Site critique request please

On Sat, 25 Jun 2005 16:32:40 -0700, Jim Moe wrote:

Tony Bukres wrote:

Please critique this site which I helped create. It's a web hosting
company. Please ignore html and css validation errors so there's no need to
pass the site through a validator. The errors which have lower priority
will be fixed later when I have some free time.

Correcting some of the errors will likely affect the layout. Might as
well get it clean in the beginning.


I am more concerned with site layout, ease of navigation, user
friendliness, functionality and anything that gets in the way of smooth
user experience.

Appearance:
Overall it is a pleasing design. The information content is dense yet
not overwhelming.
Your use of Javascript is intelligent. It provides enhanced information
to the visitor without penalizing those who have it disabled.
The graphics accents are quite nice.

Layout:
Overall
- The layout is fixed in width. There is really no need to do that. At
least the middle section should adapt to the browser.
- The layout is fragile. It breaks when the font size is changed. I have a
minimum font size set, 14px (Mozilla v1.7.8); it causes text to wrap in
the main nav, and in the plan descriptions. The result is not very pretty:
the nav background is repeated; the plan text overlaps other areas of the
layout.
- There is a lot of open space at the top. The logo looks lonely. And that
gets worse as you add nav items.

Nav:
- Why is "Home" an orphan?
- The white on light blue is a bit hard to read especially since the text
is so small. "Short News List" is truly unreadable; I had to magnify the
image to know what it said (Why is it an image?).
- The nav does not change when a new page is entered. In fact the links
stay active. As a (additional) visual cue to the user, the text should
change in some way and not be a link. You are apparently using ASP; it is
easy to create a page-specific nav bar on the fly.

On the Knowledge Base page there is a border that only goes part way
across.

Thanks for the info. Will consider these suggestions in a next version.
Also thanks for not picking on the html, as requested.


Tony
--
http://www.dotnet-hosting.com
Free web hosting with ASP.NET & SQL Server
No ads - Innovative features

On Sat, 25 Jun 2005 23:48:09 GMT, Ben Measures wrote:

Tony Bukres wrote:

CSS is newer technology but that doesn't
mean using tables is wrong.

Tables were never intended to be used for layout, and so are badly
designed for that purpose. CSS, on the other hand, was expressly
designed for layout and presentation.


Tin-openers don't mean using knives to open tins is wrong - yet, for
most people, the choice is clear.

Why is this group so stuck up on how the site is created under the hood

If you go to a candy store you can expect candy. If you go to
alt.html.critique you can expect a critique on your html.

I guess I am in the wrong group. Any groups for site, non html, critique,
including Yahoo groups or popular sites for this?


Tony
--
http://www.dotnet-hosting.com
Free web hosting with ASP.NET & SQL Server
No ads - Innovative features

Spartanicus wrote:

Ben Measures <saint_abroadremove (AT) removehotmail (DOT) com> wrote:

CSS, on the other hand, was expressly
designed for layout and presentation.

CSS has no real support for creating page layouts.

Including the word "real" in that sentence reduces it to pure opinion -
can you authoritatively define what is "real"? Of course, you're
entitled to your own opinion but no matter how important it may be there
will be others with differing views.

The fact stated is that tables were not designed for layout in contrast
to CSS, which was designed for that express purpose.

That said, the effectiveness of CSS in fulfilling it's purpose is a more
subjective and thus contentious issue. This can only be judged by it's
fruits, and my personal observations have lead me to be quite satisfied
with it's effectiveness on the multimedia multi-platform that is the WWW.

Floats, positioning
and css tables are inappropriate and woefully inadequate tools for
creating a quality layout.

If by "quality" you mean static and exact across browsers and platforms
then you'd be right. To do so is an impossible feat without the
exclusion of certain browsers and platforms - something which is not in
the nature of the internet.

Otherwise, I'd have to disagree with you if your meaning of 'quality' is
any of the following:
of a high standard;
of a high degree of excellence;
having a special, distinctive, or essential character; or
having a characteristic that defines an apparent individual nature.

There are countless examples of CSS layouts with evidence of some or all
of the above, you just have to look.

--
Ben M.

Tony Bukres wrote:

Ben Measures wrote:
Tony Bukres wrote:

http://www.dotnet-hosting.com/

site layout,

No sitemap, so difficult to tell.

While a site map is good in general, every link on the home page is one
level deep. You're not exactly going to get lost going anywhere.

Being lost doesn't just mean not knowing where you are, it can also mean
not knowing where you've been or where you're going.

Multiple links to the same pages and no special styling for links to
already visited pages ensure users will wander around in circles. A
sitemap won't take you long to create and can be very reassuring to a
visitor that they've fully explored the site without having to wander
around aimlessly.

ease of navigation,

Keyboard navigation of your site is a PITA.

What does PITA mean?

It's a chat acronym for "Pain in the ass":
http://www.netlingo.com/emailsh.cfm

functionality and anything that gets in the way of smooth
user experience.

