CardinalCountryTV.com

Hi again Luke,

That's a great perspective to have on your first web sites! So many try to do everything at once and just end up getting confused and making jumbled looking sites.

I like the striped background and colour scheme you have here. It sets a nice look a nd feel for the site right away. The logo is a little on the big side. It could be a little smaller and off to the side a bit. THat would push the rest of the content further up onto the screen. It's good to have as much content as possible in the top section. This area is called the "fold" - that's the part of the screen that people can see before they have to scroll. Right now there's not a lot of content so it's not a huge problem. When there is more on the page the scrolling issue will be more of a concern.

Ooh! That's a neat video on the front page. That's sort of a risky thing to do because sometimes it doesn't work in certain browsers and things like that. As long as it's not a big problem for download speeds then that's a good idea. I'm doubly impressed because normally these things don't work in Opera and yours does!!

I'm finding the site to be easy to navigate and generally pleasing. The borders around the content and navigation areas should really be removed. I think it would look better without them. Also add some more padding to the navigation and the copyright section.

Great job overall! Now it's time to work on the content

Hello,
BTW Congrats on having your own show. I like the site it is very clean the only thing I would change is the all the little logos on the right. I would just make the section red. with the white writing. It is to busy with the little logos.

I think the site is very good, are you limitted as to the colours to use as you want to stay to the cardinal colours?

I own a site which I am having problems with as I wanted to optomise my pages title tags and have found out as the site was done with smarty templates the site can only have a generic title tag throughout, don't know if anyone knows a way round this ?
My site is written in PHP linked to a SQL database using oscommerce as the shopping cart.
Any reviews or criticism would be welcome.
Thankyou
Martin
Jokingaround Fancy Dress

Thank you very much, Megan, altemplates, and Mrtoejam for your feedback. Megan, I made those changes you suggested, and I think they made an improvement. Altemplates -- after reading your comment and looking at the site again, I think you might be right. The repeating "CC" does look a little cluttered there. I think I might either try to space them out, or I'll just eliminate them completely.

Thanks again, everybody. I really do appreciate the feedback, and I'm always open to any other suggestions.

The size of your homepage is 21,959,160 bits

A 56k (56,000 bits/second) modem = over 6 minutes to load your homepage
ISDN 128k = over 2 minutes
DSL 786k = about 30 seconds
Cable 1500k = about 15 seconds

It's your choice on what you do but you might consider moving your video off your homepage. Alternatively, if you want to keep the video on the homepage you could use an iframe with an image in place of the video that a person could click to start the video. You could accomplish something similiar using javascript or flash.

Beside the size, your website looks really great.

I'm a dialup user and for me if I stop the video (which loads first) the load time is just barable.
IMO the banner shouldn't be flash (can't see it as don't have the player) but is all added to load time.
I notice on the 'this week' page there is no controls for the media player, can't turn it on, off, replay etc

The CC background in my opinion is to bright, needs to be muted a bit more and doesn't need to be on the (right) side.
The red text is confusing, it looks like links.
a quick peek at your source code shows you have a set of head tags () in the middle of your page, you should remove them.

The movie is still buffering while I write this review, is at 24% at 32 kbps, ok is from between 5 and 32 kbps , currently at 8 and is just over 1/3 loaded.
You might want to add some protection to that movie clip to avoid hotlinking which would suck up your bandwidth, even on two pages it could suck up a lot

i agree with BUSY, i just recently came off dial-Up and foundd it annoying when videos/music played automatically. not only does it slow down the loading but it also interfered with the music i usally have playing already in wmp

Thanks for the reviews, guys.

twist: Do you happen to know how to have a movie load with a JavaScript onClick event? I like that idea, but offhand I'm not sure how to implement it.

Busy and filip2mp -- thanks for the comments. It helps a lot to have different sets of eyes take a look at this. Already, you guys have pointed out things that I overlooked. I appreciate it!

Thanks a lot, twist. I think I'll be able to figure this out.

Hello there! I absolutely love your website! It's a great idea to advertise a television show that is only available in certain parts of the world to the internet. That will definitely get people in other parts of the country interested and you will probably even get more locals to check out the show. Now, the design...

I love the stripes and the color scheme definitely works. However, I'm not sure if the blue-on-red and white scheme works. It's hurting my eyes. Also, I would keep the content normal (not bold, italics, or underlined) unless there is a certain statement or word you would like to have great emphasis. Otherwise, those parts that need emphasis are overlooked more often.

Also, for a website like this, I would take any effects off of the images. While the one you are using isn't too distracting or anything, it reminds me of all those blogs and MySpace things you see where the images change when you roll over them. For a personal site or something, it's not so bad, but for a business-like website like this, keep it simple.

Lastly, I would keep all videos from automatically starting. Also, you might inform your audience when videos have audio because on the video on the front page, I wasn't aware it had sound and ended up turning my speakers on half-way through it out of sheer curiosity.

Good luck with your new television show and website!

-Andrew, Graphic X Web Design