http://www.rumbletrack.com

or

http://www.contractors-services.us


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This is a site that I built for a client as a contracted design job. My client originally registered contractors-services.us, but the host that we chose (which happens to be the one that I use for my site) gives away a domain name for every new account that is signed up. We chose rumbletrack.com as the freebie name b/c the rumble track is a product that my client provides.

A rumble track is basically a doormat for your car that is intended for construction sites. If you drive around on a construction site, you get lots of dirt and mud in your tire treads and when you get back on city streets, you leave a swath of debris behind you, which violates many city laws. The rumble track has grooves in it that loosen and remove the debris from your tires when you drive over it, so oyur tires are clean when you leave the construction site.

I did graphic design, site layout/coding , logo design, and photo retouching for the site.

Personally, I feel that this site is among the finest that I've ever built, and I want to display the fruits of my labor here.

Comments welcome.



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I had a good idea for a perfect new sig, but then I forgot what it was...

As a fellow designer, I just have a few nit-picky things.
1) The site doesn't at all convey the sense that it's a contractor's website. I don't get a private business feel from it at all, but rather more of a personal BLOG site or portfolio of some sorts.
2) You lied when you said you hand-code all your sites. I understand how tedious it would be (especially using imageready sliced images), but I felt deceived anyways
3) The Beam image has a funky rollover problem. When you roll over any OTHER button, the little frame thing disappears and comes back. I'm on IE 5 mac right now, so I'm not sure if it's just a localized problem.
4) Very not low resolution friendly. The images take up a ton of room. This is sooo very important on a private business' site.
5) The vertical border image cuts off. I would slice it right where it kinks to 90 degrees, and just use CSS to make it a vertical tiling, left-aligned image.

The site looks great. BUT the header is totally way too big, and it just doesn't feel like a business site.

>not all business sites have to look the same. Many contractor-related sites I've seen have that thrown-together-in-frontpage look. Anyone would find my design much more elegant than that.



>I didn't lie, I just didn't tell the whole truth. Imageready has a nice slice feature, so why do things the hard way? I had to do that back in the old days, and it sucked. I remember spending countless hours getting a graphics-based interface to line up correctly, and even in the end never getting a perfect match because the images didn't tile absolutelty perfectly. This way is much better.

I do hand-code my sites in Homesite after I'm done building the interface in Photoshop, so what I told you is true, from a certain point of view. My newer style involves building the actual interface in photoshop as a screen sized document (usually 1024 px x 1024 px, maybe taller if I'm expecting a lot of content), including the white areas for text, slicing it up, and then exporting the images. This allows for a unique, tightly integrated design that also has excellent backwards compatibility-- if the browser can reconize tables and their contents, then it could probably display the site properly. Since the images are build to tile and mesh seamlessly from the start, the illusion is practically perfect.

I love this design technique because the images mesh seamlessly and I don't have to rely on elaborate css positioning. The only con is that the design has practically no allowance for text overflow-- I have to make the design fit the content instead of making the content fit the design as would if I went the traditional route.





>Strange, that problem never happened when the page was being developed locally on my comp. It probably has something to do with downloading the rollover images off of the server. I'll write a script that preloads those images and see if that fixes the problem.

>As much as I like to be backwards compatible, the standard for web design screen resolution is moving towards 1024 x 768, so that's what I build towards. There has to be a cutoff point. You can't please everybody, but my art teachers at college claim that most people use 1024 x 768 or above, and I've heard outside sources confirm this.

I went with a heavy look for the images because my client sells things like beams and steel plate, which have a "heavy" word association to them. It would look strange to have delicate images on a site selling construction-related items, imo. I feel that the design of a site should match its product.

>I don't like making my designs rely entirely on CSS because there are still people out there that use old browsers. I use images and tables to do layouts whenever I can. I use new technologies occasionally, but I don't like having a design totally rely on them to show properly.

The way I have things set up now, theoretically, the site should appear with minimal distortion on version 2 NS/IE browsers or newer.


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I had a good idea for a perfect new sig, but then I forgot what it was...

[This message has been edited by Pagewizard_YKS (edited March 19, 2004).]

When moving the mousecursor from "rumble track" to "equipment rentals" or back, the frame outline in "Beams" flickers.

Opera 7.23 on XP, for completeness.

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Map-Review | Digital Core | The Matrix: Unplugged

Farewell, MaDaVentor. In our hearts, you'll always live on.

any other comments?




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I had a good idea for a perfect new sig, but then I forgot what it was...

Ok, here goes:

- Image filesizes are enormous, rule of thumb for webdesign is that your template page (ie design with nothing more than filler content) should be no more than 50kb.

- You could easily get that design to 800x600, it'd probably look better too. Right now it feels very "play school".

- I can't say I like the overuse of bevels and drop-shadows. The design feels more like a pillow than a construction services company site.

- Don't use HTML for page layout, if you're offering professional web-design services you want to make sure you're on top of the latest trends in web development. This means: xhtml coding (ie <br /> instead of <br> ), only use tables for displaying tabular data, use CSS2 for ALL of your layout formatting.

- Given that this site would be targeted at people who are unlikely to sit at their screens all day, the design NEEDS to be printer-friendly. Just do a print-preview and you'll see the problem. XHTML and CSS allow you to include a seperate stylesheet for printers which should basically just be the content with the company logo at the top.

Way to sum up my views.

Also, the horizontal scroll must be abolished. Graphics aren't that stellar, but they don't really need to be. The site doesn't feel very construction oriented though.

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[This message has been edited. Deal with it.]

Youch.. tough crowd.

As someone who isn't really much of a web developer, I'd say it looks pretty good..

[This message has been edited by Freelancer (edited March 19, 2004).]