My first attempt. Needs work. But what?

[dekraan]

Hi there!

Normally I get cold feet and hesitations about my webdesigns by the time I'm almost done making it. I've been at it as an ameteur for years without launching anything. Except into the trashbin. This was about to happen again, but then I managed to convince myself that Rome was not built in one day, and published my first website.

It is based on the Centric Theme, but in the end I might have done better at choosing the parallax theme.

I've got a lot of pro's and con's myself. But am still curious to see what you think, and where you see improvements!

The website is intended to show dutch businessmen, students etc a quick and easy way to get their writing checked and corrected. Through 3 easy steps.

All critique is welcome!

http://www.corrector.nl

[marybaum]

All in all, not bad!

On thing you might want to do is see if you can compress your big header image more. If you use Photoshop, try jpg Medium instead of High in the Save for Web & Devices dialogue box. And, personally, I only use .png if I have areas in an image I want to be transparent.

If you don't, there are image-optimization services online, and Google can guide you to them.

MB

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Sharing the good news about the wonders of modern CSS and the split-step. Either one should get you moving fast. 😀

[ᴅᴀᴠɪᴅ]

Long answer, sorry I started to write and write telling you exactly what I would do.. haha

Design wise, there are only a few things i would say that need neatening up. .

The extra padding on the header menu is causing the menu items to not exactly align with the site title so I would remove that.

On small mobile widths, the responsive menu icon doesn’t have enough padding making it look cluttered so I would add some more padding there.

The last thing is that when you visit individual pages of the site, for a split second as its loading you see a big jolt in the page where the layout has to quickly align itself and the page titles move.

You can see it here..

http://corrector.nl/waarom-corrector/ (if you dont see it, try clearing your browser cache and you'll see it the way a new visitor to the site would see it)

For a second, the text ‘Houd je handen vrij’ is too close to the top of the screen then it drops back down a second later. This is because the javascript used to create the shrinking header effect is still being loaded even though you are no longer using that effect. There is a div created by the javascript called .bumper which is causing the problem as it being created as the page loads.

I can see you have amended the javascript yourself to stop the effect, but unfortunately this only solves half the problem and causes the unsightly jolt.

My honest opinion would be to install parallax pro instead. It has the parallax effect that you use on the front page already built in and if you follow this tutorial exactly...

http://sridharkatakam.com/relocating-entry-title-header-genesis/

You can make it exactly the same layout to what you have now. i nearly wrote a whole tutorial on how you would change what you have now to stop the jolt, but it became too big I realised it was the wrong solution, sorry,

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[dekraan]

Hi David,

thank you for your honest critique. You are absolutely correct in your comments. Especially about the jumping part. I loved the large 'homepage' of the centric theme at first, but when I had the site done, I wanted the first line of the next box 'Klaar in slechts 3 stappen' to be visible as a trigger for my visitors.

Because I am a beginner I had no idea how to do this properly. Somewhere along the way the thought of starting with Parallax occured to me as well, but I shrubbed it because it would cost me time (and a little money). But now that the site is live, the ideas about the second version are already bubbling up, and using the other theme probably is the right way to go.

Thank you for your technical advice and pointers as well. I will definately use them, before I start 'building from scratch' again.

@marybaum,

sorry for not responding sooner, these notifications end up in my spamfolder, I just found out! Also, thank you for your advice. I've noticed that it does take a long time to load. Luckily I have a friend who is in graphic design, I will ask her to compress it!

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