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[Doctor Eric]

Heh, a microscopic portion of my faith in humanity was just restored as I noticed that Woofnah has more pictures of her pets on her website than of herself. I can still be charmed by creatures too dumb for ego.
O.K., you live.

[scot]

criti -- According to Merriam Webster

criti: singular of critus

The basics of what I was saying were, it will take more knowledge and more time than you think, if you want it to look good. Right now it doesn't look good.

Tips for the current site:
- Get a domain name
- Put your menu together (there are huge line breaks)
- Don't use times font
- Dont use normal link colors
++To change this, Ms. Programmer, put link= and then the color in quotes in your body tag. same with vlink=
- don't use a stock or stolen background like the escher one you now have. Make one or use none.
- the best photos you have on the site are the plungers at xmas and 4 clubs at a fest. That's not to say they're good photos.
- Most people don't know that John Satriano is a famous juggler. Captions are supposed to help describe the picture.
- Your alternate resume is better but not good
- Bio is too personal, too long, and too first person. I didn't read it so, can't tell you the other stuff... Oh, an ad for your juggling club?
- don't use bright red text for anything ever.

Simply fix these things and get a ton of good photos. Then, we'll do some more work.

Robert is wrong to call you a monkey. I think he was just joking. Sometimes his jokes can be tactless. Don't take offense.

[Woofnah]

Thanks for the input

"- Get a domain name"

Can't afford it yet. Will do when I can.

"- Put your menu together (there are huge line breaks)"

Those were intentional. As per the input from 2 agents.

"- Don't use times font"

Okay. I'll change that.

"- Dont use normal link colors "

Color issues: The only colors I can see are bright red, bright blue, black, and bright purple. This sort of limits what I can use.

"- don't use a stock or stolen background like the escher one you now have. Make one or use none."

Actually, this was something the agent loved. He told me to keep this.

"- the best photos you have on the site are the plungers at xmas and 4 clubs at a fest. That's not to say they're good photos."

Head shots will be forthcoming. And I'm pretty sure the posed shot that's on my "resume" page is good.

"- Most people don't know that John Satriano is a famous juggler. Captions are supposed to help describe the picture."

Most non-jugglers don't know ANY of those people.

"- Your alternate resume is better but not good"

Kay. What is bad about it. What needs changing?

"- Bio is too personal, too long, and too first person. I didn't read it so, can't tell you the other stuff... Oh, an ad for your juggling club?"

I started it. I'm the best juggler there (which is pretty pathetic). Without me it doesn't exist.

"- don't use bright red text for anything ever."

Back to my color issues mentioned above.

"Simply fix these things and get a ton of good photos. Then, we'll do some more work."

Head shots are forthcoming. There seems to be something wrong in the photo translation on geocities. The pictures look good (to me at least so that's not saying very much) when they stand alone. When I put them on the page they look distorted (to me). Hopefully this will change when I can afford my own domain name and pay for a site.

"Robert is wrong to call you a monkey. I think he was just joking. Sometimes his jokes can be tactless. Don't take offense."

I believe Eric was the one who called me blind monkey. Robert merely pointed out to him that I am, indeed, blind. And decended from monkeys, as per Mr. Charles Darwin.

Thank you very much for the actual critiques. These are much more helpful than just saying "it's bad, fix it".

[Woofnah]

Have to admit confusion here

"- Don't use times font"

Okay. I'll change that.


You know what? It's *never* been times font. I can't utilize fonts with serifs. It's Arial. It's always been Arial. I just double checked my coding and it is, indeed, still Arial.

[Woofnah]

Summary I think

What I'm seeing is that just a few changes need to be made:

1. Alter pictures:
-- Home page, remove all, add forthcoming Headshot
-- Links page, change middle picture
-- Bio page, change bottom 2
-- Resumes, remove all pics (?)

2. Resumes: remove links to websites for events (?)

3. Alter font: style and colors (?)
-- need to find unusual font that is legible
-- what colors go with a grey background?

4. It is preferable to onlookers to *not* have the gaps in the menus (?) as opposed to the agents who wanted them. This will need thinking about to find an acceptible compromise

5. Shorten bio

Anything else I'm missing?

[Tyler]

Thanks for the help. Dr Eric, that thing about me knowing more then you at 18, I'll take that as a compliment.

