Review please -

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Gerald Hornsby on February 24, 2010 at 21:07

Hi Jim

It's a nice-looking site. I like the design and the colour scheme. One thing I would think about, and that is widening the main box for more text, and laying it out better. At the moment, your site is only around 780 pixels wide, and I think most browser windows are at least 1024 pixels wide (there is information about this on the web). Also, about a quarter of the screen 'real estate' is taken up with the side navigation. I'd think about a top, horizontal nav bar, perhaps with 2 tiers of links. At the moment, all the pages are just listed. I'd try to group them into sections, e.g. graphics, advice, web design information, etc.

I'd also make the main logo a clickable link, to take you back to the main page. This is quite a common idea nowadays, making it easier for visitors to navigate back, rather than look for a "Main Page" link. There are times (e.g. on the "Contact" page) where there is no home page link.

I'd also get rid of the Coffee Cup floating advert. It's extremely annoying!

Gerald

Permalink Reply by Sheila Pritchard on February 24, 2010 at 22:02

Hello Jim

Wow, I think your site is great and it sits nice and central on my 19" monitor whilst browsing using IE8. The content is so useful I have put your site in my favourites and shall use your advice to back up my emails! I think I shall also have to come to you for some css centralling advice.

I would agree with Gerald that the coffee cup is annoying but apart from that it looks great to me. I love the colour scheme and the navigation works well.

Kind regards
Sheila

Permalink Reply by Dave Cooper on February 24, 2010 at 22:14

Hi Jim,
Very nice site. I think the gradient colours make the whole thing look really cool and clean. I'm with Gerald on the coffeecup pop-up though - it certainly annoyed me! I'm amazed you restrained yourself with the index page - I'd definitely have included a roll-over in that shopping cart logo. I think a lot of the effects you get are really striking: I don't usually care for animated gifs, but I like yours very much.
One thing I'd suggest (that you might want to pass on) is that where you're using the same menu for several different pages it makes maintenance a lot easier if you use an external file for the menu content. That way if you want to change something you just need to change it once instead of having to wade through every page on the site, changing every one. The very simplest way is to use a php file, eg have your menu in menu.php and then <?php include 'menu.php'; ?>
in every page, (probably got to call all the pages whatever.php, of course) or do something I'm doing a bit which is to have the menu in an xml file and conjure it with javascript (I think this qualifies as AJAX), seems quite reliable and means you can leave your pages as .html, which doesn't mess up external links to them.
The other thing you probably could stress a bit more is that using graphics for nav only works for people with pretty good vision: you really need to provide a fallback for people who're visually impaired. I'm not sure if good alt tags are enough or you need something else as well.
Dave

Permalink Reply by Jim Cantrell on February 25, 2010 at 19:15

Thank you for all the responses.

Gerald.
The width is 799 at the moment, this was ideal when 800x600 was the common resolution, today things are much different and I am intending to increase the width over the next couple of months.

Shiela.
Thank you for your comments, centralling using css is quite easy after you have done it for the first time.

Dave.
I understand what you say about using php includes for the menu, I have used on another site I have, but this site has been going a long time and I didn't want to change the pages to .php precisley because of the incoming links, the xml file sounds interesting, will have to look into that one, thanks for the heads up.
I think the 'ALT' tag is the way to go for visually impaired visitors, I think there are many in this category that actually disable the showing of graphics.

Permalink Reply by Harvey Raybould on February 27, 2010 at 6:20

Hi Jim,

Congratulations on a very good site, you definitely must be doing something great for it to have been going nearly 10 years now.

There is not really much for me to add, over what everyone else has;

1) I also found the Coffee Cup scroller a bit annoying

2) May be you could change the background colour of the page, to a lighter one; white, light grey, light blue etc which may just make the main content stand out a little more.

3) If the Coffee Cup software is an income provider for you, then maybe you could utilise the header part, next to the logo for some advertising.

4) You have the menu on the right hand side of your page, which is your prime real estate and it might be better to utilise this for your main calls to action, or income generators. Many studies have been done on Web Usability and it has been found that people expect and look for a menu on the left hand side.

5) May be try to use the header space and/or the space next to the Search button, to create a personal message i.e. to Welcome a visitor and have some contact information, so that people feel that there is a real person behind the site.

I wouldn’t say any of my points are absolutely crucial, however, points 1 and 5 personally I think would help. You have definitely got good SEO elements in place, unique titles, meta tags etc for each page, so well done for that.

I hope you find this useful and good luck with your site for the next 10 years.

Regards

Harvey

Permalink Reply by Jim Cantrell on February 27, 2010 at 11:23

Thank you for the tips Harvey.

I keep looking out for the right shade of blue for the background, when I see it I will know. I increased the page width from 779 to 900, a suggestion by Gerald, the other day just to see how it displayed, so maybe the gradient can now go.

The slide in for Coffeecup can go now, it is not to generate any income for the site as I am not affiliated to them in that way, the popup was just to pass around a Coupon Code from a promotion they were doing in 1996, it is valid for the foreseeable future. I have used their software from when they first sold their HTML Editor in 1996, and I still use it and some of the other titles today, plus they let me give full copies of their software away each month, but that is another story.

I did have the menu on the left hand side up to November last year, then I moved it to the right as an experiment, I always keep backups of previous layouts, so it can be replaced very easily.

Harvey Raybould said:

Hi Jim,

Congratulations on a very good site, you definitely must be doing something great for it to have been going nearly 10 years now.

There is not really much for me to add, over what everyone else has;

1) I also found the Coffee Cup scroller a bit annoying

2) May be you could change the background colour of the page, to a lighter one; white, light grey, light blue etc which may just make the main content stand out a little more.

3) If the Coffee Cup software is an income provider for you, then maybe you could utilise the header part, next to the logo for some advertising.

4) You have the menu on the right hand side of your page, which is your prime real estate and it might be better to utilise this for your main calls to action, or income generators. Many studies have been done on Web Usability and it has been found that people expect and look for a menu on the left hand side.

5) May be try to use the header space and/or the space next to the Search button, to create a personal message i.e. to Welcome a visitor and have some contact information, so that people feel that there is a real person behind the site.

I wouldn’t say any of my points are absolutely crucial, however, points 1 and 5 personally I think would help. You have definitely got good SEO elements in place, unique titles, meta tags etc for each page, so well done for that.

I hope you find this useful and good luck with your site for the next 10 years.

Regards

Harvey

Permalink Reply by Compila Limited on February 28, 2010 at 4:30

Hi Jim,

No problem at all. I am very happy that you have gained some good ideas and suggestions from everyone.

All the best

Harvey