The features page has no alternative, nor warning that it won't work for
users with Javascript disabled.

Yes.. that's a weak point. The idea was for users to get more info on each
feature without making a roundtrip every time.

It's not a problem that can't be overcome without a little JS wizardry
but personally, I'd just use some simple CSS to achieve much the same
effect without said drawbacks.

How many users percentage
wise do you think have Javascript disabled permenantly?

Many web statistics place it at about 10% but as with all statistics,
that should be taken with a pinch of salt.

As it stands, many who navigate that page will end up confused and
lacking in information about your services. The key to web development
is to allow everybody content, and enable special presentation to those
with features enabled.

Further points:

- Navigating from page to page is sluggish, and reflects badly on you as
a host. A slow site will lead people to think your servers are slow.

I can't see this slugginess. Every page has the same header (includes logo
and left panel), footer and left menu (beyond home page) which means the
browser should cache all the images wherever you click from the home page.
The server itself is super fast.

The two main pages of the site, the homepage and the features page, are
30KB and 40KB (respectively) for the HTML alone. Further, these are not
cacheable (since they're dynamically generated) and your particular
table layout prevents incremental rendering. Altogether, these add up to
a sluggish appearance.

- In the AUP you write:

Customers found using our system for illegal activities [...] will have
their accounts immediately canceled without refund of any fees.

What, no investigation or right to reply? Looks like you're just asking
for an excuse to cheat your customers.

Why do you say "excuse to cheat your customers"?? After all the company
offers free hosting and once an account gets suspended or deactivated and
if the customer was participating in illgeal activities, they most probably
will go away.. If not, we will listen and investigate.

Then why not phrase it as:

Accounts used for illegal activities [...] will be immediately suspended
pending investigation, and may be cancelled without refund pending it's
outcome.
to better fit what you describe above?

- Whilst looking cheap isn't so bad in the hosting business, your
branding looks unprofessional. Hiring a graphic designer or branding
consultant would repay the expense many times over. Alternatively, take
a dip in alt.graphic.design and prepare for the bite (no pain no gain).

Maybe you can be more specific on what part of branding and why it's
unprofessional.

The difficulty of performing your request is the reason graphic
designers and branding consultants are (on the face of it at least) paid
so much. As previously written, if you don't want to hire one, ask in
alt.graphic.design - many of them are far more talented than I in such
things.

In the mean time, the branding of <http://www.retroweb.net/> has always
made a good impression on me. Search out the features common to great
sites and judiciously integrate them into yours.

Hth,
--
Ben M.

Ben Measures <saint_abroadremove (AT) removehotmail (DOT) com> wrote:

CSS, on the other hand, was expressly
designed for layout and presentation.

CSS has no real support for creating page layouts.

Including the word "real" in that sentence reduces it to pure opinion -
can you authoritatively define what is "real"?

Created and suitable for that purpose.

The fact stated is that tables were not designed for layout in contrast
to CSS, which was designed for that express purpose.

Calling it a fact doesn't make it so.

That said, the effectiveness of CSS in fulfilling it's purpose is a more
subjective and thus contentious issue. This can only be judged by it's
fruits, and my personal observations have lead me to be quite satisfied
with it's effectiveness on the multimedia multi-platform that is the WWW.

That qualifies your observational abilities, nothing more.

Floats, positioning
and css tables are inappropriate and woefully inadequate tools for
creating a quality layout.

If by "quality" you mean static and exact across browsers and platforms
then you'd be right. To do so is an impossible feat without the
exclusion of certain browsers and platforms - something which is not in
the nature of the internet.

Otherwise, I'd have to disagree with you if your meaning of 'quality' is
any of the following:
of a high standard;
of a high degree of excellence;
having a special, distinctive, or essential character; or
having a characteristic that defines an apparent individual nature.

Off the top of my head:

Positioning:
Fails to contain it's content causing elements to overlap or (partially)
disappear. The content of an absolutely positioned box cannot be allowed
to wrap if there is another positioned box placed directly below it as
it will overlap the content of that box.

Floating:
Created to position a single element to the left or right and have text
flow beside and beneath it. When abused to create a "layout" it imposes
restrictions on where to place content on screen, and/or causes content
linearity problems. Floated boxes also fail to contain their content,
again resulting in overlapping or disappearing elements, or layout boxes
that jump out of position when the content doesn't fit in the layout box
(client zooms etc.).

CSS tables:
CSS tables suffer from the same problems as HTML tables, minus the
semantic issue. No ability to place content where we want without
introducing content linearity problems.

Crucially all methods suffer from the fact that in CSS 2.x no mechanism
exist that is capable of dealing with the infinite range of viewport
sizes that are fundamental to web clients.

There are countless examples of CSS layouts with evidence of some or all
of the above, you just have to look.

Show me one and I'll prove you wrong.

