[thelist] Site Checks

[Maximillian Schwanekamp]

Hershel Robinson wrote:
> http://www.mishpachaw.com/index.php
> 
> a few specific questions:
> 
> 1 The buttons are styled to look like links. There is even a bit of JS 
> thrown in there to match the rollover, for those users with JS. There 
> has been a bit of a challenge to get the font of the buttons to match 
> the font of the links. Do they match? (buttons can be identified as 
> those 'links' which submit forms.

In FF on Win & Mac, and IE 6 on Win, they're fine.  In Safari 1.0.3 of 
course they're still buttons, but there's no way around that - just 
something to be aware of.

> 2 The Hebrew package magazines are in Hebrew, as is the last link of the 
> to navigation links. Do these show up as Hebrew characters? (if you 
> don't know what Hebrew looks like, it does NOT anyhow look like a bunch 
> of question marks. :) )

On Mac IE 5.2 the Hebrew is a bunch of random non-English characters. 
I'd go with Felix's suggestion to use UTF-8 instead of Windows-1255.  On 
Safari however it's OK.

Also on Mac IE 5.2, the nav menu is vertical, and the links sometimes 
overlap with other text.

On Safari, I found one page especially strange - heb-sub.php.  There may 
be others like it, but I don't have time for an exhaustive search. 
Here's a screenshot:
http://www.neptunewebworks.com/evolt/heb-sub.jpg
(you can get a partial glimpse of IE 5's rendering of your nav menu on 
that screenshot too, underneath the Safari window poking out to the 
right a bit)

> 3 Any missing images or logical errors in the back issues and indexes? 
> These pages and also the advertisers and links run on a custom-built 
> (from scratch) CMS.

None that I noticed.

Lots of image weirdness.  The temp homepage (Under Construction) has a 
glaringly missing image, the path of which is:
http://www.mishpachaw.com/images/001cover.jpg

On the index.php page, you have the larger cover image at top left.  On 
IE 6 Win, the image starts out with a broken image and then fades to a 
cover image.

Also, that same cover image is wrongly sized, so it looks all jaggy and 
yucky.  I noticed some other pages with that same effect.  You really 
ought to create properly resized images for those.

Lastly, the layout creates a nasty horizontal scroll in IE 5.2 on Mac.

You should reconsider the image fade business on index.php, IMHO. 
Geegaws like that can be seen as annoying, especially when one of the 
images used is broken.

Overall though, a nice clean site!  A good balance between conservative 
and modern.

-- 
Max Schwanekamp
http://www.neptunewebworks.com/