New website homepage - feedback would be appreciated!

[3lectr1c]

I had a burst of inspiration this evening and spent a few hours putting both my novice web design and novice photoshop skills to work on a whole styling facelift for my website, and this was the result: https://macdat.net/index_test.html

I personally think it turned out really well for the skills I've got, and I'm proud of the result. It needs some tweaking still, but it's in a mostly finalized state. Would love to hear anyone's feedback on how I could improve it!

One note: One of the main goals of my site has been to maintain a level of functional compatibility with old web browsers (early 2000s targeted). I haven't tested yet but I'll bet that's been somewhat broken on the new styling. On one hand, I've been wanting a refresh on the site for a while to make it look nicer. On the other hand, I want to maintain said compatibility. I'm going to be thinking over a few different routes between the time of this post and the far-away time where this new styling takes over the old styling on how I could do this. I could go the route of many and have two separate versions, but maintaining such a thing could prove difficult. I'd love anyone's ideas on that too!

Thanks!
3lectr1c

 

[eric]

The black text on the image background is a bit hard to read at least for me.

The table width is a bit wide depending on what vintage of browsers your targeting - 640x480 looks like this:

otherwise looking very 90's

 

[bakkus]

The colored background is really glaring and makes things hard to read.
Find a suitable contrast color instead.

 

[3lectr1c]

Whoops forgot to update here. I put the same thread out on 68kMLA and the feedback was largely what you two have said and I agree - here's the updated version. I'm really happy with it now, what do y'all think?

As for the width of everything - I want to prioritize usability for the majority of users at the moment, which are going to be on modern browsers. This version of the site renders *ok* on IE 5 and 6, not perfect, but usable, but yeah, you have to scroll on screens below 1400x1050 (4:3) and 1366x768 (16:9) at the moment. I'm looking into ways of addressing this.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

I prefer a solid background for reading information (like TD's dark theme for example - solid white on gray). Reading off a background like that fatigues my old eyeballs. The cloud colors on black text is much easier to read vs 1v.

 

[Bolkonskij]

I like it, it has personality and is unique. Keep it up, 3lectr1c! My only gripe is: can you make this accessible via http too? As in offering both? No reason to "hide" things from the public

That way, your site would be accessible from older browsers too. And if you're really adventurous, rewrite the HTML5 code to HTML 3 and make it compatible all the way down to 1990's browsers like Netscape 3

Don't forget to submit it to wiby.org too ;-)

 

[3lectr1c]

Thanks! It appears my hosting enabled all the unneeded security stuff at some point so I’ve got to figure out how to turn that all off