Wine site uncork'd!
 

Let's show off some work, shall we? :-)

New client site I made went online this afternoon: www.natuurlijkewijnen.be.

A word about the contents (for those who don't speak Dutch). It's a site about natural/biological wines. Basically wines without a lot of sulphur and stuff. Too much sulphur is bad. Sulphur gives you headaches. Yup.

Did all the design and code myself. Especially had a lot of work with the graphics. Quite some IE CSS problems as well. Most of which should have been solved. On the server side it's powered by the Kohana PHP Framework. Nothing too fancy going on there.

Let's hear all the praise now! :-P
No, seriously, I'd like to hear your honest opinion about it.

I like it, it looks good. Nice work :-)

It looks nice :-)

nothing beats a glass of good red wine :-)

nice site btw ^^

I can think of one, a glass of white wine.

Beautiful! ^^

Nice site Geert. ^^

Great to see you here. I've been lurking on the KohanaPHP forums and read quite a few replies by you. ;-)

Beer for me!

Very nice indeed.

The layout is simple, yet elegant and very pleasing to the eyes. The images are crisp and really add to the layout. Lastly, the font matches very well the colors you've chosen and the images.

++

Lovely site. Can't beat the natural wine! I know what you mean about the sulphur :-) ! Grrr.

Thanks all for the positive feedback and the kind words. :-)

Myself, I really like the outcome of the site too. Actually, I think this may be considered my best design ever. A few years back I did a similar site for a company that rents coaches and covered wagons. It also has that oldish look to it. However, the wine site really takes more usage of whitespace which makes the content breathe a bit more. Well, that's probably mostly due to the fact that I hardly don't design for 800x600 anymore.

Lovely! One problem though, the text goes over the Images.

I honestly love it. I'm sure your client most love it too. Besides the IE bugs (hellish IE), the only problem I see is the branch on right side of the screen. It just seems like it was cropped too much. For example, if I look at it closely I can see a white stroke and some other extra colors in it. I might just be total OCD on this but it's the only problem I saw. It's really not a big deal so I don't think you need to stress over a new image. Anyway man, great job with the site. It really looks nice and it flows nicely.

Oh no, I thought I had fixed that. You mean that the vine coming from the right covers the main menu? I had some serious problems with that, but in IE only. Should have been fixed in layout-ie7.css. What browser are you using if I may ask?

It's a 24kB GIF file. Not a alpha transparent PNG. The reason for that is filesize. A PNG would easily become 100kB+ and since the site is quite heavily loaded with graphics already, I decided to not anti-alias the vine. It's a trade-off, I know.

Thanks for your input, both.

I would probably be more inclined to actually use a PNG in that instance. You want the site to look crisp - even if that means sacrificing the loading time a little.

Ziet er goed uit Geert! (Looks good Geert!) :-D

I recommend that you use a 24 bit PNG like Wildhoney says. I've been working alot with 24bit alpha PNG's lately and they are incredibly good to use. Except for IE6, though which is pretty easy to fix. (iepngfix)

What I do with all my png's is run them through pngcrush and remove all colour information. Pngcrush will not only optimize the file, but remove irrelevant color information from the file. Sometimes it can save alot of filesize.

Also, if you don't remove the color information, Internet Explorer (on windows anyways) tends to look at the color information and alter the colors accordingly. Hence sometimes when using png's as a background, the html hex color code won't be the same as in the PNG (in IE) because of the color information.

If you need any help with this I'll gladly help. I could take the original wine picture and give you back a 24 bit transparent png image, crushed, looking the same in all browsers and blending perfectly into the background.

I've actually been thinking about writing an article on PNG usage with CSS for TalkPHP (if anyone is interested). (also tiny photoshop tips for making it blend in)

And supplying a little library of images for navigation menus, hovers, backgrounds etc. The possibilities are almost endless.

This is what I ment.

Huh!? Never seen that. I tested in IE 5, 6 and 7 though. What browser are you using? Did you clear cache and fully refresh the page? Any other problems? Thanks for showing me this. Hope to solve it quickly.

Using Firefox, I cleared all my Private Data, and it's still there!

Very weird, Orc. Tested on Firefox 2.0.0.11, both on mac and pc. No problems whatsoever...