[thelist] Site Review (please, please) www.coeville.com

aardvark roselli at earthlink.net
Sat Jul 8 11:43:09 CDT 2000


NN4/IE5/win98/33.6k

very cute... you're obviously trying to establish a style, but it says to me, "We're nice, friendly, 
and treat you well.  Oh, and we design web stuff..."  that's neither good nor bad, just thought 
i'd let you know what message i get...

the home page is nice, and downloads pretty quickly... too bad you don't re-use any of those 
images in the following pages... while you get the images under 20k total, keep in mind that you 
have 60 images... that's a lot of connections...

your content pages have a very large header set of images... again, they load relatively 
quickly... only 23 images, but you are at 20k now...

you do know that in NN your anchor links are green, and in IE they are red... this is a function 
of how IE treats an anchor in a viewed page as a visited link...

the liquid layout looks pretty good, but my machine at home is set to 800x600, so i'm curious to 
see how your imagery tiles...

the black line that splits the white content area from the header has that Photoshop anti-aliased 
thing going on... make it a solid 2px to match the bottom...

i don't like the anchor links (Why Coeville)... even at 800x600 there isn't enough content to 
warrant clicking and have the page scroll 50px...

the 'TO' links look pretty bad... all uppercase, plain text when you've already established this 
quirky imagery elsewhere, and the alignment with the rest of the text block makes 'em look 
amateur...

the "navbar" images don't indicate to the user the current section... you may or may not care, 
but i can't tell where i am by looking at the nav... something *i* do all the time...

i want the big Coeville billboard, as well as the house, to take me to the home page...

lots of white space under your copy before the page ends...

in 'resources,' your links aren't anchors... not only does this break from the inline links 
elsewhere in the site, but IE now applies the hover styles to the links, meaning they *look* 
different as well...

your links to resources should open new windows... they should be formatted in a more 
readable format (bullet list, dictionary list, whatever)...

with those URLs, take a look at what happens to a 640x480 user at 
http://www.coeville.com/designresources.htm ... the page scrolls, but the header stops dead 
at the edge of the window...

how do i get back to the regular Resources page?  yeah, i know about the nav bar, but since 
this is a sub-section, i expected the page title or logo to bring me back...

i'm not really sure why people like to add links to the resources they use on their sites... i find 
myself looking for the ones they leave out as much as the poor ones they list to determine if i 
think they are qualified... if i'm joe average client without a clue, and i've heard good things 
about some crap resource, and you don't have it listed, i'm gonna think you don't know all there 
is to know...

also, qualifying links as "..the best..." or '...most valuable..." isn't a very good idea... if somebody 
thinks it sucks, and you say it's great, that can reflect negatively on you...

in fact, where are your usability links?  i care more about that than 'inspirational sites'...

have you looked at your portfolio pages at 640x480?  one-word lines after wrapping, headers 
that overlap the image (why are the headers blue in NN and green in IE?)...

your screen-caps are pretty fat... very wide, long download... i have a different approach - list 
clients on one page with promotional blurbs, then have detail pages with 200px-wide caps... 
http://algonquinstudios.com/clients/

all your caps are from IE/win (demonstrates browser and OS preference, not good for some), 
captured at what appears to be an 800-px-wide window (doesn't show the site too well, often 
leave lotsa white space) and at the exact same size (cuts off some stuff, leaves others 
looking naked)...  also, i don't care about the software you used... but when i see DW, coupled 
with the IE/win shots and such, i wonder if you are able to create cross-browser/platform 
sites by getting into the code...

you really should have the links open a new window...

as for the HTML... i'm not gonna say too much since it appears to be WYSIWYG-generated...

you use <span> when you could use styled <h#> or other tags... non-css browsers see your 
headers the same as other text... consider using structural markup...

you don't have a DTD, and your META tags seem a bit shaky... you might wanna link your CSS 
stuff... for some sample META and DTD stuff, try http://algonquinstudios.com/overview/


i'd talk more, but i gotta go over to the folks' and move a tub...

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rachell Coe
> 
> I finally have my redesign uploaded (complete 
> with meta's, alt's, and 
> content), and hope that some of you could take a 
> look at it and let me know 
> if everything looks OK, and/or if you have any 
> comments about how I could 
> make it better.
>
> www.coeville.com





More information about the thelist mailing list