New Web Site for Keiths Private Hire

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Chris Davis on October 11, 2010 at 14:45

Hi David,

First of all, well done on your work on this. I love this area of Compila Exchange most of all because it gives me ideas and inspiration for my own web projects and so I wish more people like yourself would post up their websites for review - although I guess other people must find it as daunting as I do, as I've yet to post one up for proper review as I'm too self-conscious of my work!! :)

Taking a look at the site, I think the colour scheme, font choices, etc., all work very effectively and I think you've picked a very good layout and style for the product that the website is selling.

The constructive comments that I would make are:

- As per your own comments, I think the header would benefit from being made a little bit more eye-catching, as it stands at the moment there's a large white area that's the same colour as the page container background, and if this were a little more striking I think that would help attract people into the site.

- In my opinion the navigation buttons would benefit from being at the top of the page rather than the bottom, simply because near the top of the page is where someone would expect to find them and at first glance it looks like the website is just one page unless someone bothers to scroll down and finds the buttons. Always remember that people who are looking at websites want instant results and so the less clicking or scrolling they have to do to find the information that they're looking for, the better! :)

- The hits counter on the front page is messed up and full of code that it's displaying, which is stretching the front page (and the container for same) wider than the rest of the site (I have to use the bottom scrollbar of my browser to read from one side of the front page to the other).

Hope that some of these comments are of help. Everything else about the site I think is excellent, in terms of the content, style, colour scheme and graphics - well done on a very good job!

Best wishes,

Chris

Permalink Reply by David Bradley on October 11, 2010 at 21:38

Chris Davis said:

Hi David,

First of all, well done on your work on this. I love this area of Compila Exchange most of all because it gives me ideas and inspiration for my own web projects and so I wish more people like yourself would post up their websites for review - although I guess other people must find it as daunting as I do, as I've yet to post one up for proper review as I'm too self-conscious of my work!! :)

Taking a look at the site, I think the colour scheme, font choices, etc., all work very effectively and I think you've picked a very good layout and style for the product that the website is selling.

The constructive comments that I would make are:

- As per your own comments, I think the header would benefit from being made a little bit more eye-catching, as it stands at the moment there's a large white area that's the same colour as the page container background, and if this were a little more striking I think that would help attract people into the site.

- In my opinion the navigation buttons would benefit from being at the top of the page rather than the bottom, simply because near the top of the page is where someone would expect to find them and at first glance it looks like the website is just one page unless someone bothers to scroll down and finds the buttons. Always remember that people who are looking at websites want instant results and so the less clicking or scrolling they have to do to find the information that they're looking for, the better! :)

- The hits counter on the front page is messed up and full of code that it's displaying, which is stretching the front page (and the container for same) wider than the rest of the site (I have to use the bottom scrollbar of my browser to read from one side of the front page to the other).

Hope that some of these comments are of help. Everything else about the site I think is excellent, in terms of the content, style, colour scheme and graphics - well done on a very good job!

Best wishes,

Chris

In consideration of your observations and comments, changes have been made that go someway towards the advice given. However it is still work in progress and other ideas for the site are on the drawing board!

David Bradley

Permalink Reply by Dave Cooper on October 13, 2010 at 10:48

Hi David,
I caught this after you'd made the mods stimulated by Chris and I'm very impressed indeed! I wouldn't presume to comment on it from a business angle because I know zip about car hire in Surrey, and the only suggestion I've got is to decrease the scale of the google map a bit so that Farnham and Aldershot and Godalming appear on the map: lots of punters in those three!
From a coding angle, most of the validation errors that W3C picks up are missing end tags, so they shouldn't be too hard to fix. I think it's worth getting the code fairly clean, because it makes your website work more consistently across browsers: they are all more or less fault tolerant, but they quite often take different approaches in handling coding errors.
Also (I've been told. What do I know?) Google is supposed to like standards compliant sites, and I guess search engine position is going to be important.
I don't know whether the customer feedback form is going to be a graffiti magnet? One thing I do myself with forms like that is have the server email me the detail of new posts so that I can pick up abusive content pretty fast. You may already do that, but if not it's easy in php.
The final thing you might want to consider is how your site works in a mobile browser: seems like a lot of people are using the phone, i-thing, whatever on the web, and it could be a consideration for a business like yours, possibly?
Hope this helps,

Dave Cooper

Permalink Reply by Chris Davis on October 13, 2010 at 16:07

Hi David,

Once again, well done on your hard work on this site and I'm glad you found my comments helpful.

