Website/Portfolio Critique

Bump. I would appreciate any feedback, so don't feel obligated to answer every single question.

This is all just my opinion, so do what you will with it.

Does my splash page sound corny?
Are the fonts in my bio hard to read? If so, is this a big deal?

I like the idea. The font is a little difficult to read initially - maybe make it less bold or change it to something a bit more conventional.

Do you like the way I set up my bio, or do you think I should make it more professional?

For me, a bio/resume/cv should look professional. Maybe throw the info in some tables to space it out/line it up.

The fonts are unreadable on the 'About' page.

Is the expand/contract feature in my portfolio confusing/disorienting?

A little. If you're going to do it, maybe use some javascript to ease in/out or smooth scroll.

Does the emptiness on the bottom of the contact page bug you?

It made me focus on the text, so I'd say keep it.

Are there any major bugs visible with your browser and OS?
...

Fine here.

Will my portfolio be helpful in an internship search, or does it need more work?

I couldn't answer that, but I'd say it will only be useful for game-specific employment. I doubt a manager at BoA would appreciate what you're aiming for

Additionally - for me, the multitude of colours are a little distracting. I'm all for being bright and colourful, but if there was more of a 'theme' going on I think it would benefit. The top links for example are a little difficult to see, and most of the fonts are different.

Better not to say anything is 'buggy'. It needs to show your best work, so maybe fix the problem instead.

Finally, it might be better to present your GD.net profile as an example of you're interest/dedication to games, but not as 'asking for help'. Not that asking for help is bad - but generally when looking at potential candidates, recruiters want to see what you can do as opposed to how many things you've asked.

All in all, the site gets the information across but possibly could benefit a little more professionalism. With no offence intended!

Hope that's helpful.

Best of luck.

Hey, thank you so much! I will definitely try to make it more professional and add smooth scrolling. As for the bio... do you mean you think the content should be more professional, or just the formatting?

You're welcome.

Definitely the bio formatting. The fonts are different across the whole site, which for me makes it a little confusing.

It's really up to you whether you want to include non-professional bio details. A couple of lines about interests/etc can't hurt.

This looks promising for a smooth expand effect: http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex17/animatedcollapse.htm

That smooth expand demo actually looks really nice, however I don't know if it would look good will large amounts of info in each div. Anyway, I just applied a smooth scroll that works well enough. What do you think?

When you say the fonts are different across the whole site, are you talking about the bio page alone, or my entire website?

The home page looks like it was created by a 10-year-old. "I want to make games when I grow up". The left side with "Hi" in one color, the right side with text in another color, that is horrible.

The font by itself is not the killer.

The lack of sophistication, unreadable layout, lack of focus, poor whitespace usage, mystery-meat navigation, and horrible color scheme are just a few of the killers. The site WebPagesThatSuck.com has some checklists of things you should not do. Checklist one and checklist two covering different severity. Just scanning over it, your site breaks 14 of the first 20 critical flaws. I imagine if you go through the list of nearly 300 real-world problems you'd discover your site has about a quarter of them.


I'm not sure what your "About Me" page is for. Why is it first? You have a facebook page, but why is that important? You have favorite movies, but why should I hire you? Why does the bottom of every page say when the content is last updated? If you gave it out to an employer I expect it to be current, so the date can tell me you've been handing out the address for 2 days or for 3 months; I know how long your job search has lasted.

Your next page has a bunch of source code. Then at the very end it has a movie showing a design document. That's fine if I want you to make design documents. I want to see actual games. Give me a movie of an actual game that you made, or a movie of an actual interactive graphical product even if it isn't a game. I'll take a terrain flyby, or an articulated model, or networked simulations, or ANYTHING ELSE over what you've got there.

Third page, an actual resume. Finally!

Objective is too wordy. Cut the first word and the second line.

Education, tell me more about what you did and why it matters.

A little less white space and margins, a little more detail. I like how you actually gave some details about what you did and the tools and languages used. That is useful. I want more of that, get rid of the five-inch margins.

For an intern resume, what you have is basically what is expected. If you held a job in the past, such as fast food or janitorial, include it. Once you've held a professional job for a while you can cut them, but it is very important to show that you know the meaning of work and that you can hold a job, show up on time, and follow your boss's orders.

The last web page, contact, has the info in an unexpected place. Why is this one on top, everything else has been on bottom?



The resume itself is reasonably good for an intern. Sparse, lacking some details, but it doesn't have most of the major errors seen around here.

Overall the site leaves me with a very bad taste, making me feel I cannot trust you to do a professional job. It counteracts what the resume presents.

My website just got destroyed. I will read through your entire post and come up with a plan for redesigning it. This is exactly what I needed, thanks!

Scott

Overall the site leaves me with a very bad taste, making me feel I cannot trust you to do a professional job. It counteracts what the resume presents.

Does this page appear more professional from a design perspective?
http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~swilkewi/home
(The links are dummies.)

Thanks!
Scott

Does this page appear more professional from a design perspective?
http://web.ics.purdu.../~swilkewi/home
(The links are dummies.)

Yes, it is much nicer.

The heavy sans-serif font on the top is very bold, the serif font in the body provides a good contrast to it, both are professional styles.

The two-tone borders are visually appealing. I like the curved borders; you'll need to make sure they look correct on all major browsers.

The lime green color isn't my preference, however, the color doesn't detract. (I'd prefer either something much lighter or much darker, or a different color scheme like blue+silver that is common in technical businesses.)