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site check. take 2 |
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| message from christoff915 on 22 Jul 2004 |
ok, i tore the hell out of the site and made a lot of changes, thanks a lot
murray and gary for your help and feedback. would you guys mind taking another
look and giving it another teardown?
http://www.nesghelp.com/test-christoff
i appreciate the time you guys took on this before and all the helpful
suggestions...i learned a LOT from them. now i'm ready to learn more.
any other feedback is also more than welcome from anyone that wants to take a
peek.
thanks in advance,
christoff
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| Gary White replied to christoff915 on 22 Jul 2004 |
Looks MUCH better. Here are a few things I notice. First, some objective
things:
Find the following in your source code:
<div id="logo" style="position:absolute; left:-4px; top:0px; width:750;
Note that you left the "px" off the width. That will give strange results in
many browsers. Change it to:
<div id="logo" style="position:absolute; left:-4px; top:0px; width:750px;
The text is still REALLY small. Nine or ten pixels is entirely too small for
most people on typical machines to read. Of course, if your target audience
is graphic artists, you may get by with it because they tend to have those
huge monitors. ;-)
The home page is still pretty heavy at over 70k. A good portion of that is
using .gif format for photographic type images. They will compress much
better if you use .jpg. Try that on graphicIndexContent2.gif and
graphicHome.gif. Those are both currently over 20k each. Make .jpg's out of
them and you can reduce them to less than half their present size.
The site is still pretty much inaccessible to anyone without JavaScript
enabled. You could easily fix that by adding a couple of pages: one for
Company and one for Services. Then make your menu triggers into real links
that link to those pages. Those pages would have links to the pages that the
respective menus show.
Now, for some more subjective things, from a purely aesthetic point of view
(and I'm not really the best person for that so take these with a grain of
salt) there are a couple of things that look a little peculiar.
The grey background in the area below the menu looks odd to me. I don't know
whether you just left it white, or picked a different color that
complemented the other colors on the page, but it looks odd.
The image on the right side of the home page looks like it's had the right
side trimmed off. It looks as though the blue border should go around the
right side.
I'd lose the clouds image on the left of the home page and the systems page.
I know you need to fill a certain height, but I'd find something else beside
the clouds to do it.
Like I said, it's MUCH better. You've come a long way in a short time. Keep
after it and you'll have a really nice site.
Gary
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| christoff915 replied to Gary White on 23 Jul 2004 |
damn gary, thanks for taking the time to type all that down, that's a lot of
feedback....much appreciated.
<div id="logo" style="position:absolute; left:-4px; top:0px; width:750;
Note that you left the "px" off the width. That will give strange results in
many browsers. Change it to:
<div id="logo" style="position:absolute; left:-4px; top:0px; width:750px;"
changed.
"The text is still REALLY small. Nine or ten pixels is entirely too small for
most people on typical machines to read. Of course, if your target audience
is graphic artists, you may get by with it because they tend to have those
huge monitors. ;-)"
yea, i have a thing for small text...i changed the size though. the main text
is now at 11 and the subtexts are at 10. i really don't want to go much bigger
than that though. i have a 19" monitor at 1280x1024 and it looks pretty big to
me.
"The home page is still pretty heavy at over 70k. A good portion of that is
using .gif format for photographic type images. They will compress much
better if you use .jpg. Try that on graphicIndexContent2.gif and
graphicHome.gif. Those are both currently over 20k each. Make .jpg's out of
them and you can reduce them to less than half their present size."
i was using jpegs before and the quality was ****e. i got much better results
with gifs. i'll play around with it a little more to see if i can't get some
better quality jpegs, though. maybe it was just some setting i forgot to check.
"The site is still pretty much inaccessible to anyone without JavaScript
enabled. You could easily fix that by adding a couple of pages: one for
Company and one for Services. Then make your menu triggers into real links
that link to those pages. Those pages would have links to the pages that the
respective menus show."
i was thinking about doing that, also so i could put breadcrumbs at the tops
of the pages. i'll probably remove those headers at the tops of the pages, and
replace them with the breadcrumbs...those headers seemed like a good idea at
the time, but they're just not doing it for me.
