1st Attempt at a site PLS review

Welcome to Webmaster-Forums, brightideas4u. One thing that we like for people who want their site reviewed is that they help us out by reviewing 3 other sites here.

Anyway, as far as the review goes, I will try to be kind but quite frankly your site needs some help.

• You used Publisher 2000 to create the site. Publisher is a fine home publishing program but as far as webpages go it is pretty lame. It's big brother, Frontpage, is a little better but not much better. There are plenty of other programs out there that will help you create a website. There is a bunch of your code that is not standard HTML but propietary things that will only work on certain versions of browsers.
• Things that are annoying on websites are music, ad banners, moving gif's, counters, etc. Your site had some quite annoying moving thingies that really just weren't necessary. The images that are being used look like they were drawn by a 4-yr old. They just drag down the look of the site. I counted 5 different objects moving on your homepage but serving no purpose but to annoy.
• You need a logo and a navbar. A logo to give your site some identity and a navbar to improve peoples navigation on your site. The logo and the navbar should be relatively the same on all pages. Your little round thingy that is in the middle of the screen want do. For one it is too big, it is not known whether the links are clickable and it is not on every page. The rainbow navbuttons on other pages are also too big and well ... ugly.
• Lose the best viewed thing at the top. It is something that is very dated.
• Color scheme & layout- I would advise coming up with a color scheme of some type and applying it to all pages on your site. The layout could be vastly improved by removing some of the graphics.

Now the comments that you get here may not be extremely pleasing but keep in mind that our main goal is not to insult you. Our main goal is to help you build a better website. Some sites will tell you 'Yeah, it looks great'. We prefer to tell the truth. Your site is decent for a first attempt that was created with something that is not really an HTML editor. But it could be made vastly better.

Hello and welcome to TWF. We'd really appreciate it if you could give us your thoughts on some of the other sites here. I personally have found that reveiwing other sites has really helped my own design skills.

This site seems to be not working properly in my browser (mozilla 0.9.5). Weird, there are several things that aren't working properly here. The big colorful circle in the center isn't showing up and neither is the clock thing, the bright box in the bottom left corner with your personal messages in it.

In NS 4.0 it is much worse. The layers aren't working at all and all I'm seeing is a long line of page elements down the left side. Is this the same in later versions of 4.x? 4.08 is the only one you can download as a standalone and I didn't want to bother with the whole suite. Busy?

What I suggest you do is get a decent HTML editor or better yet, learn the code yourself. Use a tabled layout instead of layers.

As for the layout, I think you really need to organize things better here and get rid of the junk. ONe thing that many sites do is use coloured table backgrounds to visually separate different types of content. Speaking of colours, you should also get a colour scheme. Usually a maximum of three or four colours works well. That the big rainbow circle in the center needs to go. It's impossible to read those options that are upside-down. Now that I've clicked on those options I'm seeing those rainbow buttons. I'm sorry, but those are just really ugly. I had to say it. You might just want to go with plain text for now until you really learn to make your own graphics.

Another thing you should do is make every page on your site look the same. What most people do is create a template and use that for every page. You can see, for example, that here at TWF every page has the same logo header with navigation and ad banner.

I have to say that this is probably better than my first site was The best thing is that you do have a lot of really good content on here.

I new it needed help thats why I asked. Thanks for the advice Mark. I'll Give it a rebuild and ask again.
Cheers

Not much to add really to what's already been said. Definitely use something other than Publisher or Front Page to build the site!

Looking at other sites will help you no end as you'll see what other's are doing and give you heaps of ideas.

At first I thought it was a job site, so was disappointed when all I found were links

Without doing a search, I'm not sure what you have in OZ, but here in NZ we have a few big job sites where as you can submit your CV and get replies or look/search through the listings (or offer jobs).
There are a lot of sites that just offer listings of sites, a good search engine for results like this is webferret.
You dont have a search option so would have to spend unwanted time searching for the right listings, I wouldnt stay long, I'd shoot over to webferret, or google for listings.

