What do you think???

[eluser]boltsabre[/eluser]
Hi everyone, I finally finished my first website with... you guessed it, CI.

It's been an epic 2 year journey working on it PT in the evenings after my day job. Learning CI, PHP, photoshop, SEO, content writing skills, .htaccess, and everything else that comes with building a complete website from the ground up.

I'd appreciate, if you have a spare 5 minutes, if you could check it out and give some feedback.

I'm after brutal honesty, not a "cushioned" appraisal. If you don't like something about the UI design, let me know. If you have a problem with the navigation hierarchy then blaze away. If you find a bug, or a typo call me an idiot and let me know about it so I can fix it up.

And finally, I just wanted to pas on a MASSIVE HUGE GIGANTIC EPIC thank you to all the contributors of this forum who have helped me over the last couple of years, without you my project would have never came to fruition, and my coding skills would still be languishing in the land of mediocre instead of somewhere in the realms of intermediate. Thanks!!!

www.downundr.com

[eluser]Otemu[/eluser]
Hi boltsabre,

Fantastic in getting your first site out there, I actually thought you had built many sites with codeigniter with the knowledge and how many posts you had responded to. Must feel like a great achievement as I am also in a similar situation doing a complete site, not easy with work, family, friends, social, etc. Who wants to code more when you been coding all day at work from morning to evening....................... Anyway rant over this is about your site:

Is the content dynamic with your own custom cms?

The positives:

I tested the form validation works great, I like your activation, received email and I was able to login
myaccount page works well and find it very simple to ease
pages load pretty quick considering all the content on some pages
I love the smart newsletter widget with my email address already there... oh the simple things lol

A few negative issues:

Functionality of the header navigation clicking for the drop down appears, normally the standard is drops down to appear on hover so maybe this feature should be changed, or provide a down arrow so the user actually knows this drops down.
Is it possible to use your own search feature instead of Google custom search, I always find it takes away the feel from a site.

I did find the site cluttered at times, like too much going on.

Leaving work I update this post tomorrow as it take a long time to go through it, I have plenty more to say.

Fantastic job though

[eluser]boltsabre[/eluser]
Hey Otemu, thanks very much for the feedback, it's greatly appreciated! Are you based in Europe somewhere? You mentioned you were leaving work, about the same time I was.

Yeah, I've posted lots on here even though I've only the one website. I've had so much help on here from other regulars that I felt as though I should give some back the newbies coming after me, leave the guru's to the really complicated stuff as much as possible!

You're the second person who's mentioned the top nav bar in 36 hours, so it's on the top of the Easter long break to do list, last time I played with it the jQuery was giving me absolute grief. But that was 9 months ago, my jquery is much better now.

Looking forward to what else you have to say (especially the "cluttered" pages, if you could give me some examples that'd be fantastic, I can then do some focused user testing on them, try to get them cleaned up a bit).

And hey, if you've got your own blog, feel free to drop my site a quick 200 word review and a link! Okay, shameless plug and backlink trawling finished!!!

[eluser]Otemu[/eluser]
I am currently working in London - Holborn, am a contractor.

I can see a lot of work gone into the site, must be a lot of code behind it.

More positives:
I posted in the forum worked well, tried to add JavaScript and you have protected against that excellent.
Gallery works very well
Contact form works good :-)
Favorites works really well, I remember when you posted in the forum about that, which method did you use in the end??
Checklist works really good, I like that feature

Not sure if your interested in older browsers like IE7, IE8 if you are then you should check out CSS3 PIE

"PIE makes Internet Explorer 6-9 capable of rendering several of the most useful CSS3 decoration features".

You got a lot of ads on site, can you not reduce them or you need them all?

And more negatives:
When I signed up for the newsletter it just directed me to the home page, be nice if received some kind of message that I have been added, or did I miss that??

In terms of clutter take a look at this page http://www.downundr.com/visas/student-and-study-visas
feel like the text is too close to the borders, there seems to be so many social icons can this not be limited?? if you need them all maybe add an expanding div click for more or something like that.
The margins and padding's maybe is what makes the page so clustered, images seem so close to text and other elements.

I am not a designer but I do know a few things:

Links are not consistent some are underlined and some are not so it makes it hard to know if underlined text is a link or not.
The colours on the drop down do clash a bit, mainly on hover.
There is a lot of different colors on the site, maybe look at other sites and get some kind of colour scheme, like on the home page the box "Who is this site for?" your looking at 4 different colours for text alone
You put a lot of box shadow on your images, its also around the site as well, might of gone a bit box shadow crazy
Your ad banners I would remove the borders around them, as some of them got quite a lot of whitespace around them
The downundr.com logo has a kangaroo sign next to it, if its apart of your logo then it should be click able too, if not then it should be moved else where, as your logo should not be confused.

What you have done is quite impressive though, fantastic job :-)
I post more comments if I get a chance

[eluser]boltsabre[/eluser]
Hey Otemu,

You are a legend! That's an amazing appraisal, certainly given me plenty of things to keep busy with over the eater break!