"The grey background in the area below the menu looks odd to me. I don't know
whether you just left it white, or picked a different color that
complemented the other colors on the page, but it looks odd."
are you talking about those headers? i was thinking the same thing....hence
replacing them with breadcrumbs. if you're talking about something different,
let me know.
"The image on the right side of the home page looks like it's had the right
side trimmed off. It looks as though the blue border should go around the
right side."
that image actually was like that...it's only a partial shot of the building.
i see what you're saying about the border though.
"I'd lose the clouds image on the left of the home page and the systems page.
I know you need to fill a certain height, but I'd find something else beside
the clouds to do it."
awww....i like my happy little clouds :( . heh, seriously, i put them there
because this is washington state and there's lots of big fluffy clouds here
most of the time. i see your point though....i'll look around for some images
that fit there in a more universal way.
"Like I said, it's MUCH better. You've come a long way in a short time. Keep
after it and you'll have a really nice site."
thanks a lot gary, the kudos are much appreciated. sometimes it's pretty
friggin frustrating learning all of this on the fly like i am, but it always
makes me want to workder when people tell me that i'm progressing well. i
really appreciate it....a lot.....seriously.....thanks.
christoff
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| Gary White replied to christoff915 on 23 Jul 2004 |
You're welcome, Christoff.
That's one of the things I hate about Flash sites. Flash designers all
seem to have a thing for tiny text and you can't resize it in the
browser. ;-) FWIW, I re-designed one of the sites I run and used text
slightly larger than what you had. In a two week period, I received
three complaints about the text being too small to read.
Probably the compression level you were using. On the home page, I see
some significant banding on the one image because of the limited size of
the color palette in .gif's.
The headers are really pretty nice. It's just the grey color that I
didn't like. You could do both breadcrumbs and the headers.
Nope. It was the headers I was talking about.
You could add the border pretty easily. It would give it a more finished
look.
I don't know what it was about them that bothered me, but they just
looked out of place and "off-topic" if you know what I mean.
You're welcome. Good luck!
Gary
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| christoff915 replied to Gary White on 23 Jul 2004 |
ok, it's updated with jpeg images, i changed the header to a white background
with a fading border, and added Company and Services pages. i haven't added the
crumbs yet because i'm pondering where the best place on the pages to put them.
i'll prolly add them in later today.
ready for volley number 3, gary :D
heh, thanks
christoff
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| Gary White replied to christoff915 on 23 Jul 2004 |
Don't have a whole lot of time right now, but it's looking better. For
some reason, you're getting some cell spacing in the tables for your
drop-down menus. I don't see the cause right off the bat. I'll try to
look later and see if I can spot it.
Most of your images are simply decorative and should probably have empty
ALT attributes applied. The banner at the top of the page should
probably have the company name for ALT text.
All pages use the same title. I'd suggest short, more descriptive titles
for the individual pages. Page titles and headings (<H1> etc.) in the
body are strong ammunition for search engines, if that's important to
you.
Get those and you've gone about as far as I can take you. Good job!
Gary
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| christoff915 replied to Gary White on 23 Jul 2004 |
For
some reason, you're getting some cell spacing in the tables for your
drop-down menus. I don't see the cause right off the bat. I'll try to
look later and see if I can spot it.
i have a 1px pad around the cells....it just looked funny to me with the
borders and with no borders and no pad. call it asthetic, but i like the little
spaces between the cells and it doesn't seem to affect usability on IE/firefox
or opera (although the positioning changes a little for the menu in opera)
Most of your images are simply decorative and should probably have empty
ALT attributes applied. The banner at the top of the page should
probably have the company name for ALT text.
damn, i always forget about the ALT attrib. i'll have to get that on monday or
maybe over the weekend if i feel like working on it at home. thanks for
catching that.
All pages use the same title. I'd suggest short, more descriptive titles
for the individual pages. Page titles and headings (<H1> etc.) in the
body are strong ammunition for search engines, if that's important to
you.
also something to take care of on monday.
ps, if you want, take a look at the site up right now on nesghelp.com. this is
what i'm redoing from the last guy and he was supposedly a 'pro'. it took him 3
months to get that far on it. i've been working on this site for less than a
month and knew nothing about table layout, css, and very little about
javascript when i started (i had a little html background, but not much).
*flexes* i'm feeling pretty good about myself right now, heh....i won't let it
go to my head though. ;)
thanks a lot
christoff
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