We get lots of requests for work from junior develpers and from time to time give some potential developers a task to evaluate a website and / or create some logos for us, here is an sample evaluation and reply which also goes to show that different people can view a website in different ways, as a coincidence he picked a website that was started but never completed (due to the client running out of money for his website so most comments are valid)
[Essex Website Designers] Thanks for you email, your cv seem very professional and your passion is clearly shown, as a mini test can do one (or all) of the following to ensure you are of the correct calibre of candidate for us.
1, Using photoshop create a quick / simple logo to replace this site’s logo
2, Using photoshop create a quick / simple logo just using the name of the website
3, Look through one of our own websites on one on the porfolio pages and give us some recommendations to improve the design or SEO of the site, once we see we what your ideas are perhaps we can take this further
[Junior Website Designer / Developer] Thank you for the fast response. I appreciate your feedback. Attached are my versions of the logos in various formats as you didn’t specify.
I have looked at your website Silent Bubbles and these are the improvements I would make:
- Make a more varied gradient for the background and align the image behind the main text to the right, fading to transparent towards the bottom and left, or remove it completely.
- Align the header background with the body instead of having it run all the way across the top of the page.
- Attempt to make the main body of text more concise and if this was not possible I would add a seperate page for further information as it is quite lengthy and doesn’t look very clean. I think that a clean and simple aesthetic would suit a website relating to water and the sea.
- I would put the images and the news feed on the left hand side of the page underneath the menu. This would provide more space for the text and allow the page to be shorter.
- The image of bubbles in the logo is cut off on the right hand side.
- A few other pages have a lot of empty space at the bottom of the page which isn’t needed.
- There seem to be a lot of menu items. I would move all of the information on each sub-menu item of the ‘About’ menu item on one page as I think the seperate pages are unneccesary and look messy.
- I would space out the top menu further so it is justified in relation to the central column.
- The image which seems to be used as a sort of background that I metioned earlier looks incredibly messy and I don’t like the aesthetic of the image on the left with a ring of people. I would either use this as a background for the left menu, lower the opacity and set a downwards transparency gradient to make it blend with the text of the left menu. If this didn’t look very nice then I may remove the images altogether and replace the background gradient with an image of rippled water or something similar so that it wouldn’t be too boring.
If I am completely honest SEO is something that I know very little about so I am not very well equipped to suggest improvements, however it is something I have considered and I will be creating an e-portfolio for myself soon to share my computer and music skills so it is something that I will have to consider anyway and I do intend to learn more about that area of web design. I do believe that, although there is plenty for me to learn from the web design industry I would find it quite an easy process once I have become familiar with the techniques so I don’t think I would require much instruction in that area.
I have worked on testing out several different concepts with the owner of that domain over the last couple of years, helping her to build them and see how they are received by the public. Currently there isn’t much of a design on there as we’ve had to put our most recent idea on hold so we haven’t been able to do any work since the end of summer last year. We did have a website set up as a sort of private chat network and classified ad directory running as a facebook app at that URL but unfortunately the server was attacked and we lost a lot of data. I have been testing out different colour schemes and layouts for the portfolio I mentioned previously. I was originally planning to just use it for music, hence the logo. Again, this isn’t really much of a site as I’m just testing ideas and I’ve been a bit pre-occupied with looking for work and trying to actually practice the skills I will be displaying on the site. I have only been doing it for an hour or two here and there so I’ve probably only spent about a day actually playing with it. If there is anything in particular you would like to see then I will make some time and let you know when the site is updated. Both are built on Joomla.
I am also working on a permaculture network with a few people however we only came up with the concept early this year so we aren’t really ready to publish a website. I have written a contact form in html for the website and I have started on the php however that is something I am not so familiar with so I want to wait until I have more time to absorb the process a bit better. I’ve also been playing around with a basic template idea in html, just a floating header, sidebar and footer for when we are happy with the concept. I think that we are going to have to write a lot of that site in javascript though to suit our needs and we are unable to do that until we know exactly what we are doing, so that is another project that’s sort of in limbo at the moment. All of the files for that are stored on my computer though.