The only things that I'm now aware of are that the navigation buttons are left-aligned as opposed to centrally-aligned, which in my opinion would possibly look better - this isn't a big deal as they seem to cover the standard width of the site on most pages (if you look at the top of the white space containing the main site info, you can just about tell that the margin on the right hand side is a fraction wider), but it shows up more on the front page.

Also, perhaps the reason for this showing up more, the hits counter along the bottom of the front page still displays a huge amount of code instead of a number, which I believe is forcing the page wider than it needs to be.

I also think that Dave Cooper makes a lot of good points in his post.

As I say, well done for a great job on this, and very glad to be of help to you! :)

Best wishes,

Chris



David Bradley said:

Chris Davis said:

Hi David,

First of all, well done on your work on this. I love this area of Compila Exchange most of all because it gives me ideas and inspiration for my own web projects and so I wish more people like yourself would post up their websites for review - although I guess other people must find it as daunting as I do, as I've yet to post one up for proper review as I'm too self-conscious of my work!! :)

Taking a look at the site, I think the colour scheme, font choices, etc., all work very effectively and I think you've picked a very good layout and style for the product that the website is selling.

The constructive comments that I would make are:

- As per your own comments, I think the header would benefit from being made a little bit more eye-catching, as it stands at the moment there's a large white area that's the same colour as the page container background, and if this were a little more striking I think that would help attract people into the site.

- In my opinion the navigation buttons would benefit from being at the top of the page rather than the bottom, simply because near the top of the page is where someone would expect to find them and at first glance it looks like the website is just one page unless someone bothers to scroll down and finds the buttons. Always remember that people who are looking at websites want instant results and so the less clicking or scrolling they have to do to find the information that they're looking for, the better! :)

- The hits counter on the front page is messed up and full of code that it's displaying, which is stretching the front page (and the container for same) wider than the rest of the site (I have to use the bottom scrollbar of my browser to read from one side of the front page to the other).

Hope that some of these comments are of help. Everything else about the site I think is excellent, in terms of the content, style, colour scheme and graphics - well done on a very good job!

Best wishes,

Chris

In consideration of your observations and comments, changes have been made that go someway towards the advice given. However it is still work in progress and other ideas for the site are on the drawing board!

David Bradley

Permalink Reply by David Bradley on October 13, 2010 at 18:57

Chris Davis said:

Hi David,

First of all, well done on your work on this. I love this area of Compila Exchange most of all because it gives me ideas and inspiration for my own web projects and so I wish more people like yourself would post up their websites for review - although I guess other people must find it as daunting as I do, as I've yet to post one up for proper review as I'm too self-conscious of my work!! :)

Taking a look at the site, I think the colour scheme, font choices, etc., all work very effectively and I think you've picked a very good layout and style for the product that the website is selling.

The constructive comments that I would make are:

- As per your own comments, I think the header would benefit from being made a little bit more eye-catching, as it stands at the moment there's a large white area that's the same colour as the page container background, and if this were a little more striking I think that would help attract people into the site.

- In my opinion the navigation buttons would benefit from being at the top of the page rather than the bottom, simply because near the top of the page is where someone would expect to find them and at first glance it looks like the website is just one page unless someone bothers to scroll down and finds the buttons. Always remember that people who are looking at websites want instant results and so the less clicking or scrolling they have to do to find the information that they're looking for, the better! :)

- The hits counter on the front page is messed up and full of code that it's displaying, which is stretching the front page (and the container for same) wider than the rest of the site (I have to use the bottom scroll bar of my browser to read from one side of the front page to the other).

Hope that some of these comments are of help. Everything else about the site I think is excellent, in terms of the content, style, colour scheme and graphics - well done on a very good job!

Best wishes,

Chris

Thanks for your feedback.

To be honest with you the Google Map is really a "filler" for the page to pad that page out a bit but nevertheless it has been re-cast to show the towns that you mentioned; it is of course interactive and can be altered to suit the site visitor's requirements.

Getting the coding validated for HTML is pretty easy to nail down but rather more complex to resolve when it's PHP because it is not that easy to track down the source file within the "Advanced Guest Book" of the hosting package. Once located it should be possible to adjust the coding as necessary.

You do indeed get unwanted entries in the Guest Book but with notification of new entries as they are made it is possible to get on top of that issue. I make a note of the IP address of unwanted messages and build up the banned list accordingly. I think this is pretty effective as I certainly don't get further messages added from that source.

