Wonderful Copenhagen

I find that pop-up on the main tourism page ('Copenhagen - A city by the sea') quite annoying - it kept popping-up when I went anywhere near the menu links.

Note: I'm using Firefox on WinXP.

The layout is a bit on the table-side of things...and not very inspiring to look at (okay - that's my impression!) The use of colours are nicely balanced though, and I get the suggestion that this is a very professional site with much to recommend it for. Not validating is a shame, and I'll give it a 7.

Not so surprising that you think it's on the "table-side of things", since the site use tables for layout. Also the navigation is done with images in the content instead of in the css. Lots of stuff that doesn't fit with the stylegala submission guidelines in my opinion.

It's nice from a design point of view though, and most of the flash seems "non-crucial".

Lovely clean colours and columns, but there are several things that irritate me. I agree entirely that the flash on the home page is a bit annoying, and not particularly well executed. The site is close to fitting in at 800-600, probably 10-20 pixels or so, so why doesn't it? And the advert on the home page looks a little tacked on.

Visually pretty, but that is some ugly html.

Jeez, some people are never satisfied. You can give them a major site redone so it loads pretty close to lightening-fast, you have lots of attempts at making this more accessible, standards-compliant and whatever ... and someone needs to trash it because, well, of rather minor issues.

Lately I think that many of these design critique sites are losing their focus: Instead of encouraging people to go down the right path, they get trashed for making the site a bit more flashy. Get real! How many major sites for metropolitan areas do you know that present themselves in a way such as this one?

None?

This is NOT a blog with some nice dittly squat stuff. Look at the depth of it and ask yourself if it delivers ... no matter what the guidelines are here ...

In my opinion it does (and no, I have absolutely nothing to do with this site).

My two cents.

It appears to be DIV soup, it looks great but could work a lot better.

It does look great, better every time you see it.

With very few exceptions, large corporate or municipal sites like this will be doing well to merely approach Web standards. Here, the layout is a div structure - contained within a table. Not perfect, but better than perhaps 99% of sites in this category.

I will always put more emphasis (in my Stylegala reviews) on the design, information architecture and communicative power of a site - especially when the site is an excellent example of those things and with something to teach us. Others here will put more emphasis on the backend. That's great. Together, we offer a more rounded offering of reviews.

So before you simply give a site the back of your hand, ask youself if you could do as well at the positive aspects the site exhibits. Neither aspect is the end-all, be-all of successful Web craft. Criticism is appropriate, necessary even. But unless that criticism is offered in an appropriate context, it's probably a waste of everyone's time.

Good points, Andy. I'll try to explain my concerns.

Using a table is totally forgiveable. I'm not sure if this design hits its mark, though. There are so many small blocks of text that my eyes aren't really directed to anything besides the Flash header. Nearly all the textual content is treated the same, and so none of it floats to the top or differentiates itself from its neighbor. Once you get below the Flash movie, it's all pretty nondescript. The Flash movie is also problematic; separating the image/description area from the "Design, History, Royal, Relaxed" menu is confusing and disassociates two elements which are very much associated. I didn't even realize it was a menu at first. On top of that, the size, placement, and vertical alignment of the text is poorly chosen. Why is "Welcome to" so small? And why is it so far away from the rest of the text?

All in all, I think this is a nice layout with lots of potential, but it seems more like a first draft than a finish

The design is excellent. Nicely done rounded corners, good typography, nice use of flash (embedded fonts on the web, yay!), strong photographic elements, thoughtful cropping, appealing contrast, inviting colors and very interesting content.

The nerds really need to stop viewing the source code before they look at the design; you're not a designer if that's how you judge design. And you likely haven't had enough experience writing code for large scale web sites if you think compliance or validation is king; some of these comments are so uninspiring and weak!

It would be interesting to know how many people worked on the site.

Well done Tobias and a fine choice Andy.

In general, the overall design is acceptable. But the advertisements really need to go, it doesn't render properly in FireFox and also prevents the main content from being centered. The little flash object is a nice addition to an otherwise "non-interactive" website.

Regarding the semantics side of things, it's all valid well structured, (minus the table that's holding everything together)

I particularly like the tabbed navigation and the logo placement.

Love the use of the squidfingers pattern

Grey with some red colors, make sence. Content devided in right way, looks as busy website. but a little messy. Overall, its nice website i think

Eyes catching website, first thing i noticed was inigue background, men tabs, and colums. I found this website by chance, and I'm glad that I have an opportunity to empress my opinion. Good luck, great website