Critique this site, please

Spartanicus wrote:

It seems that you don't understand what happens when a user changes
between a serif and a sans serif font as the user preferred font.

I have never encountered this feature in a browser. Or do not recognize

it as you describe it.
Which browser do you use?

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Chris Beall wrote:

General:
Most of the text is justified, which I find hard to read, especially
when you allow long line lengths. I prefer a ragged-right margin with
line length limited to about 30em.
The amount of material above the navigation means that on my setup the
last navigation link I can see, without vertical scrolling, is "Authors".
I like the subdued color scheme, though it does reduce
text-to-background contrast a bit. I had no trouble reading the text.

The text justification is client-specified. I too find full justified

text unpleasant on a low resolution monitor.
Something really needs to fill that space. I've reduced it and on the
index page there is a blank spot just begging for something. Maybe a
background image....
I have been ambivalent about the color scheme for a while. I wanted
something that would stand out a bit from the standard white background.
Finding a suitable light/pale/pastel background color that is not wretched
is quite the challenge. Especially when there is such variation in color
balance for monitors.
I finally decided to lighten the background to a nearly white color.

Home:
I'm dubious about the 'News and Announcements'. Most of the
information is about updates you've made to the site. Do you expect
lots of folks to check back often to see what changes you've made? This
doesn't seem like that sort of site to me, but perhaps I'm wrong.

The product is a book, a text book at that. Not very dynamic. The main

point of interest is for schools to see which other schools are using the
text. Actually the point of listing the customers is a bit lost on me.
But dropping the News section would leave the first page mostly blank.
Maybe that's desirable. Hmm.

Reviews:
I was confused by the layout of this section. Each page replicates
the index of reviews and each page contains multiple reviews under that
index, but I detected no structure regarding which reviews were on which
page. [...]

They are ordered in descending chronology. Would have putting the

publication date ("Spring 2005") first made it more obvious?
The reviews take up a lot of space and I wanted to keep the page size
down below 20KB yet have it look like a single page. I apparently did not
succeed.

Home Study Courses:
Navigational inconsistency. [...]

Yes, well. It was worse. It used to link to another site altogether.

That was weird. I have not properly highlighted the Study Courses.

Teacher's Corner:
The first 4 links: Description, Preview... represent a set of steps.
To follow those steps, however, you must go to each page, then go
"Back" with the browser, then click on the next step. I'd put "next
step" (appropriately titled) links at the bottom of each of these pages,
so you can go directly. In the case of the library card form, if the
form is processed in real time, then the 'thank you' response screen
should contain a link to Enter the teacher's library. (I didn't test that).

That is a good idea. Thanks.

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Jim Moe <jmm-list.AXSPAMGN (AT) sohnen-moe (DOT) com> wrote:

It seems that you don't understand what happens when a user changes
between a serif and a sans serif font as the user preferred font.

I have never encountered this feature in a browser. Or do not recognize
it as you describe it.
Which browser do you use?

The phenomena is the same in any browser. The cause is the difference in
x-height between serif and sans serif fonts.

To cut a long story short, to avoid body text size problems specifying
100%/1em body text size isn't enough, only if you also don't specify a
font family for body text will you avoid all small text problems.

--
Spartanicus

Jim Moe wrote:

Chris Beall wrote:
(snip)
Reviews:
I was confused by the layout of this section. Each page replicates
the index of reviews and each page contains multiple reviews under
that index, but I detected no structure regarding which reviews were
on which page. [...]

They are ordered in descending chronology. Would have putting the
publication date ("Spring 2005") first made it more obvious?
The reviews take up a lot of space and I wanted to keep the page size
down below 20KB yet have it look like a single page. I apparently did
not succeed.

Jim,
My preference would be one page for EACH review with either:
- the index repeated on each page or
- the index on a separate page, with a "Back" link following each
review.

I maintain one site which has a "Press clippings" section. The main
page is just a chronological (most recent first) listing of the
clippings, and each clipping is on it's own page. Among other things,
this allows each page to have appropriate styling, without a jumble of
styles on a single page. Each page also has a link back to the source
(in this case newspapers), primarily as a quid pro quo, since these
papers don't have archives on their own sites and I've had to copy their
text onto my own pages.

Cheers,
Chris Beall

Spartanicus wrote:

The phenomena is the same in any browser. The cause is the difference in
x-height between serif and sans serif fonts.

To cut a long story short, to avoid body text size problems specifying
100%/1em body text size isn't enough, only if you also don't specify a
font family for body text will you avoid all small text problems.

Ah! I understand.

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Spartanicus wrote:

http://www.theethicsoftouch.com/

Okay, I've incorporated most of your comments.

12) Useless nonsense:
meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css"
meta http-equiv="Content-Script-Type" content="text/javascript"
meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE"

The "MSSmart..." meta is spurious. Why are the other ones useless?

15) <hr> used as presentational markup, use CSS instead.

Hm. What is its use then?

20) News and Announcements
14-Aug-2005 Today is a great day!
No it's not, my cat just peed outside his litter box, and now someone
has to clean it up (me probably). (I get the feeling you are an
American)

Ah. You took it literally. Irony is hard to convey in text.

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Chris Beall wrote:

The reviews take up a lot of space and I wanted to keep the page
size down below 20KB yet have it look like a single page. I apparently
did not succeed.

My preference would be one page for EACH review with either:
- the index repeated on each page or
- the index on a separate page, with a "Back" link following each
review.

I see your point. I groan at creating a separate page for each review.

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Jim Moe <jmm-list.AXSPAMGN (AT) sohnen-moe (DOT) com> wrote:

12) Useless nonsense:
meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css"
meta http-equiv="Content-Script-Type" content="text/javascript"
meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE"

The "MSSmart..." meta is spurious. Why are the other ones useless?

1) It assumes that the server parses the html document and does
something with it, this is most unlikely.
2) In the very unlikely event that the server is setup to parse html and
do something with this data, it is very inefficient.
3) In the very unlikely event that the server is setup to parse html and
do something with this data, declaring a http header in one document for
another document is ludicrous.

15) <hr> used as presentational markup, use CSS instead.

Hm. What is its use then?

It's use in modern markup is rarely justified, if it is to be used at
all it should be used to markup a structural division (semantic markup
such as header or paragraph elements are much more suitable to
structurally divide a document in virtually all cases).

--
Spartanicus