Up 30 hours - is this any good?

After waking from a slight nap after 30 hours of straight work, my judgement
may be off. Is this any good? What red flags catch the eye. Any input would
be appreciated.
http://www.page-zone.com/customer/

On Tue, 06 Sep 2005 02:45:33 GMT, "Jim" <mail@ rm -f
THISpage-zone.com> wrote:

After waking from a slight nap after 30 hours of straight work, my judgement
may be off. Is this any good? What red flags catch the eye. Any input would
be appreciated.
http://www.page-zone.com/customer/


Font colors in the center, shaded Hosting section are too light. It's

easier to ignore them than to read them (system: Dell notebook,
WinXP, Firefox 1.06).

Your "Standard Plan" hosting package details are missing.

On your hosting plans -- how about a detalied listing of
services/programs? E.g., PHP version, Perl version, own cgi-bin,
shell access, ftp, FrontPage Extensions, SFTP, etc.

Maybe a direct link from the Hosting Packages pages to a customer
testimonial page and a pre-sales questions area of the forums?
--
Terry
My blog: http://www.TheNextWindow.com
My website: http://www.TerryStockdale.com
My tip site and newsletter: http://www.TerrysComputerTips.com

Hyphenate "easy to use" in "easy to use domain" management system."

Visually very nice.

"Jim" wrote:

After waking from a slight nap after 30 hours of straight work, my judgement
may be off. Is this any good? What red flags catch the eye. Any input would
be appreciated.
http://www.page-zone.com/customer/

I think a slightly longer nap is on order. You put HTML markup in the HEAD
section:

div ID="blockDiv" STYLE="position:absolute; left:-1000; top:-1000;
width:200px; height:30px; visibility: 'hide';"> ... etc...

The text is far too small. If some of it actually contains useful or
important information, perhaps a larger size would help?

You seem to be using pale blue text for hyperlinks in some places and for
emphasis in others. In other places your links are white on dark blue (which
is also used for unlinked headings in /customer/hosting.php), dark brown on
pale grey, grey on white, and probably others that I haven't spotted yet (I
only looked at 2 pages). As a result I have to wave the mouse around to
figure out what I can click on. Are you *deliberately* trying to make this
site difficult to use?

The design falls apart when I zoom the text up to a legible size (on a 19"
monitor at 1600x1200 pixels):
<http://vzone.virgin.net/phil.ronan/junk/page-zone.png>

Overall, the home page has no particular focal point. I suggest you think
about what you want to say, and then work harder at getting this point
across clearly. A page full of small print makes you seem rather measly and
insincere. And don't forget to validate your HTML in case you make any more
silly mistakes.

Phil

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

In message <hp7Te.1534$9x2.1060 (AT) newsread3 (DOT) news.pas.earthlink.net>, Jim
<mail (AT) rm (DOT) -f.invalid> writes

After waking from a slight nap after 30 hours of straight work, my judgement
may be off. Is this any good? What red flags catch the eye. Any input would
be appreciated.
http://www.page-zone.com/customer/



A few obvious ones:

(a) Use of 'px' to define the font size means that in IE I can't
increase the size to something readable. If I override your font size
choice using the 'acessibility option' in IE, the design falls apart.

(b) Use of justified-right text in narrow boxes doesn't look good once
the font size in increased -- too much white space.

(c) A lot of your images have no alternative text specified; some of
these are headings. So, when image-loading is turned off, so are the
headings.

regards.
--
Jake
(jake (AT) gododdin (DOT) demon.co.uk .... just a spam trap.)

Jim wrote:

After waking from a slight nap after 30 hours of straight work, my judgement
may be off. Is this any good? What red flags catch the eye. Any input would
be appreciated.
http://www.page-zone.com/customer/

The colors are good and it visually looks good at a glance.
But there are a lot of problems.

The page fails validation. It is hard for us to be helpful
if you do not at least validate your pages before posting
them here for review.

You CSS does not validate. Please check validations before posting.

