Yes it was necessary. I don't know how to do design and CSS and there's no money made or invested into it. I tried putting together a design but it looked shit and never worked very well.
Convenient to you and necessary are not synonyms. There is an Internet full of free (beer and/or speech, your call), legal, pretty designs that you can use to your heart's content.
I recommend anything by Styleshout (great web 2.0y designs), MultiFlex (more traditional, a little boring by default but clean and fits just about anything), and several of the designs on oswd.org for projects which don't have the budget for a custom design. I actually ran a profitable business off of an OSWD template for almost two years:
I like the idea, but I would make it a bit more clear what the site actually does.
I'd also recommend making the boxes quite a bit larger since there's so much white space. Done right, overly-large boxes work - like at tumblr ( http://www.tumblr.com/register )
Agreed. I took a look for about 30 seconds, then came here to say the same thing.
EVERY site should have a single sentence (at the least) with a concise, non-jargony explanation of what it is. You can't just assume.
When I saw someone mention the Favicon I went back and got it :) I think the problem I really had was that I read your "example" but it made no sense since I couldn't see any of the character boxes until I typed in the number of characters.
I've added a tagline now. I didn't have one before because before I launched it on a domain name I had a much more obvious name for the site which would need a tagline much less.
I've clearly learned something by all your feedback. It used to have a more obvious name before that I couldn't use because of domain name real estate. I had to change to Crosstips but didn't pad it with more explanation of what it does.
Plus having stared at it so much myself I got "home blind".
But most of the complaints say it needs to be more explicit because they didn't realize it was a crosswords tool, which inherently means they DID realize it was a crosswords tool.
I don't think it would be all that useful for scrabble. For that you would have to be able to input random letters and get words out.
I didn't, however, have any difficulty figuring out what the site was for (the name and the icon made it fairly clear I thought). The "crossword puzzle" metaphor could have been incorporated a bit more in the design, maybe.
Well, Google does not explain what their search is for; why should you have to? Considering it is a niche market for folks that want to solve crossword puzzles, and you had enough people talk about it with each other, you could keep the front page non-descriptive. It is a destination site that people will visit when they know about what it does.
I wouldn't want to see a slogan every time I visited the site, anyways.
I think you'd be far better off to swap the "About" page text for the statistics on the front page. I doubt the average visitor to your site cares how many searches have been run in the last 30 days (especially since they all seem to be zero), but judging by the comments on this page, the average new visitor probably would like to see something explaining what this is.
Yikes, I had absolutely no idea what this was for. I thought it was some type of word generator. After finding the very tiny link at the bottom, I saw the magic word: crosswords.
Most people don't do crosswords. Add that word to your page, or a lot of people will be completely lost.
I automatically assumes British English if you're located (by GEO IP) in the United Kingdom and likewise for American English. For people in France for example they can chose between "English (GB)" and "English (US)".
"length" is a strange way to begin the conversation with your audience. i get it, length is critical to finding the right word, but that doesn't make sense until you understand what it does. i would think about this from a user experience perspective and see if maybe there's a better way to get this information from your User.
That would add noise I think. Plus don't people expect an About link/page? Kinda similar to how people expect to find a link to the home page near the upper left corner.
I mean, Jesus, it's a simple web app. It shouldn't take you more than a few hours to come up with your own design and code.