Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Where are the gifted web designers?

Some people hate with a passion black background with white letters...I know it is a personal preference and some people love it and others find it too harsh to read.

Egifted is nice but I won't return.

Visited out of curiosity. I'm afraid I find it completely unusable (on a nexus 7 under Chrome) - things dancing around so I have no idea where I am or should be. I didn't bookmark it.

The pitch black background reminds me those hacker's websites my DS used to visit. Apparently you hired some professional photographers, but not the same level of web designers. They did not match up well.

I find it interesting when people consider 'design' something frivolous.

Well... but relative to things like debugging so that a site keeps running,



it is slightly lower on the priority list.

I mean, I consider my own area of expertise/passion to be Absolutely Essential to the Human Condition.

It has lately come to my attention, however, that this perspective is decidedly unusual, as innately powerful and elegant as my reasoning may be.

Different people also have different sensitivity to different design elements, I will also add.

In running a message board, some people find the dynamic user-interface (or specific elements of it) the most important, some find color-scheme to be critical, and for still others, it's all about the font or images. All of that falls under "design" and all of it is "the most important thing" to someone.

It's subjective, in other words.

I do maintain that none of that is AS important as the ability for users to actually access a site to begin with, however. So yes, a server crash caused by a code problem is a far greater disaster than the right hex color to complement headings, or where to put your Twitter feed box or Facebook button.

Besides, what I like and find particularly user-friendly, someone else is bound to hate. As noted above.
LOL.

Sometimes it is, and sometimes it's not. It depends on whether the design serves a purpose or not. It's very easy for a design element to detract from the overall functionality while increasing costs.

Take, for example, the Saturn V rocket. There are many design features that are brilliant... 3 stages, separate service module, the 2-stage LEM. When I saw how that rover could fold up and fit into that tiny compartment on the LEM, I thought that was one of the most brilliant designs ever.

Now, if they'd added chrome plating, a psychedelic paint job, and gull wings to the Saturn V, that would be frivolous. They may look nice, but they contribute absolutely nothing to the function (and in some cases detract from it), at an increased cost in fuel, materials, schedule, manpower, etc.

With that metaphor in mind, taking a second look at egifted.com in Firefox, I see a scrolling bar of photos below the embedded Youtube video, labelled "What is trending now in education!" It's full of pictures without context, and no hypertext to provide any... it just says "Go to link" for every pic. Except for idle curiosity, there's no reasoning provided for any user to click on any of those links.

It sure does look nice, though.

The fifth slide on the slideshow at the top of the page has the same problem. We're treated to a very nice picture of the back of two heads staring at an image of the earth... which is appropriate, since the hypertext of "Go to link" will leave the audience asking themselves, "What on earth...?"

Oh, and I can't say for sure which is the design element causing the problem, but the homepage fails to load entirely in my version of Internet Explorer. This is a fully-functional laptop here, not some tablet or smartphone, and it's running some of the most common browsing software.

So yeah... chrome plating and gull wings.

Well, I am browsing on a smartphone. But egifted loaded in six separate chunks. I counted to 23 between two of the chunks of design elements loading on the page. By contrast Hoagies loads in full before I can count to 2. I get it that egifted is online classes, so it's a different crowd and purpose. For example, we tried Aleks and they said, "this will take a while to load". I'm glad the forums load quickly and look simple. I don't have Roadrunner, but I do have wifi and the fastest internet that AT&T sells in this area.

I read their other post here:
http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ubbthreads.php/topics/148169/E_gifted.html#Post148169

They seemed to be offering a product, not asking for advice... but., I would say If that business doesn't take off the way you'd like then consider selling (leasing (?) your classes to ALEKs, CTY, Connections, K-12, etc., who already have marketing and a student base.

There's a whole job nowdays converting classes into great online courses (forgot what it's called, read about it online, of course). The point being that while e-gifted is run by Uber- Gifted educators with great credentials and experience, and it's ran from a college, that they could find it more productive to offer their classes to/thru one of the established companies and have a student base, the more efficient marketing, and the school's already on top of ironing out/maintaining software glitches. jmo

thanks for the feedback for E-gifted. I promise our technology for the classes is much better. We will definitely look at each piece of feedback and tweak. Thank you so much! We really appreciate it. If you want to provide any more feedback, we are all ears. We will try to update our website to address all these concerns by mid-Sept. So check back! www.egifted.org

-Jennifer Gordievsky

Err. Here's some feedback. I just went to the site and it displayed a purple background with two black bars at the top. Nothing else, and that took a while to load.

And it made IE freeze.

I just checked it too in Firefox ... loads ok but I find the graphic really hard on my eyes. The white font on black background especially ... and the red tabs too. It screams at me too much and then I tend not to look at the actual content on the site.