Foo - Class Project Critique...

I am not plugging a website, but my teacher in my pre ed class is asking us to put together a website for our "students" to use... my students are taking "world history" and I am a high school Social science teacher...

NOTE - non of the links work yet... it is just a test page... it took me maybe 40 minutes to do...

The goal... easy navigation that even a web savy 13 year old could use :lol: - actually the 3 pictures are big buttons for their respective classes, the middle bar (I have to be different) contains the less meaty content of the page...

Webpage (http://mswager.cloud.prohosting.com/)

What do you think?

Mandy

My only comment is to replace the photo on the GOVERNMENT button with something more familiar. 13 year olds may not recognize the inside of the capitol dome. Some kids in our area never get out of town! Maybe an outside shot of the capitol instead?

A Web-savvy 13 year old? Gee I wonder how many of those are out there?

:D

Otherwise, it looks good!

The "One Moment in Time" bit reminds me of a Whitney Houston song. A 13 yo will probably have never heard of the song so I guess the rest is fine. No links to syllabi, lecture notes/handouts and a test schedule?

Oh man, you had sound?!?!

(I don't have sound at work which is odd since I do acoustic testing)

For a historical bent, how about "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel?

An instrumental of "I'm Proud To Be An American" may work, and would be less distracting than BJ's chart.

Everyone's a music critic...:D

My vote is for Steppenwolf: Monster

This is admittedly rather nit-picky, but I don't like the spacing on the lettering. Can you make them just a little tighter between the letters of the same word? The way it is now, you have to look an extra second to be certain where words divide.

Other than that, the page is very attractive, and seems intuitive to navigate.

Your three big links could benefit from a little more emphasis, since they are presumably the main functional aspect of the page. It took me a second to notice them. I suggest putting a border around either the group or each one individually. If you're familiar with CSS, you can do a fairly simple mouseover effect using the :hover pseudo element that will emphasize that they are links rather than just graphical prettiness. Overall it's very professional looking. Not cluttered.

Sorry if my advice is a little complicated. I've dabbled in building business sites, so I've looked fairly deeply at interface design and I work directly with the code. Makes me a bit snotty. ;)