Ah, London. I'm an Australian (obviously), and have been based in Germany for almost 3 years, but looking at heading home later this year.

To answer a couple of your questions:
1. Is it a CMS? No, when I first started this project my skills were not at a level good enough to consider creating a cms. And considering this is a personal project I wouldn't consider making it a cms. I find them to be rather restrictive when it comes to granular things. Sure you can do it, but the time and complexity it ads I find to be counter productive.

2. Favourites. I went with the storing them in the sessions. Users can only have 99 favourites per "group" (so they could have 99 Recruitment Agencies favourites, and also 99 Positions Vacant favourites, etc). So, the data in the session is rather small, just an array with up to 99 id's per group. If/when the site gets more traffic I'll start monitoring/testing this compared to file based caching, or even memcache. But for now it works, and I'm not going to touch it again until I have to!

As for all your other comments/ideas, I'll be looking into them over the next couple of days, it really is appreciated. After 2 years it's just so hard for me to see this with a fresh set of eyes! But I think you're comments about padding/margin and less shadow are spot on, and will make it look a lot neater once implemented.

Thank you very much for your time and involvement, let me know when you launch your site and I'll give it a look over as well if you'd like!

One last thing, if you've got a spare 10 minutes, do you think you could give my "create a position vacant listing" process a quick test. Create a template and use it to create a job (and can you please delete it once you're finished with it), I'd be interested in your thoughts on that as the positions vacant part of the site is one of the cornerstones I'll be pushing heavily. New job ads are new/fresh content, and a draw card to bring travellers back to the site. But only if you have time, you've already done a great job!

Anyway, you have a great Easter, enjoy your 4 days off!

[eluser]Otemu[/eluser]
Almost had a disaster, I had written the post with all my comments went to post reply and got an error as session had expired, hit back everything was gone............... I thought nooo can't do that again, hit forward and refreshed same thing error, lucky with firebug you can get all post data, hit refresh again and all post data was shown phew...... So here what I posted

Am amazed that am the only one who's actually commented. I thought a few others would of said a thing or two and just two poll votes one being me is not great from the community, come on people help boltsabre out, even simple vote or one line comment better then nothing.

You are correct a cms in itself is a massive project on its own, in some ways bigger then any site depending on what you want it to do.

I just tested your “create a position vacant listing” it works really good, the template idea is nice, it the same way how I pictured how a certain process would in my site although I haven't quite got to that section yet. I found it fast and smooth which is what I would want when posting a job. Also once the vacancy was posted seemed easy to read and laid out well. In fact I don't have much negative comments to make on this apart from on the form you put a mandatory * next to the contact details, better to put a * next to each element regardless if that whole section is mandatory or not.

In myaccount you have the option to view all ads in "My Job Ads" maybe give the option to add new job there too for quick access.

Looking at other job sites, when it comes to the listings I have noticed there include salary and normally some details of the job overview truncated, so just thought I mention it.

Not sure if this is a future development or something you planned for but you could give the option to submit CV directly. So I could save my CV on your site, then any job I see posted I just click submit CV to job. Your also probably in the future have to look at an advanced search to filter jobs.

I have noticed you have no about us section, maybe because you provide details on the home page, I think you should have it so people can get more information about downundr.com. Come to think about it you might need to rework that home page, the home page is the most important thing as it decides whether people stay on your site or not. If you want people to search or add there jobs it should be shown on home page, example Adventurous backpackers looking for work, find a job here (searchbox). Look at some sites home pages and try play with some ideas as I think the home page needs to be worked on.

Well that more added input from me, if I get some more time I give you more

[eluser]boltsabre[/eluser]
Oh dear, that would have been disastrous, I've had that happen once on here as well!

I sent you a PM, but I'm not sure sure if this came through, so I'll just post it on here, I was after some clarification on your second last post:

Links are not consistent some are underlined and some are not so it makes it hard to know if underlined text is a link or not.

What links are you talking about? My breadcrumb links were not underlined (fixed now), but I couldn't find any others on the site (but, the main "index" pages of the top nav bar links do have the title and images as links, but each box also has a textual underlined link).

The colours on the drop down do clash a bit, mainly on hover.

And I really don't know what you mean by this, could you explain/expand upon this a little more?

Am amazed that am the only one who’s actually commented.

Yeah... I'm a little perplexed myself, 430 views and no-one commenting except you. It's normally a very active/engaged community...

on the form you put a mandatory * next to the contact details, better to put a * next to each element regardless if that whole section is mandatory or not

Yeah, good idea, thanks!

In myaccount you have the option to view all ads in “My Job Ads” maybe give the option to add new job there too for quick access.

GREAT idea, double thanks! I will also put links in the "My Favourites" to the recruitment agency and positions vacant index pages!

Looking at other job sites, when it comes to the listings I have noticed there include salary and normally some details of the job overview truncated, so just thought I mention it.

