Re: NA2LIST

cnc wrote:

www.na2list.com


cnc,

Reviewed using Netscape 7.1, 600 X 800 full-screen (except as noted),
56Kb dialup, JavaScript enabled, cookies disabled, and without previous
reading of other comments.

Entry page:

The text that explains the purpose of the site is too small and has
insufficient contrast with the background, i.e. it's hard to read.

When screen width is reduced below about 422 pixels, a horizontal scroll
bar appears. That's a pretty low number as sites go, but there's no
reason for it at all here.

Since the purpose of the site seems to be rapid access to a broad list
of resources, why make the user click once just to get off the splash
screen? I'd go straight to the list.

No DOCTYPE. How do you validate your code? How are browsers supposed
to know how to format it?

You seem to have specified a favicon. It did not display on my system.

Second page:

Nice clean appearance. There's lots of stuff here. The text seemed a
bit small, but I had no trouble reading it.

To the right of the clock there's a gray rectangle. I couldn't tell
what it was for without clicking it. When I DID click on it, I saw what
looked like a calculator, but although it would accept digits, none of
the function keys seemed to work, so all the digits I entered just got
strung together.

On the top left there's today's date, followed by what appears to be a
time. There's another time at the top right of the page, and a third
one appears if I click on the date. After refreshing the page, these
three times were: 16:24, 19:00:00, and 16:24:47 followed by 04:24 PM.
The 19:00:00 value seemed to reset (to the same value) every time I
refreshed the page, then start counting upward.

I clicked on "The Labirynth" (which is spelled incorrectly) and found a
nice-looking site. Although they don't have anything in their source to
specify a favicon, one was displayed in my browser.

I clicked on "Jobs and Learning", a section title, and got a page with
more links and a brief description of the sites they led to. The grey
text of the descriptions was a bit hard to read against the white
background. I picked a link at random and it worked.

I clicked on 'Images & Wallpapers" and got to a page with several
backgrounds shown, in different colors. There was a small horizontal
scroll bar in my browser; I see no reason for that. At the top was an
input field for a color code (as I learned only after doing a mouseover
on it). As instructed, I typed in several different color codes, then
moved the mouse to the wallpapers. Nothing happened. I tried to enter
invalid values, such as 'bush'. Nothing happened.

Back on the second page, I clicked on "Music". The resulting screen
contained a stylized image of a radio (in an outlined box that extends
clear across the screen) and a button like that on the splash screen. I
clicked on the radio. Nothing happened. I clicked on the button. It
took me back to the splash screen.

I clicked on "Search". On the resulting page I checked "Google" and
typed in "dubious", then clicked the gray smudge below it. My browser
progress bar (at the bottom of the window) went instantly to the far
right , but nothing else happened. I changed the number "0" to "10" and
tried again, with the same result.

By this time I had determined that an empty box to the left of a section
title meant that the title was not a link and that a box with a dot in
it meant that the title WAS a link to a page with related links or
activities, which were different from the links listed below that title
on the main page.

Under "Art & Culture", I clicked on "100 Greatest Paintings" and was
promptly rewarded with a list of 409 great paintings. To save others
the trouble, "Bosch: The Garden of Delights" was number 1.

There's a tracking counter at the bottom of the page. I think they are
tacky.

Horizontal scroll bars appeared if the window was reduced below about
713 pixels. There's absolutely no reason for that here. The various
columns should stack within whatever width is available. Think about
cell phones and PDAs.

The main page is 4 screens high on my system, but the only way to see
the lower items is a vertical scroll. An alphabetic tab rack would let
you go directly to, say, the "M" entries (though the categories are not
currently in alphabetical order).

Net: This looks like a useful list of links for a particular user (I
have a similar one myself). This list won't work for everyone, though
(there are few technology sources, for example), so it's not clear what
you are trying to achieve. Many of the non-link functions just don't
work and navigation is generally cryptic.

The second page at least does have a DOCTYPE, but it's transitional,
which is badly outdated.

I noted lots of JavaScript and was tempted to disable it in my browser
to see what broke, but with so much not working already, it didn't seem
worth the time.

Chris Beall