[thelist] Request for site check

Wed Nov 7 22:11:56 CST 2001

Eric,
Overall, the site is clean and well organized.
Here are a few things you could consider:

1. See if you can clean up the pop up window so it doesn't scroll. Better
yet, remove the pop up. You have room on the home page to include it there.
Most users are already trained to close pop ups (ads).

2. Do a little touch up on the table structure. You've used fixed width
table size of 595 - which is ok - but on my big screen it makes the site
look tiny. Also, when I tested the pages with larger font sizes (for those
with visual impairments) the fixed table width makes it nearly unreadable.

3. Set your page margins to "0" so your table is flush left on the page.
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" leftmargin="0" topmargin="0" marginwidth="0"
marginheight="0">

4. This is minor - but when I have email links I like to use me at abc.com
formats rather than cryptic labels. Users then know that it is an email link
rather than a page.

5. Re-visit your meta tags. The description tag is only 29% utilized - you
can add more information and help your long term search engine placement.
The keywords tag is only 15% utilized and the relevance of keyword to page
content is really low. (not design related, but ultimately user-experience
related)

6. Remove the site admin link from the main navigation. It's not for the
public so it probably shouldn't be there.

7. Finally, I would move the banner to the bottom of the page, or consider
moving it to the inside pages. It's a little unwieldy up there.

My setup: IE 5 - Mac OS 9.2.1 - Laptop 1024 resolution

Hope this helps.
Kimberly