--
Spartanicus

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Tony Bukres
<tony (AT) dotnet-hosting (DOT) moc> writing in
news:10ovwsx3mse7f$.kjryy6vt3nij.dlg (AT) 40tude (DOT) net:

On Sat, 25 Jun 2005 07:40:30 GMT, Adrienne wrote:

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Tony Bukres
tony (AT) dotnet-hosting (DOT) moc> writing in
news:v6ltjcdlc36m$.mzzf8113xom6.dlg (AT) 40tude (DOT) net:



Please critique this site which I helped create. It's a web hosting
company. Please ignore html and css validation errors so there's no
need to pass the site through a validator.

I couldn't help myself. I also ran it through Tablin and Cynthia
Says. Some clients who are thinking about doing business with you
might do it as well.

What is Tablin?

Tablin checks to see if a page based on tables reads correctly.
<http://www.w3.org/WAI/References/Tablin/> . Take a look at how your index
page renders <http://makeashorterlink.com/?O5A05255B> . It is out of order.

Since this is a hosting company, and from the content, it seems your
clients will be developers. As a matter of fact, there was a
discussion "Is W3c validation woth the money?" at alt.html
http://makeashorterlink.com/?F2675135B>, so I would say that
validation IS important, only for the reason that other developers
will want to know what's under the hood.

I am a hosting company. I am not selling validation tools. How many
users in this world will try to validate a site before doing business
with the site?

If you are a hosting company, your clients will be people who want a host.
Your hosting packages seem geared to developers, and those are the sort of
people who might validate your site before considering doing business. I
am a developer, and that is something that I do when shopping for hosting.

The errors which have lower priority will be fixed later when I have
some free time.

You know, one never seems to have free time later.

There is something I don't understand. When one is developing, there
is always some time set aside for debugging and testing of server side
code. When you find a bug, you fix it. You run letters and such
through a spell check to be sure you've spelled everything correctly
(or you have one in memory). If there are errors there, you fix them.

I made it clear that I am not interested in validation issues right
now. As long as validation errors do not affect the look and
functionality of the site, they will have lower priority. Regulars
users are not concerned if there are error under the hood. This is not
software where errors need to be fixed before it ships. A site can be
worked on while it's still online. Every day an online business is not
online is a day with lost revenue.

It's been two days since you asked for this critique, and there are still
93 errors. The bulk of those are missing alt attribute. You could have
spared five minutes to do [replace <img with <img alt="" ]. To me that's
just plain laziness.

Why do some developers feel that fixing validation errors are not
equally important?

See explanation above.


I am more concerned with site layout, ease of navigation, user
friendliness, functionality and anything that gets in the way of
smooth user experience.

With nested tables, some users are not going to have a smooth
experience at all. This is what your page may be for someone using a
screen reader:

"Table with two columns and eighty-two rows Table with two columns
and eight rows Table with one column and seven rows Link home Link
Webmail Link Control Panel Link Knowledge Base slash FAQ Link Live
Support Link Support slash Contact Us Link About Us Table end"

Right now it doesn't matter.

I can envision a time when persons might have a screenreading device in
their car, and have the car read web pages to them as they drive long
distances.

Most of online users user graphical
browsers and as long as the the site displays and functions properly
under the major browsers, that's good enough (for now at least).

And how long is it going to be good enough? Small screens, telephones and
the like, are going to have problems. I ran your site through the Openwave
SDK (which simulates a cell phone), and it crashed the program.

If I
am going to spend time making a site work properly for every single
browser and for every single type of out there, this work will never
finish.

<http://www.anybrowser.org> . Apparently, a lot of people have already
created sites that work properly for every single browser, and they seem to
be finised.

A business needs to ship a product or service to survive and as
long as the product as the product or service can serve a customer,
it's a good enough start.

But, not in your kind of business. Your business depends on people who
want to host web sites. The people who use FrontPage and Word to make web
sites are not the kind of customers you are targeting. You are targeting
the kind of customer that has built a site for an important client, and
they have to be darned sure that the hosting service is going to be strong
and reliable, as well as economical. These are the kind of people who will
look at your poor markup and wonder if your servers are poor as well.

You know I did mention that I am interested in the site's layout and
user experience. Not how the site was built under the hood. Nested
tables work fine under GUI browser and I know about text browsers which
are not my audience right now.

Your most important visitor does not have eyes, does not have javascript,
does not have Flash, cannot fill out forms, and just wants text. Gee, I
wonder who that could be? Google, perhaps?

Tony

Nuf said.

--
Adrienne Boswell
http://www.cavalcade-of-coding.info
Please respond to the group so others can share

Adrienne wrote:

It's been two days since you asked for this critique, and there are still
93 errors. The bulk of those are missing alt attribute. You could have
spared five minutes to do [replace <img with <img alt="" ]. To me that's
just plain laziness.

A run through HTML Tidy would fix a lot of it.
http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/
You might have to add a couple of minutes to your estimate because
of the download time, though.