Site Critique requested, hangingrockcamp.net

Please take a moment to look at the following site and post your
opinion on it. Please post any critiques as well as errors that cause
it to load incorrectly, display incorrectly or misspelling that you
might run across.

http://www.hangingrockcamp.net

thank you very much

hillbillyfunk (AT) gmail (DOT) com wrote:

Please take a moment to look at the following site and post your
opinion on it. Please post any critiques as well as errors that cause
it to load incorrectly, display incorrectly or misspelling that you
might run across.

http://www.hangingrockcamp.net

You are using two _almost_ identical images of rocks (black and white).
Try the same image both places, and that load time will go to 1/2.
Use normal text, not an image for the "Loading Images...Hanging Rock
Camp" that adds size to one of the two. At that point you have even
less than 1/2 the download time for the two image displays. (This is
Dependant on how the browser is programmed to remember things already
downloaded, but most do.)

The "Hanging Rock Camp" link at the top doesn't seem to lead anywhere
except back to the same page!

The rounded corners around the border of the left hand links are
breaking up badly in Opera. It is hard to get rounded corners right
for all browsers. I never use the things, because when they fail the
result makes your page look really raw.

Is the big background color image of the river optimized to the smallest
possible size?
--
mbstevens
http://www.mbstevens.com/cgi/mkatt.p...ique_Generator

hillbillyfunk (AT) gmail (DOT) com wrote:

Please take a moment to look at the following site and post your
opinion on it. Please post any critiques as well as errors that cause
it to load incorrectly, display incorrectly or misspelling that you
might run across.

http://www.hangingrockcamp.net

Might as well start here:
<http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A//www.hangingrockcamp.net/>

<http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?profile=css2&warning=2&uri=http%3A//www.hangingrockcamp.net/>

These: "<!-- hide from older browsers" have been unnecessary for
years.

New pages? Should be using a Strict doctype.

The banner at the top is way too tall, causing me to need to scroll to
see virtually all of the content. Remember the newspaper phrase "Above
the fold?"

Uses tables for layout; use CSS instead.

Stats on pages makes the pages look like amateur pages.

thank you very much

My pleasure. I was using Firefox 1.0.7

--
-bts
-When motorcycling, never follow a pig truck

"hillbillyfunk (AT) gmail (DOT) com" wrote:

http://www.hangingrockcamp.net

A few random impressions:

It's very untidy. The text is unnecessarily small in most places, and often
illegible where it is superimposed on the photo background. It really looks
as if no thought whatsoever has gone into the *layout* of the pages. It
looks like things were stuffed in any-old-how.

Your home page has 43 validation errors:
<http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A//www.hangingrockcamp.net/>

The navigation design is rather bad. There is no indication that the green
bar at the top is the "main menu" and that the jumpy thing on the left is a
sub-menu.

Since when was "river_info" a word? I can't think of any good reason why you
might want an underscore in the middle of that.

The colour scheme is drab and unexciting.

Your home page fails the 5 second test. If it takes people longer than that
to work out what the hell your site is about, then it's not doing its job.

I always think that sites containing lots of photos are let down by the
standard of photography unless they use a professional photographer. Yours
looks very amateurish.

--
phil [dot] ronan @ virgin [dot] net
http://vzone.virgin.net/phil.ronan/

hillbillyfunk (AT) gmail (DOT) com wrote:

[...] Please post any critiques as well as errors that cause
it to load incorrectly, display incorrectly or misspelling that you
might run across.

Viewed with Mozilla v1.7.12.

- HTML 4.01 Transitional is for legacy pages, not new. Use HTML 4.01 Strict.
- As noted by bts, a large number of HTML and CSS validation errors.
- The CSS validation errors prevent your layout from displaying correctly.
For instance the "Located on the ..." paragraph is not positioned in the
white area because of an error in .data_located.
- Use of tables for layout. Your site layout is fairly straightforward;
tableless layout would be simple to achieve.
- Inconsistent use of quotes around tag values. Sometimes double quotes,
sometimes single, sometimes none at all. There is no downside to quoting
all tag values.
- "tag soup" and "style swamp" for presentation. You sometimes use
style="" to replace <font> (and similar) elements. That only changes the
method without fixing the problem.
- Use of &nbsp; for presentation. Might as well use a "spacer" GIF. Use
CSS instead.
- You have a lot of redundant attributes in the CSS, for instance
font-size:12px. And no use whatsoever of the Cascading aspect of CSS.

