[thelist] Site critique, please?

[Charles Johnson]

"Herzog, Ari" <Ari_Herzog at Instron.com> wrote:

> Here's my critique:
> 
> 1) I like the homepage. Might suggest for the top of the page
> where you have the left image of the surfer and right image of the logo,
> that they
> be reversed, so logo is on top left.
> See http://www.surfacademy.org/classes/surfclinic/surfclinic.htm
> for what I mean which has it like that.

Another vote for making the image/logo positions match. Tallied and counted!

> 2) Each linked page does take a little longer to load (about 10-15 seconds).
> Might be due to the design or maybe is not preloading anything?

Well, there definitely is pre-loading code in there, but I'm starting to
wonder if something isn't working right, because you're the second to
mention it. The navbar and table corner/background images point to the same
images on all pages, so after visiting one page the next ones should load
much faster since the browser will pull it out of its cache instead of
requesting from the server. That's the theory anyway, and it seems to be
working that way for me.

> 3) I like the mouseover links which highlight into a faded blue.

Cool, thanks! They're web-safe colors too, believe it or not.

> 4) The forum page is named "discus". Spelling error there.
> Also uses a different leftmenu; I see why, but should still be similar.

Nope, not a spelling error; Discus is the name of the discussion forum
software we're using. The forum does use a different nav menu, left over
from the design before this one; I haven't gotten around to changing it yet
because it means messing with various templates for the discussion software
and it gets messy. The forum pages are the only place you'll still find all
kinds of questionable code (including the dreaded FONT tag), mostly because
it's hard-coded into the Perl scripts.

> 5) On all the pages, aside from using the "breadcrumbs" at the top of the
> pages
> to get "Home", I'd suggest also using the logo or surfer image (ideally top
> left)
> to also go home.

Yes, I agree -- the home link should be more prominent. I've been thinking
about ways to do that...

> Looks nifty, though. Can I borrow some of the design for my personal site?

Thanks for the compliment! Sure, you can use the general approaches, table
layouts and such -- just don't use or link to any of my graphics, please...

Charles F. Johnson
Little Green Footballs Web Design
http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com