ncross

I'm giving the Halls Gap Zoo website a face lift.

Meet our Animals - Halls Gap Wildlife Park and Zoo

The idea is to provide photographs of the animals to engage the visitor to the website and to make it look a little more professional.

I am interested in your opinions about the design, it's colours and the photographs. Do the photos look good on your monitors? Is there a best way to calibrate the monitor for developing and viewing websites for the average user?

This is work in progress and I haven't added text yet or finished the interactivity of the page. Also, the page links to the old pages at the moment.

I would appreciate your critical comments to help me build a better website.

Thank you,

Regards

Nigel

knapper

I think the issue is that most monitors aren't calibrated, in addition to which the monitor quality varies so much. Some will be too dark, some to light, and some will have poor contrast. The approach I take is to make sure my development monitor is reasonably calibrated, and make it look good on that. What you can then do is deliberately upset the settings and make your monitor to light or to dark or use other monitors and check what happens if settings are too light, too dark etc and if any particular imbalance makes a huge difference you can consider a change, but always bear in mind the limitations.

percepts

Warning: Bad zoo joke!

"I went to the zoo the other day. They only had a little dog. It was a ShihTzu ."

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percepts

Looks better than I remember from last time I looked. I think the design is OK but you could have it wider as most people have 1024x768 screens or larger these days. A useable screen area of around 1024x600.

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ncross

How do I make my monitor reasonably calibrated? Is there a good tutorial that anybody knows?

Cheers

ncross

That is useful information. Looking at screen resolutions used on one of my websites it seems that only about 6% of my users use a width of 800px. I will certainly bear this in mind when developing future sites as that number will most likely dwindle further.

cinnamondm

However you need to take into account bits not used in the screen width for your web pages; things such as scroll bars and browser window edges - plus the fact that people with larger resoluitions do not necessarily like to keep their browser window maximised.

About 960 px should be the maximum for fixed page widths.

percepts

Yes it is an unknown. Some people like to have favourites displayed down the left of screen taking up more space. But if you tried to cater for everyone doing everything possible, there would be no screen space left.

Scroll bars only take about 14 pixels but I ussually define my main block at 980 pixels wide which leaves a little space each side on 1024 wide screens.

Also some people have a lot of toolbars at top of screen which takes up space so you can't rely totally on there being 600 pixels height for flash movie to display without scrolling.

Those are reasons why people end up designing sites with scrollable content. Fixed size flash movies can be a pain for people with low res screens but even 1024x768 is only used by 30% or so people now. In a year or two that will be much less.

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Terra

loading is painfully slow - some of the image sizes seem very high. E.g the logo is 379KB which seems odd - even the flash has a smaller file size according to YSlow. Forward/Back buttons on left side dont' seem to do anything? I think the images are a good idea but quicker load would be good for first time visitors.

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ncross

Yes, I will look at the download speeds. The logo includes the text produced in photoshop and I am sure that it can be reduced in size.

The Flash files included photos exported at 100% JPEG quality. I then exported the Flash files at 90% but they can be exported lower at 80% perhaps and then potentially increased later as peoples download speeds increase. It is quick enough on my system but thanks for your feedback as I want to be accessible for the majority.

Cheers

knapper

First thing to check is to see if your monitor came with calibration software, check your driver cd's if you bought the monitor seperatly. Many do but you may not have installed it. This thread is from back in January and dicusses calibration.

best screen for colours?