Xion Community

Please post any issues, questions etc...

Here are a couple points I noticed, not indepth at all and I know there are some things still needing to be ironed out.

• No meta descriptions on pages - get those in asap, make it readable and pimp Xion - users look at meta descriptions in search engines to verify they're going to what they want
• External links on homepage/footer/elsewhere should open in new window (as site is using strict/html5 doctype this will need to use the onclick)
• Forum using strict doctype has hundreds of errors, suggest transitional and cleaning up errors
• Main site is html5 doctype yet some basic errors such as unescaped & should be & (cmon that's 101 stuff )
• Main navigation buttons should use text rather than image based
• No hover (or active) states for any buttons, should have some kind of visual clue other than hand icon
• Text overflowing some boxes without wrapping
• Large spaces in page header where no content is displayed
• Overuse of white text shadow for main body text, fine to use it on header tags/footers and such but keep main body text clean

I'm putting together a new PSD for Cliff right now.

Few things to note from me:

* @SLoB There's not an overuse of text shadows/insets, it's just they start looking very strong when coded as apposed to PS. So I'm giving Cliff a bunch of new color hashes to use so they'll be less subtle. Btw, the extra space you're referring to may be the google ads section, do you have them blocked?

* There's a few differences to the PSD regarding spacing and padding so I'll make a note of those areas too Cliff, particularly the header.

* I've been meaning to get hover states for the nav and buttons done, but in the mean time, text links definately need at least an underline on hover, or remove the underline if already underlined.

* The skin rating stars look awful so I'll remake those too, I wasn't finished with those anyway. But regarding those, would be nice to have an active hover state over how many of the 5 you're about to vote.

That's about it. On my part Cliff, I'll just let you know about anything I see that's different to the PSD. Too many differences and it starts to look like I don't know what I'm doing Albeit this all was kinda rushed...

On a personal note, could you remove "site design by" in the footer and just leave "default skin". Now I think about it, I don't really 'do' web design so it seems pointless advertising that fact, plus I don't want to take credit for the coding when it's all you So that'd be appreciated!

Peace, Lance

@Lance heh yea I use ABP (Ad Block Plus) It's a must have imo
The main forum body text (i.e. these very replies/post texts) is what I was referring to with the overuse of white shadow, the rest of the site is fine with it.

@Cliff Please can you change my link in footer to http://multilayerdesign.com thanks

I never designed the forums, Cliff threw some parts together real quick. But still the text isn't overdone, just needs to be more subtle, which will change soon =]
End of the day though, everything is heaps better than what it was ^_^

I agree. Especially the forums, they really needed a facelift from the default bb style.

I've addressed most of the raised issues.

Just need Lance to do the ratings images and the smaller button hover state.

SLoB to be honest I can't be bothered with the forums. The phpBB template code is huge and really badly duplicated.

Also, which browser are you using SLoB that you're getting overflow? Perhaps try a forced refresh of this page?

Cliff

I know what you mean with the forums Cliff, there is so much duplicated code it's unreal. Even changing the doctype to transitional would alleviate some of the errors as strict does not take any prisoners.

The overflow is on the download page in the panels. I'd hazard a guess at the div within is too wide for the panel, stick a dummy border round it to check and resize the width so it fits within the panel.

@Lance, we'll have to agree to disagree on the body text on the forum Readability is key and no shadow rules, again with any of this I also believe in testing. However text easily becomes more readable the crisper it is so adding a stroke to it with the text-shadow only clouds this ideal. It's only overused for as long as the posts are, you get a huge post and eye strain takes its toll.

@Cliff, Looking much better dude, particularly the home page and footer

@SLoB, The forum text inset still hasn't been reduced, the homepage has though and it's much better to read. And on the contrary, strokes and insets on text make them sharper, not cloudy. The reason being it adds a subtle 1px line of higher contrast to eliminate some of the anti-aliasing. It's the same way the unsharp mask works in photoshop. But again, it needs to be very subtle. I agree it's much too strong as it is now.

EDIT: Seems it's been removed now so that's cool.

@Lance Yea I know about it reducing the anti aliasing
However a direct compare would easily show the one without stroke much clearer to read, best readable body text is one with no gimmicks.
I hate PS text rendering on smaller font sizes, it has sucked since early versions and they've still not improved it in all these years. Browser fonts render much smoother, so why can't Adobe use a better text rendering engine.

I hate PS text rendering on smaller font sizes, it has sucked since early versions and they've still not improved it in all these years. Browser fonts render much smoother, so why can't Adobe use a better text rendering engine.

Gotta +1 that.

Even fonts on Windows and OSX look sweet. They should at least add an anti-aliasing option which emulates that of an OS, like Xion does