- I have a minimum font size set for my browser, a size that is larger
than the small font size (12px) you have. Your site does okay with that.
Also note that IE users cannot increase the font size because you have
spec'd it in px, at a size that is 75% of standard.

- The link appearance is inconsistent. The left nav has a :hover defined.
The top nav does not.
- The left nav :hover fore-/background contrast is very poor. If anything,
the contrast should increase to heighten interest and readability.
- The link in the left nav for the current page is not disabled. Doing so
provides additional feedback to the visitor about location within the site.
- When the text wraps in the left nav, there is no obvious separation
between the links until I hover over one.
- The heading color is the same as the link color. Because of the
inconsistent link presentation, I did not know if they were links until
the mouse hovered over them.
- Non-navigation links are normally underlined. While ugly, it is what
visitors expect. Removing it makes finding links and Easter Egg hunt.
Another option is to create an obvious link style for your site.
If you change the color of one link pseudo class (:hover, :link),
change them all. (Spec them in this order: :link :visited :focus :hover
:active.)

- You use the <hx> elements for presentation, not markup. There is an <h3>
with no h1 or h2.
- The superscripted ".00" in "12.00" is very odd.
- I had to disable Javascript to stop that annoying blinking image slide
show. If you absolutely must have it, have it loop only once. Or, better,
provide a button to allow the visitor to choose to see it.
- Does N8's license require that you provide a link to their site? If not,
why is it there?

- Your images file sizes are rather large. You can save JPEGs at a lower
quality setting, say 75%, to reduce the size (for instance, from 20 KB to
5 KB). Video monitors are low resolution devices.
- Create a separate background image for the non-home pages. Clipping off
3/4 of the main image is a bad choice; the whole image must still be
downloaded. Don't waste the bandwidth or the visitor's time.
- The b&w photo of the "hanging rock" is pretty bad. Contrast is too high
and there is no spatial reference to decide what it is. (I am guessing
that is a hanging rock from the name of the campground.)
- In general your images are obviously quick snapshots. Hire a photographer.

- I never saw the stat counter because my browser only allows images from
the original site.
IMO, using an image to load a script is questionable practice at best;
it is sneaky, underhanded, and a betrayal of trust between you and the
visitor. A common use is delivering trojans and virsuses in email.
If you must have such a function, publish a site Terms of Use that
explicitly states that you may do these things.

--
jmm dash list (at) sohnen-moe (dot) com
(Remove .AXSPAMGN for email)

Thank you all for the input. I would likle to clarify a few things to
several replys just for the sake of clarity.

fromhil [dot] ronan @ virgin [dot] net

Since when was "river_info" a word? I can't think of any good reason
why you
might want an underscore in the middle of that.

the content management system uses the "directory links" as table names
in the database, spaces are not allowed so PHP inserts the underscore
on creation of the table. It is not hard to remove in display though.

always think that sites containing lots of photos are let down by the

standard of photography unless they use a professional
photographer.Yours looks very amateurish.

They are shot by our camp visitors on their vacations then given to us
to upload, the visitors like them very much and they bring traffic in
so they stay.

from: jmm dash list (at) sohnen-moe (dot) com

- Use of tables for layout. Your site layout is fairly straightforward;

tableless layout would be simple to achieve

I have had better cross-browser success with things looking the same
with tables, too many issues with css compatability for a site like
this.

- Does N8's license require that you provide a link to their site? If
not,
why is it there?

I'm N8, I designed and host the site for free as my testbed for the
content management program I wrote

- In general your images are obviously quick snapshots. Hire a
photographer.

yup, that's what they are, shots on a koda DC3400, hiring requies
money, this small camp has none.

Thanks again for the input
N8