Manufacturing website

[johnflower]

I recently returned to the steel manufacturing industry after ten years of doing other things. I took my father's place in one of his businesses, and built this site for it today: Majormatic Manufacturing.

I know the site lacks images, but I'll be adding as they become available.

[yojoe]

Looks nice, but font-size is imo too big, and makes the content a bit too heavy to read.

[johnflower]

Looks nice, but font-size is imo too big, and makes the content a bit too heavy to read.

yojoe! I was hoping you'd give the site your expert opinion. Last time I took your advice I ended up building a masterpiece ;-)

I shall reduce the font size. You reckon just the paragraph text, or should I reduce heading text sizes too?

Thanks for your input.

[johnflower]

I reduced the paragraph as well as heading text. it does seem to lift some of the heaviness a bit.

[yojoe]

hihi, I wouldn't call myself expert.
Just a specialist

Font sizes was the first thing which caught my attention, because frontpage text overwhelmed completely site navigation.
I'll list things I'd do to improve this website's usability and overall look

1. Pages doesn't contain much content, thus I'd try to put it in 2 vertical columns.
Text on left side, images on the right.
Or place text and img in vertical boxes using 2-3 columns template.
Line-height is too big. Go with smaller interline while giving header text a bigger bottom margin.

2. make bigger paddings for content - indent it deeper than menu.

3. images: transform them into clickable thumbnails, or crop them into long stripes; add fancybox-like solution to display full sized images.
Text isn't visible because images override descriptions.
Cut img border thickness by half, or make its colour brighter.
Current beige colour doesn't blend with red, black and white colours.
Gray colour is safe but commonly used with reds and blacks. You can come up with other palette.

4. Top header: logo is way too big, as well as majormatic manufacturing caption.
Make them smaller and the header will have more free space.
Boldened, black text in header seems to look very heavy.

If menu bar won't get additional buttons, uou could do something like this:
Make caption smaller vertically, and move menu below it, and to the right of logotype.
like
______
| | majormatic
| logo | manufacturing
|_____| menu

5. Using sifr->flash instead of @font-face is imo bad solution. It has a fallback of course, but flash shouldn't be used just for displaying static text.

6. menu: try with red colours <- it will make it more visible. Page's background is black.
Centerizing it would be also great.

7. index page: you could split its content into 3 columns and 2 rows, and put contact box at the bottom right "cell".

8. footer: give text in footer top/bottom padding between page content and browser's bottom border.

9. links in page content arent stylized, thus I see oldshool blue and purple links

Overall try to make text less heavy. Images overtook this role.

[johnflower]

Hi Yojoe,

I used the contact form on your website to send a message. Did you get it? Could you perhaps contact me? The contact email is on my website.