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There's a startup weekend coming up in Grand Rapids soon, and another in Kalamazoo sometime in the next few months.

http://grandrapids.startupweekend.org/

They're pretty intense weekends. The teams that did best at the one in Detroit were pretty heavily stacked with very experienced developers. If you want to find out more about what's going on in the community, check one out. They have weekend passes for teams, and spectator passes if you just want to check out the final results of 54 hours work.


Engineering advice: in your enterX() functions, consider calling another function that clears the text of the UL of dots in the top left corner then have each enterX() function add the text of the currently selected page section, and maybe change the hollow circle to a filled circle. Breadcrumbs are usually a good design element.

You might also want to move them down to the middle of the left of the page. That's a design decision, entirely up to the design owner's discretion.

From a design perspective, it's not terrible. I'm not a fan of the supersaturated color trend, but, that's me. I can tell you that the last inch or so of the page has a jarring color change. Consider transitioning to a darker color in the section that is currently yellow/orange, or change the blues/greens in the bottom.

I agree with mcallan with the typography. Typography is a much harder part of design than most people give it credit for. It's one of the oldest forms of design, and people have very strong and unconscious expectations with regard to words-per-line, kerning (spacing between characters), and fontface matching. Read up on it if you have a few hours over the next few years. This is the main area your site needs work -- fewer words per row, and maybe a different main body font. The font choice is up to the design owner, though. Some people, like me, can spend hours choosing a font.

On a brief glance through your code, I notice the use of timers. I didn't really analyze why, so I could be mistaken here, but you could maybe use jQuery's promise/done functions as a matter of good engineering practice. Magic numbers are bad, and are a last resort. Monads are good. Learn them early on, learn callbacks early on, especially if you're doing web development. You'll jump through hoops that will make Java/C++ developers' noses bleed with frustration.

For all the feedback and criticism in there, it's actually a good site. That was some serious small detail talk above. Also, I'm going to start using the pallets = []; idea in a few places. Thanks, sir.


Oh, a more advanced tweak that I've only seen on a couple pages would be to take your vertical sections (about, intro, blog, those) and give them their own horizontal scrolling sections with left and right arrows.

That could easily turn into a significant time investment (a day or two, if you're a motivated beginner with some knowledge), depending on your current skill level, but it amounts to a few very wide <div>'s, and some jQuery to calculate scroll distances. It'll make your page easier to read, and more visually complex in a good way.


ok, one last one. I'm sure you already know this, but, just in case you haven't heard yet.

When you're doing design of any kind, but seemingly especially in UI design, everyone has an opinion. Most of them are wrong.


Never give that up.

It's something you can never let go.


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