Some thoughts:

- The ad on the left covers up the list of ingredients when doing a search. For example, if you remove all the ingredients and then try searching for "butter", the list of results is unusable.
- Please get rid of Times New Roman. It's not 1997 anymore. Try something more modern like Lucida Grande
- The overall graphics needs some design work. If you are using Photoshop, try adding some subtle borders and shadows around the images and menus. Also, I personally don't like the black background surrounding the white-themed site.
- The 'Fridgn' logo looks too much like Photoshop's 'Bevel and Emboss' effect. Try lightening the effect drastically and using gradients. The modern look is sharp edges with light gradients and shadows. Try using some specular highlighting effects (which can simply be a semi-transparent layer of a white gradient with portions of it cut out).
- If you want this to appeal to everyone, you should probably work on the wording at some point.

Overall, a very good idea. I wasn't really able to do anything much with the website due to the left ad covering up everything.

9/7/2011 8:10:09 PM

So I added in the 'x's' on the ingredients, made all the buttons the same length, removed the home, changed the header image to a link to the home page and thanks to ^ I got the ingredient drop down list no longer being covered by the amazon ad.

In regards to ^ you said add borders and shadows around the images and menus. Which images and menus? I've got drop shadows on most things using css3... which browser are you using?

As far as the text goes I'll look at it with something different as opposed to the times new roman. And thanks for the critique on the header image, though at least for the time being its a place holder till I have some time to play around with it in photoshop again (it is actually a gradient with a light effect on it... just no highlighting, the text was too thin and things got lost.)

And what would you suggest in regards to the black background? I've tried white, it looks off. My room mate also does not like the black but had no feed back on what other colors / gradients would be more appealing.

Thanks for the feed back!

9/8/2011 3:55:35 AM

Cool, I can actually use the website now

The actual menus where you choose the ingredients actually look fine (the borders and shadows are showing up there). However, there are other aspects of the website that could use some work - mainly the single-line black border that separates all the "panes" of the site (such as the header, side menus and main body). These lines would look much better if they weren't so black and blended more with the color scheme of the website. Adding some light shadows underneath the header may also help. You could also try a "3D" look. Also, the "Fridgn Monthly Feature: September 2011" header image could use some light borders and perhaps some shadows. I would play around with those thin black borders first though.

If you want an idea of what I am talking about as far as shadows and 3D look go, feel free to look at my website in my profile (which is still a work in progress). There are very light shadows underneath the header that aren't glaringly obvious but at the same time make it blend with the website a bit more. You can also see what I mean by "specular highlighting" by looking at my header graphic. A Google search for "web design tutorials" should help you implement some of this.

As far as the background goes, I tried playing around with it via Chrome's dynamic CSS replacement feature, and I think it looks pretty good white (though that shadow you have surrounding the website could be more subtle). You can try this yourself by loading the website in Chrome, right-clicking anywhere on the website's outside black background and selecting "Inspect element". Here, you can double-click on any of the CSS attributes on the left and change any value on the fly. This allows you to easily see how a website looks in real-time. You can also do the same with the text if you want.

[Edited on September 8, 2011 at 10:11 AM. Reason : .]

9/8/2011 10:10:50 AM

^ Thanks,I see what you mean with the hard black borders. I'm going to give them a bit of an overhaul and go with a lighter orange I think. I did not know that chorme has this dynamic css function! I'll have to play around with it to see what is a bit more appealing, thanks for the input!

9/9/2011 5:23:11 PM

^^Eleventy's suggestion is up next to make this a little bit prettier.

However, I did get the url's working for SEO. eg. http://www.fridgn.com/recipes/Tiramisu which also allowed me to just have everything work off of a layout / partial format which is going
super smoothly.
But alas, Google is not having it. Does anyone have an idea what this is about? This is an alert from the submitted sitemap.
"URLs not followed
When we tested a sample of URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs redirect to other locations. We recommend that your Sitemap contain URLs that point to the final destination (the redirect target) instead of redirecting to another URL."

The example they give is

http://www.fridgn.com/recipes/Easy_Mushroom_Vegetable_Paella

Is that because only one thing comes up with the Easy_Mushroom_Vegetable_Paella as opposed to the tiramisu which throws back like 20?

9/28/2011 3:27:08 PM

Shit still looks like it was designed in Powerpoint.

9/28/2011 3:29:47 PM