I persinally think this kinda site would be better suited set in a database with search options, place, type of job, casual, freelance, temp etc. also on your own domain, not your isp's host

best viewed with (its actually best view with IE 5 and up, doesnt work on netscape 4.7)
the big clock at the top is annoying and clocks are not needed
the multi colord circle, ohs its actually a image map.
925 ? is that a counter
Email: @hotmail.com ? add your address.
8:34pm ? no idea
site updated ... we dont really need to know the time you updated it.
the links at the bottom should be at the top or side

and everything everyone else said

Looking at your code I counted at least 7 diferent fonts, never use comic sans, keep it all verdana or similar and one size as well

I've taken your advice and removed the garbage, settled for a simple colour scheme, removed the crappy third party animated graphics and sort of dabbled in the creation of my own. To tell the truth I don't know what I was thinking with my first attempt. I think this may be an improvement on my first attempt but I need some feedback. Could someone review my new site please. Oh and pls ignore the counter and stat buttons at the bottom, there only there to give me some initial feedback, in time I will remove them when I know how the site is going.
In anticipation of your response I Thank You.

http://users.bigpond.com/col.ric

After opening your page and looking at it for a minutes wondering what to critique and where everything was I saw that you could actually click on the "Menu Toggle" and make a menu appear. That just goes to show that the average person isn't going to hang around to read instructions on how to "operate" your page. Then again I may be below average.

I didn't see the instructions that you have near to bottom (Click the "Menu Toggle" to Start) until after I had reloaded to page to see exactly what that was you had written under the menu. You have to remember the "scan factor" when building web pages.

I think that you should have the menu show at all times and maybe use the text that you have in the left column for an introduction near the top or in the main body part. I am not too crazy about how you have the links appear on mouseover. It is a neat effect but maybe not for the whole site. If you do choose to leave it as it change your gray text to white. It will show up much better. Not crazy about the page interface either.(guess that is what you would call it). I think it would all look much better if you used a white background and seperated things up into different pages instead of having it all on one page.

Just my opinion. Don't ya just hate it when someone disses your master piece??

Well, this is my first site critique...so please...if i say something that might sound mean dont take it the wrong way. I don't have a lot of room to talk because I myself am only 16 and just started making websites last year. But i think it is all too plain. I use basic tables in my pages but i try to use a "wierd" color scheme to get people's attention. I try not to copy what i see other people do but I try to turn it into something my own. Now I like the idea of your site. I believe it is something that could eventually turn out to be awesome. nothing I can really say that wasn't said above already. Just keep at it, learn code, get a better editor....thats about it other than visit lots of other sites and get ideas off them.

Later

http://www.lwgaming.com

Well, it's a mess in NS4.6, spread out over 23 (yes, 23!) vertical screens!

In IE4.0 (Mac) I *think* it displays more like you intended. But there is considerable horizontal scroll at 800x600. It almost looks like you intended a third column and for it to be viewed wtih 1024x768 or higher?

I'm with DM, the "menu toggle" thing was confusing to me. Why not just have the menu there already and the "intro" text in the blank box to the right? That would seem simpler and more logical to me. (Haha! After writing that I just noticed that DM said the exact same thing.)

When I toggle the menu on, the mouseovers have several seconds of delay. You've got a mouseover variation and an on-click variation. I think you just have too many things going on and that's causing the delay. Granted, I'm on a 33.6. The on-click purple clashes with the blue, to me. I'd eliminate the on-clicks altogether.

The text that displays over to the right when you mouseover... you've got serif, you've got sans serif, you've got a multitude of sizes. Stick to sans serif, same size, and make your text flush left instead of all centered. It will look more professional that way.

The link buttons are very wide, taking up about 1/3 of the horizontal space. I'd use a smaller, or at least narrower font for the buttons and cut the width on them.

When I click on a link, like "careers", it brings up a list on the right that appears to extend below the box, but I can't scroll in it. Also, I think a description of the site and what it has to offer would be really helpful. gtaltd.com.au doesn't let me know where I'm going or what I'm going to get if I click it.

I'm not crazy about black backgrounds. This reminds me of a gaming site for some reason.

These two items serve absolutely no functional purpose for being there. I'd eliminate them.

1) LogoAnimation10ANI.GIF - "Is this flashing annoying you ? Click Once to Stop it. Double Click to Start it."

2) IconOn-14.GIF

Col.ric - What is it? I realize it's your account name at bigpond, but is it relevant to "Australian Job & Career Search Hub"? If you are serious about this site you might want to consider getting a domain name.

Honestly, it looks like you've overcomplicated things and are using things "just because you can". Save the "whiz-bang" factor for a future undertaking and concentrate on making your content the focus of the site and making it easily accessible.

Despite all I've said above, I *do* think it's an improvement over your first iteration. Keep fine-tuning it. Good luck to ya!