Have a look (website critique)

DogDragonDogDragon Jacksonville, Fl Icrontian
edited July 2008 in Internet & Media
SweetDragon is still working on her web page
This is the first
http://my.att.net/p/PWP-mcgillpage
After working on it this is what she came up with
http://hstrial-mmcgill.homestead.com/index.html
I think it's better, She's trying to get it right and
one of the things that bugs her is.
How do you put a back button on her calendar
so it takes you back to her home page.?
If anyone have any ideas to make it better or
to improve it please post.
But I think she's headed in the right direction.

Comments

  • SweetDragonSweetDragon Casselberry, FL Member
    edited July 2008
    I figured out the calendar thing.
  • UPSLynxUPSLynx :KAPPA: Redwood City, CA Icrontian
    edited July 2008
    Nice design, easily navigated. Very clean site. So far so good.

    A few suggestions.

    I would change the unvisited link color to something darker. Maybe is a color blindness that I have, but the orange is hard for me to read on the background. The visited link color is fine.

    On the entertainment page, I would try to find a way to break up the link organization. The links are split up appropriately, but the result is a bit of a 'wall of text'. This becomes daunting for new visitors to navigate.

    Here's an extreme example of what I'm talking about:
    www.wndu.com
    it's the television station I work for. They recently re-designed the site and those geniouses thought this was the best solution for it. Just scroll down and look at all the links - some of which are redundant. It's the most terribly confusing thing.

    Maybe break it into categories first, then link the categories with pages that have local sites. Or maybe, if you know how, use javascript to put in a dynamic drop down menu system to hide links until the category is clicked.

    Also, that page looks to have a <div>'s height set to really big, there's a lot of extra space at the bottom with no content. Easy fix though, and being a WIP, I know this will be addressed.

    Great site so far though, keep it up!
  • SweetDragonSweetDragon Casselberry, FL Member
    edited July 2008
    I changed the link color from orange to lavender and pink.

    It will take me a few days to learn enough to do the drop down menu's but I think that will really help. I am even going to put pictures up over the drop down menu's. To make it pretty.

    Thanks for the advice.
  • LincLinc Owner Detroit Icrontian
    edited July 2008
    Here's my short list of stuff to improve:

    Change the title to "The West Volusia Insider" instead of "Welcome to...". In general, treat a website like this as if you were writing a brochure.

    Home page rewrite: "A resource for the Florida communities of DeBary, DeLand, Deltona, Enterprise, and Orange City. Conveniently located between beaches and theme parks, West Volusia is full of entertainment and fun. To contribute, email me at blahblah@bellsouth.com." You don't need to tell people what pages are for if you label them well and make them stand out. Speaking of which...

    Triple the size of the tabs. There are the most important thing on the page.

    Make all 3 pages have the same design. They look like 3 different sites right now. (I would stick with the design of the first page - it's quite nice)

    Consider dividing entertainment simply by Indoor and Outdoor rather than by near and far. Maybe even have an Indoor Activities tab and an Outdoor Activities tab. It's confusing to find things the way it is now. Maybe, for instance, put all the museums together and put the distance from the center of town in parenthesis after each one.

    Don't use Comic Sans. It's hard to read and sloppy, especially for a directory of information.
  • LincLinc Owner Detroit Icrontian
    edited July 2008
    I don't think you really need drop down navigation for such a simple site. In fact, I'd probably purposefully avoid it lest you make it needlessly complicated. Check out Verdana. :)
  • SweetDragonSweetDragon Casselberry, FL Member
    edited July 2008
    O.k. I changed the font to Verdana. I also made all the pages the same layout. I am still worried about being to wordy on the entertainment page and thought of using pictures to indicate the drop downs. Like a picture of a playground to symbolize playgrounds, parks, and facilities. What do you think?

    I really appreciate all the advise. I am slow at building and making changes since I am still new at this, but with all these ideas my page is really starting to look like the one in my head.

    Thank You So Much!!!
  • LincLinc Owner Detroit Icrontian
    edited July 2008
    Wow, awesome! 100% improvement.

