Chicago Arts Non-profit site - What do you think?

[Mackie]

Looking for feedback on my local arts nonprofit Joomla! site:

http://www.chicagocityarts.org

Planning to add soon: gallery, wiki, multilingual, accessibility component, blog & WAP.

Any comments/ideas. This is a one-person show, so be gentle.

[masyomo]

looks cool - nice & easy on the eye.

With firefox on a mac some of the menu items are overlapping each other - its where some of the titles have gone onto 2 lines so easily sorted if you can shorten the title somehow - had the same prob on one of our menus so had to abbreviate some stuff.

[Mackie]

Thanks for the tip. I just looked at the December site stats and was amazed to see that 20% of my visitors use Firefox.

[yogi]

yeah nice and easy on my eye too.

not colours I would choose but very nice, and simple.. well done

looks good in 800 and 1024

[Mackie]

Thanks. I understand what you mean about the black and green. Luckily templates are easy to swap in and out of Joomla! so it's a lot less work to get a new look. Perhaps summer will bring something that pops a bit more.

-Matt

[yogi]

It actually looks ok...  i did not mean change it... what I meant was they are not colours" I" would ever choose... hey your talking to someone who wants only to use BLACK as a background... 

looks great.

[theperthgirls]

I liked it - plus looks good with zoom in there. 

I liked the header/writing in the header, plus translator. Translator played up a bit for me - but unsure whether one has to have the character sets for the language chosen.


theperthgirls

[sachas]

Looks good...nice and clean.

One note...I was playing around with the translation thing.  I was considering the implementation with some of my future sites.  Bug I found....if you go from English to something else, and then go from that language to another, you get an error.  If you always go back to the beginning in English, things are ok.

[jerzom]

Nice friendly site. One thing: I am using FF and the first paragraph seems to have a different font (plain Times it seems) while the rest is Verdana(?)...

I got a lot of feedback on my new site about being too 'static'. I am building a list of images which I randomly 'throw' around the site the loosen it up a little. The same seems to apply to yours...

[Mackie]

It's not your browser. I messed up the style on that first article and my fixes just made things worse so I reverted back. I asked for feedback and no one cared so I left it. There's only so much time and some times I accept less than perfect rather than delay new content too long.

You're right. Dynamism is key. These days, that means mixing in non-text elements. For me, as an arts nonprofit, that's easier than for other sites: online exhibitions of images or film, even music exhibitions, other multimedia. Be creative. If you can insert 15 seconds of a song (fair use) in part of an article that is a little dry, just do it. Depending on your license, there's tons of free video, audio, and image material you can use if you can comply with the license (I use a Creative Commons and there are over 1 million Creative Commons sites indexed by Yahoo!). So I encourage you to continue to explore ways to make your site dynamic. It can be done for free or on a small budget. We are a visual and auditory culture now, there's no getting away from it.