Rotary International Interactive

I love the color palette ... although some of the content does get a bit cramped in that middle column. I would rather have seen the middle column expand to the right and take over the third column when you go into a secondary page.

I'm not one for being negative when it comes to commenting on sites, but this site just doesn't look well 'designed'. While it is not that 'bad' - and I'm sure the markup and code structure is spot on (I don't check as it should really be a given nowadays) - the site just doesn't work.

1) The logo looks blurry and lacks visual impact (and is also, well, just messy as logos go) - my eye is drawn to other areas of the page which is subconciously confusing, 2) The content lacks a hierachy, 3) The red seems too harsh against the background colour, 4) Why is the introductory text so small and a flat image? It's not using a non-standard font so this in itself is a poor development decision.

Perhaps I'm just in a bad mood today, but I really want to come on to Style Gala and be inspired and learn something new, and this featured site does not provide any of this. I think the bar needs raising - if a site is not either visually or technically pushing boundaries leave it off ..

I have to agree with kevadamson. What also is strange, is that some titles are links and some aren't, but you can not see the difference.

I can understand the importance of the site, but I can imagine that a lot of rotarians wont understand the functionality of the site.

truely uninspiring. I'm at a loss as to why/how it made it onto Stylegala.

I'd have to agree with the above comments - it's actually quite hard to read and navigate, with no obvious 'sections' or other structure.

The content unique to each page is also crowded into the narrow centre column, while the two side columns basically don't change - it's a lot of stuff given equal visual weight to distract from the the core of a given page.

Hey kev, it's orange not red, better have your monitor checked.

Please let me reiterrate what i said in the last gallery entry. please only leave comments pretaining to the site at hand here. any and all comments aimed at style gala should be made in the appropriate forum thread, such as this one

http://forum.stylegala.com/viewtopic.php?p=23907#23907

I appreciate everyone's comments... thus the purgatory of a new online publication. That said, we do plan on fixing the usability of the layout by either a) limiting the amount of stories we accept or 2) adding an actual navigation. The latter of the two we really didn't want to do, since it will go out next month as an e-letter to the many, many Rotarians who have already signed up. If we do decide to add a navigation, we may change a few minor layout decisions as well.

We look forward to your criticism when our whole web department launches the redesign of http://www.rotary.org next summer!

Mum always told me if I had nothing nice to say then say nothing at all. However, Dad then told me that if you believe in something strongly enough, speak up.

I think this is one of the most arid and banal designs I've seen added for quite some time. The colour choice almost seems to want to make things difficult for me. I click on some red text and it's a link; I click on other red text and it isn't.

Then we have title links, but also a "Read Full Story" link below the snippets. Why? It makes no sense.

The forest green text colour, against the already green background makes a combination which induces me to bang my head on the desk in frustration.

Then the content: I was hoping that we'd seen the end of stuffing as much content into a small space as possible. Clearly not. There seems to be absolutely no breathing space on the page, nor anywhere that will allow my eyes to rest, even for a moment.

Didn't like it at all.

I just think its funny how people keep saying the old sites where better, nothing is ground breaking, blah blah blah.

Go to the gallery, the last 6 sites all have a rating of 5+. Now if you look at the gallery where you can see all the site ratings you'll find that over 75% of all the other sites were rated LOWER than the last 6 sites reviewed.

In all honesty if voting was still allowed on the few sites in the 7 or 6 rating level they would probably be 5 now. I'm not sure why everyone is ridiculously hyper-critical all of asudden ... was your site(s) overlooked so now all you have left to do is whine and complain?

Most of the reviews on stylegala are user submitted, and nothing new or amazing out there is being done in the way of web standards design because there isn't much amazing new stuff we can do with the technology.

Very different layout which I like, however the site has no navigation what-so-ever! Other than the links on the front page I can't find anything else?... I take it this is supposed to read like a newspaper as it's volume 1, issue 1, at least have a page count and the ability to flick through pages.

It gets an 8 out of 10 for the creative layout, but a sad 0 for navigation. I gave this a 4.

I think the criticism is rather heavy here - while there are usability problems (the worst, in my opinion, being that there are some headers that are clickable, some that are not, yet there is no distinction), it's really a very attractive and compact layout. As far as heirarchy, I think that a decent amount has been maintained, though it could stand to be even more evident - my suggestion would be to reduce the font sized on the side columns by two points, though given the target audience this may not be an option.

I really dig the nearly equal width column layout, and I think that content is actually quite readable despite such narrow margins. Overall it gets a solid 7 from me - it's very good design, that could stand to have a couple small adjustments made.

I'm sorry to post a bad comment, but I just can't get the sense of this site.

The homepage layout is the same of the other pages, but first of all section titles are the perfect example of what shouldn't be done in terms of usability: some are clickable, some aren't... why?

The markup is valid, and this is good, but it is one of the few good things on this website.

Sorry for making another negative comment, but I agree very strongly with the people who say that the text is too cramped and haphazard. I can barely read the image replacing that paragraph at the top, for example; the title of the issue doesn't stand out enough; and the links to different sections and articles are all over the page, without any apparent logic or order.

Aesthetically, the site seemed a little dull. The colour scheme is not unpleasant, I just didn't see anything very interesting. This is forgivable, to an extent, because it just manages to convey an impression of sober respectability.

I would like to congratulate the designers on one point: the text which ISN'T replaced with an image resizes quite well, without breaking the layout too badly. Sadly, any sites posted here don't fare well in this respect. If only it were fluid as well!

I actually turned off the stylesheet to read one of the articles, and therein lies my final criticism: no "skip to article"

Great colorchoice.