Yeah, I've got to have a look at some other job sites, pick out the best of the best bits and apply it to my site. I'll be doing that next week (although in hind site, it would have made much more sense to do that during development. Not sure what I was thinking... not much obviously!)

Yes, your correct, the CV uploader is high on my list of critical future functionality/content to be added to the site. I'll allow users to upload 3 resumes (so they can have their generic, and 2 targeted cv's on hand). Also going to do a "application letter" template system a bit like the "post ad" templates. And yes, a search filter will be coming, although it's not as high on my list as the uploader. But thanks for the thoughts!

And great ideas about the "about us" and the "homepage"... the homepage drove me nuts, couldn't come up with anything good. I'm certainly not happy with it in its current state. I'll have a look at some other sites this week and try to come up with a new design next weekend.

I can't say thank enough Otemu, you're incites have been invaluable!!! After 2 years working on the website it's almost impossible to view it with a critical eye. Right, on that note, I've got to go do some coding on the thinks you've recommended. Thanks again champ, it really is appreciated.
And let me know when your site goes online, and if you'd like I can have a look over it for you!!!

[eluser]Otemu[/eluser]
Hi,

Actually until now I didn't notice I was getting pm's as I wasn't receiving any notifications and there no visual place it shows you unless you go to account settings which I don't do. Had so many pm's............. gosh am so popular......................... okay only 6 messages lol.

Well since I am here now I reply your pm messages and forum post:

Links
This is something I just noticed initially and now checking it in more detailed this issue seems only related to home page. On the home page you had some text underlined which wasn't links "Who is this site for?", "THIS SITE IS FOR YOU!", etc maybe you was looking to make the text stand out not sure, better to keep all links underlined so I would remove the underline off them text.

Drop Down
The top level drop down is clear when your hovering over when the drop down isn't expanded, however when the drop down menu is expanded, when you hover over the list items, the text changes colour and I find it not so clear. This was I minor thing I spotted actually and isn't that bad really ;-)

PM questions

Social Icons
I find you have to many icons image here normally the standard is just 3-5, I also find you have different sizes for the like count g+, fb and twitter can you not make them close to same size. The icons below footer links(site map, etc )are fine. I looked at your attached screenshot, I was thinking more of the lines of simplified look, take a look at this page here I developed, maybe you could do something similar but just add a more link for the extra social icons, maybe you could get some ideas from the site also to get a more clean look regarding the clutter we spoke about before.

I definitely let you know when my site goes online, your probably be a grandpa by then haha, I hope to get it done sometime this year as it has been dragging awhile now.

[eluser]boltsabre[/eluser]
Hey thanks for that.

1. Links. Ah okay underlined text, that homepage again... yeah, it really needs a re-design as we've both mentioned, this weekend!
2. Drop Down. Cool cool, I've got to have a look at that, see what can be done... need to keep some kind of click action there for tablets/smart phones, but I'll give it a look over on the weekend as well, and I'll check out those hover colours!
3. Social Icons. First image didn't work, even signed up for a free account, still couldn't see it, but that's okay, I think I know what you mean from the text that comes after the link.
Yeah, I'm hearing you on the vertical count bubbles, each damned one is different by a pixel or two. I've bottom aligned the actual buttons, I'll do some research tonight and see if I can manipulate the bubble size to make them uniform. Unfortunately horizontal options like your second link are not really an option on the RHS column due to size restrictions. As soon as I get into double digit counts it'll push wider than the column.
But... what I will do is go and take another look at the layout of the social buttons with a critical eye and see if I can come up with something a little better.

And I've been playing around with some extra padding/margins,etc to get some extra space/less clutter/elements too close to each other. And you're right, it's pretty horrible the way it currently is. Just got to finish fine tuning and cross browser/platform test it, then test every page to make sure it's still displaying okay, hopefully push the changes live this coming weekend.

Thanks so much Otemu, you've really helped. It'll take me a little while to get all the things you mentioned pushed live, but I'll get there, and the site will be much better off for it!

Can't wait to see your site when we're both old and wrinkled, sitting on our respective porches in rocking chairs . I look forward to looking at in my my google retinal and cornea implants!!! Google glasses are soooo 2013!

[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
I voted so felt I'd point out what I like and don't like.

I couldn't find any fault with the programming, whether it be broken links, javascript bugs etc. You should commend yourself for that. Where the site could do with improvement is with the "look 'n feel". It's easy to overuse cool jquery effects and css3 box shadows and the like, but you need to ask what do they add to the site? Do they help the user navigate, or improve the usability in some way? If not, then they are simply a distraction from the main course, the content. Specifically I think there are too many box-shadow effects, particularly on rollover. I would also question whether you need as many features as you do. It's cool (and impressive) that you have added the ability to share links using 10+ different methods, but when 99% of shares will come from 2 or 3 of these, wouldn't it be better to remove some of the clutter and create a cleaner user experience?