Search Engine

first thought:  this is Just Another Portal Site.  there's nothing that immediately tells me it's any different from other portals.

second thought: it looks better in Opera than Netscape/IE because Opera leaves margins around the main table (if you want to remove the margins in Opera too you'll have to use CSS (body { margin: 0;})

the site design is fairly good.  as I've already mentioned is looks like Just Another Portal Site, but that's maybe the point?  the site adapts to window size, which is good.

the top part (down to and including the Find:-links) looks good except for a few things.  www.sunsteam.com shouldn't be in italics, doesn't look good at all.  it should preferably be a part of, or an extension of, the logo (thereby having anti-aliasing).  the light bulb icon seems misplaced since it's a rather crude drawing, and besides, what does a light bulb have to do with "about"?

I'd use a different hover color than the orange that's used for "Find:" and some of the other text.  the way it's done now the hover text disappears slightly since it's the same color as the text, it doesn't "stand out" like it should.  this is probably also due to the orange lines.

apart from that I think the top part is good.  I'd maybe move the search field into the lower blue part of the top part, so the white field doesn't end up being so large.  don't know if that makes the blue part look too large either.  the colors used here have a distinct contrast, which maybe will lead to a few problems since what might look like small part sizes in other designs will look large here (due to the contrast between the parts).

the bottom part looks disorganized, incoherent.  since the top part is so consistant the bottom part probably looks more disorganized.  there's 7 different background colors and in my opinion they do not go very well together.  my attention is drawn down to the right, the "Tip of the day" (there's a spelling error there by the way).  the "Tip of the day" can probably stay different from the rest, but the other parts should have a more consistant design.  headings should all be one color combination, and the link/text panels be another.

in the link section down in the middle I'd add a space between all commas and the text after them.  it's difficult to read as it is now.  I also find the hover color to be problematic here, it shouldn't change to the same color as surrounding text.

apart from that I noticed a 404 error came when I tried to go to the "Add URL" page form the "About sunsteam" page.  and why is there no footer on the page about the Microsoft trial?

I think that's about it from a 5-minute visit. :)

I noticed now that this is a duplicate question, also asked in the WWW area.  you'd probably want to delete the other before it gets comments, and then post a simple "Please see (link goes here) in WWW Authoring area".  that way you don't end up spending a lot of points for nothing.

(I also noticed that the question is given more priority over there, 180 points compared to the 100 here).

I got an e-mail notification saying this question was pending deletion, but it doesn't seem to be now that I've checked it out.  I'll just post this comment and see what happens.

ah, I noticed now, it was bound for auto-deletion.  well Lars, any news about the service?  any comments of my comments?

Well, i have done some changes, if you have some tips on how to organize the bottom part better, please tell me about it, i appreciate your attention,

Lars...

I didn't like the large black footer.  it's far too high, and since its colors are inverted from the rest of the document it grabs attention.  I'd stick with the color scheme from the header (blue background, orange lines, white text).

I'd also add some padding to the bottom part of the news flash table cell.  maybe 0.5em, maybe 0.75em, or something like that (done through CSS).  the "tech news" heading is in my opinion too close to the other cell.

I found the underlining of the headers of the portal look section, middle cell in the botttom part, to be nice.  works well I think.  but I'd remove the underlining from the left & right cell. it's not so necessary there because they don't have headers like the portal section has.

also, in my Opera the list in the left table cell (news flash) is quite different from the list in the right table cell (downloads).  the one on the right has a paragraph break between each list item, so it becomes quite large.  I'd look into trying to remove that paragraph break (probably comes from the <br> stuck in between list items).

I think that's about it.  the front page looks great, with a very nice logo adding professionalism.

Thanks to all for letting me keep this question open for so long, i have gotten many good ideas out of it, havent been able to put them all into action but many things have changed since i opened this,

if you ever see some spelling errors on the page i'd preciate alot if you told me, im norwegian and might miss-spell sometimes (did i spell that correct? hehe)

18r

Lars