    I potentially like the iconography/pictures idea. Maybe start by making the headings on the entertainment page bold and give them some breathing room above each one? That would break it up a little.

    Ooo... ever thought of making a Google Map of the area and embedding it on a fourth page?



    //edit: Also, change the title that appears in the browser bar. If you look in the code, it looks like this:[html]<title>Home</title>[/html]
    Change it to: [html]<title>West Volusia Insider</title>[/html]
    That's the title that will show up in Google search results and such. :)
  • SweetDragonSweetDragon Casselberry, FL Member
    edited July 2008
    Thanks I will have to work on the site next week but I will enhance the titles to fix that. I will also learn more about Google map.

    When I launch the site It will be WestVolusiaInsider.com Which should change the codes I think. I will have to check with homestead tech support.
  • UPSLynxUPSLynx :KAPPA: Redwood City, CA Icrontian
    edited July 2008
    When I was talking drop downs, I meant more of a cascading menu type idea.

    Something like this:

    http://www.itsrigged.org/tin/newsite/conarchive.asp

    Not exactly like that of course, but similar organization...

    but with how the links have been broken up now, it's much more readable, negating that step. Probably more complex than what's needed anyways.

    Nice work!

    The height is a little too small now on the entertainment page.

    If you feel like diving into some code, you could set that div to automatically adjust to the content within.

    I'm tired and drawing a bit of a blank, but I believe it would be something like

    *doh! What's the trick to posting HTML code so that it's visible on these forums?

    div style="float: center; height: 100%;">
    *content*
    /div>

    Though I've got a terrible memory for code, I never work without references so I could be wrong on this. Keebler?

    I'd remove the visitor counter on the homepage. This is more of an opinion thing, I really don't like those counters. If you need it for site usage statistics, you could easily add Google's free analytics service:

    http://www.google.com/analytics/

    Link color is much much better, you're on the right track!

    Keep it up.
  • LincLinc Owner Detroit Icrontian
    edited July 2008
    Lynx, wrap it in [ html ] tags. I don't think height:100% is going to solve this; float:center doesn't exist ;) The only ways to center something are text-align or auto right/left margins.

    I think getting into the scripting needed for cascading menus is going to be a little much for this project, personally. :)

    Honestly, I think the minor detail of the text invading the footer on the entertainment page would most easily be solved by putting some blank lines under Theme Parks to push it down a little further.

    Sweet Dragon, what are you using to do the design? Most programs have a way of editing the page title without looking at the code, as I suggested earlier.

    Your code shouldn't change at all between this demo and the real site, though. Otherwise you'd end up with something completely different :) Web pages don't work like Word documents, where you send a big file along and it always opens the same everywhere. When people come to a website, their browser gets all the code and the browser decides how it should all look based on what it gets told. That's why a website might sometimes look a little different in Firefox than it does in Internet Explorer. All you're really doing with your program is making the right code to send out. :)

    Looks really good! Much easier to read the entertainment page.
  • SweetDragonSweetDragon Casselberry, FL Member
    edited July 2008
    O.k. I think I fix the name thing From home to west volusia insider like Keebler suggested check it and make sure please. I also fixed the centering issue and the height issue for the entertainment page. My concern is that the entertainment page is so much larger then the other pages.

    I was thinking of using pictures and text like the magazine(archives) that Lynx was talking about. Except when you click on my picture instead of taking you to an issue it would display a drop down menu of the links under that title. This way there are only 10 pictures below the main one with titles. which would make it so I could resize the page smaller then it would make the site more consistent. It would also make it less wordy and more pretty.

    What do you think?
  • SweetDragonSweetDragon Casselberry, FL Member
    edited July 2008
    Oh and the reason that I am using the visitor counter is because out here in bfe the people are slow by having the counter more people will be willing to advertise with me and more people will do the band wagon thing and start using my site if they think everyone else is.

    It's silly I know but that is how it goes here.

    Sorry to if I offended any locals but I am sure you agree the general public here is slow.
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