Again for the site counter I am using the facilities provided by the hosting package and all that is necessary is to cut and paste the coding on the web page. As the coding is relative, I transform it into absolute so that the counter image appears when viewing the pages local, i.e. . The coding does indeed get displayed if a syntax error is made but as the image appears OK wherever I go it is difficult to understand why it is not seen by everyone. Can anyone help out on this issue please.

The navigation buttons come from http://www.flashvortex.com/ where the Corporate style is used. It is possible to zero down the left and top pixel space but not the right or button where 5px of white space lingers on. I think the reason for this is that a shadow can be created but I haven't figured out how to do this. In building the navigation strip you end up with an swf file [ http://www.keithsprivatehire.co.uk/bas.swf ] that is plonked down on the web page. I've tried centralizing it but it seems to look at its best if left aligned.

Your kind comments about the site are noted and very much appreciated. I really only scratch upon the surface of the facilities that are provided in the hosting package provided by Complia and while I could no doubt use a kaleidoscope of all these facilities sometimes sticking with KISS [Keep it simple stupid] is more effective. Well IMHO anyway.

David Bradley

Permalink Reply by Tony Rolfe on October 14, 2010 at 9:57

Hi David,

I have had a quick look at the site and have a few observations.

I think the site is designed well and the colours work good together. The first thing I have noticed is that you are using a flash menu system. To be honest if possible you will be best to steer clear of navigation created in flash. The reasons for this are below:

1. I am using a 64 bit machine and although not the norm, the fact that windows 7 now allows the user to use more than 3GB of ram, 64 bit machines will start to enter the marketplace a lot quicker. The reason I say this is because, flash is not supported in IE on a 64 bit machine, so the navigation does not work for me. (I use Firefox anyway so this is not a major issue but at the same time is not perfect)

2. One the same issue the iphone and ipad also do not support flash, so again the navigation will not be visible on these devices.

3. Google and other search engines cannot read flash and it blocks them from looking at the links in your navigation. These navigation links can help with SEO and using a flash menu could be losing you ranking.

Don't get me wrong, flash has it place in websites, but for something as important as the navigation you should try looking at CSS or DHTML as these will be visible on all browsers and devices.

A useful source for these types of menus can be found on the following URL:

http://dynamicdrive.com/

I hope you find my comments useful.

Regards

Tony

Permalink Reply by David Bradley on October 14, 2010 at 19:51

Tony Rolfe said:

Hi David,

I have had a quick look at the site and have a few observations.

I think the site is designed well and the colours work good together. The first thing I have noticed is that you are using a flash menu system. To be honest if possible you will be best to steer clear of navigation created in flash. The reasons for this are below:

1. I am using a 64 bit machine and although not the norm, the fact that windows 7 now allows the user to use more than 3GB of ram, 64 bit machines will start to enter the marketplace a lot quicker. The reason I say this is because, flash is not supported in IE on a 64 bit machine, so the navigation does not work for me. (I use Firefox anyway so this is not a major issue but at the same time is not perfect)

2. One the same issue the iphone and ipad also do not support flash, so again the navigation will not be visible on these devices.

3. Google and other search engines cannot read flash and it blocks them from looking at the links in your navigation. These navigation links can help with SEO and using a flash menu could be losing you ranking.

Don't get me wrong, flash has it place in websites, but for something as important as the navigation you should try looking at CSS or DHTML as these will be visible on all browsers and devices.

A useful source for these types of menus can be found on the following URL:

http://dynamicdrive.com/

I hope you find my comments useful.

Regards

Tony

It seems the days of creating a simple website to get a message across have long gone. Not only do we have to consider whether our cyber presence will work with the myriad of devices out there, but we also have to be aware that straying away from anything that is not "pure" HTML may well mean that segments of any web site won't be displayed. I suppose if you have a big enough budget, the appropriate skills and enough time anything is possible but in the real world compromises have to be made.

I am not an avid user of flash but its popularity must surely mean that eventually it will be available for any new platform that comes along. Actually I don't really know what the merits are of using a 64bit browser actually are but I have to accept that there is a growing number of users who have decided to do their surfing in this mode. So using Flash for those all important navigation buttons is probably not such a great idea and what would therefore be ideal is a switch that shows an alternative rendered if Flash is not available in the same way we have SCRIPT and NOSCRIPT.

I welcome being pointed towards http://dynamicdrive.com/ but there is a bit of a learning curve before a poductive output arrives. Meanwhile there is a live site that needs TLC. As a quick fix, an HTML menu has been provided at the bottom of each page which has the added advantage of allowing spiders to crawl through more of the web site.

Anyway let's have some more website creators appearing here so that we can see how they approach the issues that have been highlighted in this thread.

David Bradley