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Site check and help.

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sirjon

sirjon

Instructor
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Jun 6, 2002
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TH
Sorry to post this one here but if anyone has time I would love some feedback on this site.


If you register, you are able to make your own webpage and weblog instantly.

It's far from complete but I'm not sure whether this idea will work or not, so all comments are much appreciated.

Regards,
JB
 
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When you click the main nav buttons on the left the submenus that appear are not well spaced. Also, I'm not sure about some of the menu choices on the top navigation rollovers. I think Home buttons are more useful without submenus(i.e. When they just get you to the homepage). And if I was a user of the site I don't think I'd think to look under the 'home' rollover to find information about joining the site, or the 'about us' section. As for the other items there, (the login , logout ,register submenus under the home tab) perhaps change the 'please login' at the top to 'login | register' Then when they are logged in this link could change to 'logout'?
There is no sign up link from the 'web pages' page.
I think the overall idea of the navigation is really good though. With a menu at the side. the rollovers along the top, and navigation in the middle of the homepage on load. As I navigated the site, the pages were well laid out, attractive, and quick to load and from a graphic point of view the site looks great. It's a good idea as well, and I'm sure there'll be a lot of demand..

One slight caveat to the above may be that the site looks very grown up. It's a tough job designing a site to attract parents teachers AND kids. I think the balance here might be just very slightly out. Perhaps just a few little touches to communicate visually with the kids(Perhaps one or two of the images on the homepage could be changed). On the other hand maybe I'm talking out of my a@!
Hope that helps though.
 
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Many thanks Dweezel.

The points you raise are all spot on and I will make the necessary changes.

Regards
JB
 
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The site is good, but looks too pale. Needs some colors or maybe an image or two. Nice font choice, and nice navigational menu's. Like the style and feel of the site. Just add some colors and image or two and you're good. (at least in my opinion).


____________________________________
Just Imagine.
 
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I think it looks pretty good as-is. The "pale" look works well for me, though I agreee with Dweezel that it might not appeal so much to children. Maybe you should look into letting the visitor pick from a selection of style sheets so they can "skin" the site to their own tastes.

Looking under the hood it's not so pretty. Your document starts..
Code: 
<!--IHeader.ascx-->

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML>
Starting with that comment may cause problems with some browsers - I think the DOCTYPE should really be the first thing in the file. It also needs to be a full doctype, including a URL, if you want to avoid browsers' quirks mode. Try:
Code: 
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "[URL unfurl="true"]http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">[/URL]

All your navigation seems to be based on Javascript, which means that search engines will have difficulty spidering your site. It also seems a very long-winded way of achieving an effect that you can do pretty easily with CSS - take a look at the "suckerfish" techniques at .

You've also got some CSS class declarations in the body of your document. These are much easier to handle if you put them in a seperate style sheet document. Finally, you should try to get your document to validate at . Most browsers will render invalid documents perfectly well, but why chance it?

On a totally design-unrelated point, you really need to be much more forthcoming on the site about who you are. These are dark days, and schools and parents need to be reassured that you are not trying to contact their children for some nefarious purpose.


-- Chris Hunt
 
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Thanks for taking a look GUJUmOdel and Chris and for your comments.

How important is the W3 validation?

Cheers
JB
 
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Some people have suggested that Google rates valid sites higher than invalid ones. I think that it's unlikely that Google have explicitly taken up that policy - if they cared that much about validation, they'd make their own pages validate:
What is true is that by validating your pages you reduce the chances that you inadvertantly shut out search engine spiders (and browsers) from your pages. Valid (X)HTML pages can definitely be read, invalid ones can probably be read. Do you want to take the chance?

An example from personal experience - before I'd ever heard of validation, I had a website online for 6 months before I discovered that Netscape users were seeing a blank page instead of my content. I'd missed out a </td> - a fault that NN was absurdly intolerant of. Had I validated those pages, I'd have found the error straight away.

-- Chris Hunt
 
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