Well I have to say, ExpressionEngine has been growing on us, slowly but surely.
We just announced the redesign (and relaunch) of needmoredesigns.com today. We spent about a week building this site, and while it’s not 100% finished, it’s close enough, and we can always keep working on it in our spare time, thanks to ExpressionEngine.
The most noteworthy technology used is the jQuery library for subtle effects. We didn’t want to use Flash, so this was perfect.
Very nice work. Hey, I noticed on this page: http://needmoredesigns.com/services there is a link to your portfolio, but it gives a 404 error. Darned hard-coded links!
I like this design a lot. Good use of whitespace, thoughtful use of text weight and a simple look that feels nicely ‘finished’.
Good work on the client testimonials, Goudy Old Style comes through great on my mac, however, my PC makes a mess of it (as PCs do so much of the time), the lettering is a little narrow and becomes slightly illegible.
Great use of jquery, using it as a sort of flash replacement on the home page is neat.
Thanks for your feedback, and the compliments are much appreciated. It can be hard for me to take a step back and appreciate the design after messing with EE tags for so long!
I have been concerned about the fonts in those blockquotes. When I’ve tested it on IE, it’s looked okay but it’s just showing up in Georgia. I think perhaps if other fonts are installed, i.e. if Office is installed, things get a little funky. I’ve observed the same issues when using Helvetica rather than the much-loathed Arial. If Office is installed, things can get kinda ugly. Which is a shame.
So yeah, I’ll have to do more testing. That blockquote styling is actually taken from the Blueprint CSS framework, in a slightly different context, so I’d sorta kinda hoped they’d done more testing than I cared to.
I don’t know if this will fix it, but I just overrode the blockquote CSS in the IE-specific stylesheet. It occurs to me that maybe that’s sufficient - just force IE users not to see Goudy! I don’t know if this is a viable long-term fix, but hopefully it will prevent a large number of visitors from seeing an ugly site!!!
Love the site!
The CSS didn’t load for:
http://needmoredesigns.com/notes/show/on_the_new_needmore_site/
But now it does, thought maybe I’ld found a bug, guess not.
The w3c validator has some issues with the homepage, not sure what all of them are really.
An xhtml transitional doctype might remove a few of the squawks…
Sorry, i think I have misled you, it is on Firefox on the PC and IE. Now you have IE7 looking good, but the problem persists for PC users on Firefox. I think that is a little harder to fix, but, it isn’t the end of the world, the text loses legibility but may benefit from having the GOS removed across the board?
EDIT: Sorry, I think that may have sounded like I was telling you how to design your site. Apologies.
tz3ee: Thanks! There were of course some issues with glitches in the uptime during the course of the morning. Naturally, that was bound to happen, since we just announced the site today! I will take a look at the validation errors. It’s not surprising to me, I didn’t really check much as we went along, I was more concerned with just getting the basic site up quickly! I will definitely work on those issues ASAP.
adamwiggall: I see. Darn it! Goudy is so darned pretty on my Mac. If only I were in the majority in that regard! Sounds like I definitely need to consider removing it altogether.
Yeah, I’m 100% sure it’s Office’s fonts that cause that issue now. Both on FF and IE on a PC. I wonder if I should submit that as a bug to the Blueprint CSS project. Since the fact is, a huge number of Windows users are going to have Office installed also, with the funky font.
Adam, any chance you could send a screenshot to me at ray at needmoredesigns dot com, if you get a chance? Just so I can see how bad it looks?
