. Resize it to the size you want. This will throw away lots unnecessary data, and the filesize will fall dramatically.

3. Use an appropriate compression (GIF or JPG mainly) and save it.

If you have a simple logo that consists of line art or basic colours, GIF is usually best. You can save a GIF with up to 256 colours, but you nearly always find that you can drop down to 64, 32, or even 16 colours with no visible effect on quality. By saving these, you throw away a lot more data so the filesize falls still further.

GIFs are generally not the best choice for photographs (though they work in some cases, especially thumbnails).

For photos, JPGs are best. You can compress in JPG format in percentages. I find that you can go down to 70% or even 60% in most cases before any degradation becomes obvious.

Drawbacks to JPGs are that solid blocks of colour (i.e. blue sky) can get a smudged effect, so they aren't good with line art or logos a lot of the time.

A photo might be 1MB to start with, but you can get it down to 50kb-ish sometimes with compression.

You usually experiment, and most graphics packages allow you to preview the effect at magnified and normal scale so you can compare the results.

You must make sure that your HTML hasn't got any old size settings in the image tags otherwise it will look bad. Make sure it contains the actual size of the image you are using.

Never resize an image manually in HTML (like you did with your images). Apart from the fact that it wastes bandwidth and puts people off visiting, the quality of the image is degraded when you do it (a lot of people don't realise that). If you shrink it this way it will be grainy, but if you expand it it will be pixellated (blocky) because you threw data away when you made it that size - that's why you always size the image in your art package before doing anything else.

Obviously, if the data is missing you can't get it back, so increasing the size of a raw photo in an art package will always degrade it.

There are lots of graphics packages available and nearly all of them have compression utilities tucked away inside somewhere - usually in the SAVE or EXPORT tools.

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Sualdam

hi Sualdam,

that was excellent. I learnt a lot. It is indeed very nice to know that you guys have taken a lot interest in Ravi's site. Ravi is my brother by the way.
Tell me something. How and what software do you need to use to do the the cropping. Will Adobe photoshop do it?

Now this has made me go back to all my sites and do some renovation.

thanks guys

veena

You would have a members-only section to promote the same thing that keeps you coming back to webproworld! That being what marketing people refer to as stickiness. You want to have certain people coming back time after time to promote a sense of continuity and community....like you'd find here.

You would certainly not want to make the whole site members only.

Features such as a bulletin board or even chat would help Bangaloreans who are away from home find folks with a lot in common. Again, like you'd find here.

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Brandon Dawson / WPW: Ender
http://www.athenainternet.com
brandon(-at-)athenainternet.com

Oh, yes. Photoshop is considered the best package - as well as probably the most expensive. There are plenty of others you could use - and they all have this crop/size/compression functions. It is standard.

But even humble packages built in to Windows will do it. Photo Editor does.

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Sualdam

Thanks sualdam for the info. I will try it out and get back if there is anything.
bye
veena

Thanks a lot guys for taking time to review my site. I really appreciate it.

Can somebody tell me how do I make my site to resize itself to the various browsers, computer settings, etc. Because I find that some of the pages appear distorted in Netscape, while some extend beyond the size of the monitor. Is there a way?

Ravi,

The flash intro in begining takes a long time to load. I would recommend you to remove it as it does not serve any purpose.

However, if you still want to keep it, I have some suggestions; make it smaller, make text bigger, make "Enter" bigger, put "Enter" url in text outside of flash (so that people outside flash can go to your website)

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http://www.food-india.com

Thanks bin79,

I will look into the delay in the Flash. I know it does not serve any purpose, still I like it. Maybe I should make a Enter button outside of flash as suggested by you.

You have gotten a lot of reviews so I did not read them all but did want to put my two cents in.
I would get rid of the flash intro. It is not going to help you with Google and it is not going to help you with your customers.

I also think the pink under the logo clashes with the rest of the site.

But you do have a great looking site.

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Custom Website Design | Search Engine Optimization | Web Design Templates

Thanks Janeth,

That was good. I thought of removing the pink band under the logo, but then it didn't look good. Maybe I should reduce its width or change the colour. what do you think ??

Thanks for reviewing my site. However I do want your two cents in. I welcome more comments.