The Enterprise Project… Feedback?

[AstroSmurf]

For the last two years, I have been working on a website dedicated to Star Trek: Enterprise called “The Enterprise Project”. It started out as a simple place to display my NX-01 deck plans, but over the last year or so, it has grown to include detail plans of key areas of the ship and technical specifications. I have also started work on an episode companion. It is hard for me to believe that a couple of pages tacked onto my art site two years ago have grown into this. What was once five humble deck plans has now evolved into more than twenty schematics, three or four technical pages, desktop wallpapers, a forum and an episode companion for the first season. I am still surprised at the amount of work I have poured into this. Sometimes I think I need to get out more.



Of course the project is far from being finished. I have quite a few things still left to do, including getting back to work on the episode companion. But I just wanted to invite everyone to come over and take a look. I would love to hear what everyone thinks. Since I have been staring at it for so long, my objectivity has been severely compromised. I am not even sure the layout or style is even working anymore. My NX-01 flavored page designs were never constructed to handle this kind of site complexity either. I guess I am a little paranoid but I want people to be able to navigate without to many problems. It may make sense to me but who knows what others might think.

Any advice or feedback would be appreciated! Just click on the picture…


Thanks! Cheers.

 

[CheapTrick]

Wow. Great design. I'm a sucker for the blueprints:thumbsup: Keep up the good work. Highly recommended for all Enterprise fans.

 

[kv1at3485]

The navigation pages are a tad too wide for FF. On 1024x768 res, the superfluous horizontal scrollbar appears.

Potential text overflows are a problem throughout the site since users can have their own browser settings and the page layout doesn't resize dynamically. You'll have to look into setting the font attributes or adding scrollpanes. (For example, I already have text overflows happening with some of the buttons and the copyright box at the bottom.)

You have two types of buttons labelled "Main Page" leading to two different pages. Confusing.

Pseudo-buttons result in Mystery Meat Navigation. If you must have them, they should be less prominent. Perhaps they should all be grey and static (no animations, no roll-over image changes) throughout the site so the user knows that grey things don't do anything.

On the actual schematic picture pages, I think it's possible to use <map> and <area> tags, coupled with the 'title' attribute, to achieve the 'popup text' effect. A nifty thing about <area> is that you're not limited to boxes. I find that if you click it either removes the popup text or it prevents the pop up text from appearing.

The good news is that as a whole the site functions with JavaScript disabled. However, the same cannot be said if images start failing to appear. Consider adding alt attributes to critical images (like for buttons) so users can still access the schematics on a bad day.

Personally, I'm not fond of the image-based layout that's going on here. The site could be much less 'heavy' if it relied more on HTML and CSS. And as a purist, I'm a bit wary of complicated sites that don't validate.

 

[AstroSmurf]

^ To be honest with you, I am a novice. When I started this, I had never created a website from the ground up before. I am sad to say much of your post was over my head. (Normally I will design the style, write the text and pass it off to a company that does the actual building.)

But a few quick words about the things I did understand...

The superfluous buttons, at the time, were a necessary evil. To limit the number of images that had to be loaded for each page, I created just three background styles. Each page is a combination of, or a slight modification of, those three styles so some pages ended up having more buttons than were needed. So I made the animated buttons to cover anything I didn't intend to use. (And I figured out later how to correct the issue but I just haven't had the time to remove and correct all of them.) I also have some place holder links that I keep forgetting to remove. I realize that the NX-01 styled buttons make things confusing but I had to compromise to get the look I was after.

As for the page size, I chose that one based on the average screen resolution information I was getting from my site log. I basically catered to the majority.

And as of right now I have hundreds of popup tags on the schematic pages. The html tags will just have to do for now. (To be honest, this is the first complaint I have ever had about them. I also don't know what <map> and <area> tags even are. )

Thanks for the advice. I plan to drag out my help books later and figure some of it out. I am also going to correct that double Main Page. It was something that slipped passed me in my last expansion.