[Doctor Eric]

It's a good idea not to take an agents advice on web design, I have yet to see an agency's site that doesn't look like crap. I think your colors issue could be solved by with style-sheets, use one with the colors you need for layout, and then have a friend help you pick out a three color scheme that is pleasing, and helps to convey the "woofnah-ness", and make that the public style-sheet. Any colors will go with light grey, they just need to have the same chroma value. Which I think makes what I just said necessary, because all the colors that will match your background will probably just blend right into it to you (which will read as pleasing to folks with "normal" vision, I'm assuming you need things to be pretty jarring to see them) another option is black and white with a couple of splashes of color here and there.
Choose your fonts carefully, that is what makes a site look professional, get a font wheel, it's just like a color wheel, and makes combining fonts a snap about three seconds after you look at one, I'll try to google it and post a link, if money for photos is an issue, a good solution that I used to use with my circus (whose roster was constantly changing, we always needed new group photos), is Sears, or any of those places in the mall that does family portraits, they'll give you all the photos on a CD as you leave. All the pics will have that cheesy "airbrush" thing going on with them, but you can just play it up, and then, you'll at least have studio pics until you can cough up for some nice photos. Plus, those photos are easy to integrate into websites because they fade out to white at the edges. And even though they are cute and charming, you should probably take your puppy and kitty cat photos down, approach your website as a sales-pitch for YOU and you'll thank yourself later (or link to a more personal page somewhere where you can post all that stuff, that's what I do).

[Butterfly Man]

blind leading the blind

Thanks for your advise but I don't think I'd call unless I needed to update my cockring ...





P.S nothing you say is "necessary".

[Woofnah]

A little more input please, Scott

I've changed the link color to a purple. Please take a look at it and let me know if you think it should be a brighter, i.e., lighter purple ... or if the purple I have chosen will suffice.

I really did like the bright blue best. Blue is my favorite color.

Thanks for your input.

[Tyler]

I like it.

[Tyler]

As Dr. Eric pointed out I am only 15, so it wouldn't be a promo site for all over. It'd be for places where I live, with some stuff for my juggling friends.

[scot]

nearly perfect...

Eric said that the page had the appearance of being made by a, "blind monkey with an iBook." Robert was the one to classify this saying as relating to you by noting your powers of vision. This link leads to the idea that you may be a monkey with an iBook.

Link colour is better. Now, change the headline color of "ADRIA M. MOSKOWITZ" To black (main stuff should have highest contrast), and the sub-headline to a dark ("#330033") shade of purple. Your vlinks should be "#6600cc".

As long as you're going with that fansite-ish background, black text is alright because your grey is far enough off white. If you get a lighter bg or you change to white, all your black text should be changed to "#333333" or a similar "off black" value of a color (like "#000033").

Your color vision limits you a lot in this arena, but if you understand how rgb values work, and remember to keep things subtle, you can do ok. To keep the stave off the brightness, avoid values of "ff" on any of your colors.

As Eric suggested, CSS is a good thing to learn if you have more time than money. Once you learn the basics, you can change the colorvalues and layout of your entire site by just changing one file. you also have more flexibility than with plain HTML.

Eric, knows more than just how to reduce the size of a cockring. His site is a designer's nightmare, but he knows all the rules he breaks. He's right. Don't listen to the agent on advice about design. The tips the agent gave were all wrong, and anti-helpful. If links were supposed to be spaced like that, I think at least one other company would have a site that looked similar. And, M.C. Escher is cool, but he's more cool for being unique and discernable.

Trash the pictures on your homepage ( You just admitted that most people don't understand them) and put up the picture of you sitting on the grass. It's not a head shot, but a body shot. That's ok. If you have the larger resolution photo, crop it just past the edges of your body (cut off a toe, a bit of your knee, your elbow tip, and a bit of your head) then resize it so it's 400px tall. If it looks bad at this size, undo and make it a little smaller until it looks ok.

If you're getting new photos taken, read the stuff I wrote below. Be extremely prepared for your photographer. Ask him if you can pick up some film for him? Get him some reference pictures of what you want ahead of time if possible. If he doesn't like it that your making a style suggestion and you're paying him between $1000 and $50, you need a new photographer. Get a new costume if you can. Practice your poses, so you can do it all fast. Make everything look as custom as possible, you're not trying to sell a juggling show to agents (they have those). You're trying to sell you.

Domains are free at the link I posted for Tyler below.

If there's any chance, ditch your personal pages, and the links page. You don't want to make it easy for people to leave your site.

If you need to post anything else, please start a new thread. That will help keep things more organized.

I think you should go with a bionic juggler thing. You giving team building workshops doesn't make as much sense as a self-starter type of workshop. You should work the overcoming obstacles angle.

Scot

[Chance]

Hi!

Your site is looking better all the time, but I was wondering if you have any pics where you are smiling?

Chance