Please critique Intensive Care Site

Hi,

I have been lurking here for a while building up the courage for a
web site critique:-) And so could I ask for any comments on:

http://www.nepeanicu.org

I am not a web designer by trade or training, in fact I am a
Registered Nurse who is given a day here and there from the floor of a
very busy Intensive Care Unit to put this site together. I have many
more skills with multi-trauma than with HTML!

The basic site has been assembled from a free template which I credit
at the base of the page. I am very keen to hear suggestions of how I
can further modify the template. I am working through the site slowly
to ensure w3c compliance which should be possible in all sections
except those that use macromedia coursebuilder. (Or can this be done
as well??)

The password area (Staff Only) is small and does not need review.

Thanks for all comments!!!

Andrew Strong.

On Thu, 16 Mar 2006 08:12:44 +0100, <sorry.no.email (AT) spamsux (DOT) com> wrote:

I have been lurking here for a while

That can't have been for very long.

building up the courage for a
web site critique:-)

Should have been learning from what you've read in this group instead.

And so could I ask for any comments on:

http://www.nepeanicu.org

- Transitional doctype, where for new documents Strict is appropriate.
- Quirksmode, that makes rendering in various browsers trickky.
- Tables abused for layout, where you should be using CSS.
- Fixed width design, where liquid is very well possible.
- No background color defined, so my bright pink default shows.
- Using many inline style through attributes/values, where you should use
CSS in an external stylesheet.
- Silly 'Valid somthing' buttons that shout: I'm a proud beginner!
- Markup makes no sense to me. What you marked up as a list, is actually a
couple of paragraphs with headings, not a list at all. And what is a list,
the menu items, you abuse <br> to create the list look. Why not use the
appropriate elements to markup your content?

The basic site has been assembled from a free template which I credit
at the base of the page. I am very keen to hear suggestions of how I
can further modify the template. I am working through the site slowly
to ensure w3c compliance which should be possible in all sections
except those that use macromedia coursebuilder.

I didn't care to look any further. You talk about a template, W3C
compliance and Macromedia Coursebuilder.
- The template is bad. Better start fresh.
- W3C compliance is one thing. Accessibility and Usability is more
important. Read up on what it is and how you can achieve it.
- Have no idea what Macromedia Coursebuilder is, but don't blame your
tools for your product. If you don't like what it spits out, find another
tool.


--
______PretLetters:

weblog | http://www.pretletters.net/weblog/weblog.html |
webontwerp | http://www.pretletters.net/html/webontwerp.html |
zweefvliegen | http://www.pretletters.net/html/vliegen.html |

For someone without a design background, much less coding experience,
I'd say this is infinitely satisfatory for a freshman effort: It looks
nice; the color scheme is non-offensive; the navigation is easy to
identify and consistantly positioned; the pages load quickly.

I would suggest different colors for already visited links, to let me
know which pages I've seen already. I would also worry about the email
addresses on your contact page getting harvested by spammers.

As the name of the group implies, however, this is html.critique. And
as mentioned, the underlying code could be improved quite a bit. So if
you're keen, in between saving people's lives and stuff, you could read
up on xhtml and css. That should give you a much better idea of what
your could should look like.

On Thu, 16 Mar 2006 07:12:44 -0000, <sorry.no.email (AT) spamsux (DOT) com> wrote:

Hi,

I have been lurking here for a while building up the courage for a
web site critique:-) And so could I ask for any comments on:

http://www.nepeanicu.org

I am not a web designer by trade or training, in fact I am a
Registered Nurse who is given a day here and there from the floor of a
very busy Intensive Care Unit to put this site together. I have many
more skills with multi-trauma than with HTML!

The basic site has been assembled from a free template which I credit
at the base of the page. I am very keen to hear suggestions of how I
can further modify the template. I am working through the site slowly
to ensure w3c compliance which should be possible in all sections
except those that use macromedia coursebuilder. (Or can this be done
as well??)

Very difficult to critique without knowing how much is raw template and
how much is your own input. Still, the look in my graphical browser is
clean and useable.

Try and get some semantics into your mark-up. For example, on the home
page you have:
<p><span class="bigheading">Welcome to the Nepean ICU Web Site</span></p>

Whereas this would be more semantic and help people with non-graphical
browsers:
<h1 class="bigheading">Welcome to the Nepean ICU Web Site</h1>
It would also improve your search engine optimisation, among other
benefits, without changing the look in a graphical browser. Do the same by
marking, class="smallheading", elements as <h2>.

Good luck, hope your bosses are happy and appreciate the extra work you
are doing for your unit.

--
Fig

<sorry.no.email (AT) spamsux (DOT) com> wrote

Hi,

I have been lurking here for a while building up the courage for a
web site critique:-) And so could I ask for any comments on:

http://www.nepeanicu.org

I am not a web designer by trade or training, in fact I am a
Registered Nurse who is given a day here and there from the floor of a
very busy Intensive Care Unit to put this site together. I have many
more skills with multi-trauma than with HTML!

The basic site has been assembled from a free template which I credit
at the base of the page. I am very keen to hear suggestions of how I
can further modify the template. I am working through the site slowly
to ensure w3c compliance which should be possible in all sections
except those that use macromedia coursebuilder. (Or can this be done
as well??)

The password area (Staff Only) is small and does not need review.

Thanks for all comments!!!

Andrew Strong.

Nice site.