Your page uses deprecated markup. Perhaps your source of
information
is old. Try changing to more modern markup.
The most common sympton of deprecated markup is
placing instructions about where or how a thing is displayed in
the (X)HTML markup instead of CSS.
Example:
<table width="176" height="109" border="0" cellspacing="0"
cellpadding="0"
background="templates/coolblue/images/smallplanbox1.gif"
align="center">
....and this:
<tr><td style="padding-left:20;padding-right:13;padding-top:0">
<font face="verdana, Helvetica, san-serif" size="2">
Account Menu</font><br>

Tables are misused on the page. Tables are
only for true tabular data -- think about TV listings,
bank statements, matrix algebra, and spread sheet data.
That kind of stuff. Avoid use tables simply as aids to display.
This foils semantic markup. Use CSS and semantic markup
to control position and display of non-tabular data.

Your page uses non-semantic markup. There is a special
tag for almost anything you'll need, but you are ignoring
these tags.
Typical examples:
1) Lists of links are really lists, not cells in tables. If
some information is a list, it should be marked up
as a list (<ul> or <ol>), not as a table.
You repeatedly have to call your bullet image.
If you used a list, it could made part of the list with CSS.
2) If a string is a heading, it should be marked up as <h1>,
<h2>, not as an image.

Many things that Javascript was formerly
used for are now taken over by CSS, which does the same things
quicker and more smoothly. For instance, things like
JavaScript mouseovers have now been largely replaced by the
CSS hover directive. It is used on your page to show and hide
objects. Nowdays this is normally done with CSS.

Horizontal scrollbars appear in your page.
Many visitors find these to be
an aggravation. People are used to scrolling down,
but having to scroll to the side makes a page hard to read and
use. You are setting widths in pixels instead of percentages.
Let the page adjust itself by using percentage width in your CSS.
--
mbstevens
http://www.mbstevens.com/cgi/mkatt.p...ique_Generator
(New v 1.5)

"Jim" <mail@ rm -f THISpage-zone.com> wrote

After waking from a slight nap after 30 hours of straight work, my
judgement may be off. Is this any good? What red flags catch the eye. Any
input would be appreciated.
http://www.page-zone.com/customer/

Thanks for all of the input. The page is limited to 780 pixels wide so I'm
not sure how right scrolling would be needed. I did increase the font size
and some of the colors. And yes it does kind of fall apart with font size
increased any larger than it is. But it seems to render OK in IE and Firefox
with all of the code mistakes that have been pointed out. Thanks for the
in-depth critiques!

Jim wrote:

After waking from a slight nap after 30 hours of straight work, my judgement
may be off. Is this any good? What red flags catch the eye. Any input would
be appreciated.
http://www.page-zone.com/customer/

The basic design looks good. The content is well presented.

Your implementation, however, is rather sad.

The color scheme seems a bit random. There is the dark blue of the
logo, main menu, borders, and table headers on subsequent pages. Then the
mismatching light blue, orange, and some brown thrown in for fun. Some
headings are blue, some are orange.

Unit abbreviations are case sensitive. 1 mb (milli bit, or milli bar)
is not the same as 1 MB (mega byte). See <http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/>.

The layout is fragile. When I enlarge the text scaling so I can read
it, text wrapping turns the layout into a mess.

The main page has a vast number of validation errors. Some are
egregious like having body code in the header, or leaving out the required
unit for padding/margin/other values. Many of the errors them are minor.
But since your are using HTML 4.01 Transitional, there is no excuse.
There a lot of serious CSS validation errors.

Why all of the inline Javascript? That stuff is much better placed in
external files. Especially since it is duplicated in every page.
Browser sniffing is a bad plan.
The body text is forced smaller (11px) than what I find comfortable
(16px). And because it is in px, IE cannot resize it. Use % or em.
CSS offers a dashed border which follows text layout as it changes. Why
use a background image?
Inconsistent link presentation. Finding links became an easter egg hunt.
People expect links to be underlined. Unless you have profound reason
for disallowing that, do not change it. Menus are an exception.
<Hx>, the heading element, is not used for any of the headings.

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