Critique my site before it goes up..

They have: 11 posts

Joined: Aug 2001

http://business.unbsj.ca/sbicworking

I asked for a critique before when it was about half done and didn't get a lot of good feedback.. here's my final effort..
I realize there are some broken links and the menu bar doesn't link, but they will once it's actually up.. Just looking for feedback on the look of the home page..

old site is smallbizinfocentre.com

The Webmistress's picture

She has: 5,586 posts

Joined: Feb 2001

First thing is it loaded very fast for me on adsl connection and looks good at both 800*600 and high resolutions as well. A couple of the images didn't load at all though - The ones by Leverage Your Backend with Wireless, The Culinary Adventure Company, Job Opening & IT Heroes.

I like the general layout but wouldn't bother with the 'best viewed....' bit as by the time someone gets down that far they aren't going to change their browser settings anyway.

Only other thing is I would have the blue down the right hand side the same blue that's in the very top logo part. The last but one cell in this right hand table (that has nothing in it) looks odd as the border is thinner than the others. Put a transparent gif in as a spacer to keep them all the same.

Julia - if life was meant to be easy Michael Angelo would have painted the floor....

Megan's picture

She has: 11,421 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

Looks great! The only thing I have to say is that the photos across the top there look really bad. Those should definitely be replaced.

In NS 6.1 the background for the navbar isn't showing up.

disaster-master's picture

She has: 2,154 posts

Joined: May 2001

Looks good on IE 5.0. I did notice a few things.

The left side of the nav bar is extending beyond your main table. I copied your code and headed off to Dreamweaver to see what the problem was. I did the "clean up HTML" command and it removed one empty tag and combined 8 font tags. There are */body* and */html* tags just below your dhtml menu code.

There are 3 empty close paragraph tags */p*.....one just after the News Archive, one in the stock market box just under the S&P500 1202.960 -2.86 and another -randomjoke.com in the joke of the day section.

There is an opening font command near the bottom of the page in the third table from the bottom but no closing font tag.

You have something going on with your tables. I haven't quiet figured out what it is. I am seeing two table tag errors for the first two tables that you have. And I think maybe a set of extra /td, /tr and /table at the bottom. These are the problems that Dreamweaver is showing. They may or may not cause you problems with how the site is rendering but I would want to fix these just in case.

The montage of photos at the top look stretched out width wise and I think they need a little contrast added. The stretched look may be caused by % widths that you are using...not sure.

Over all I like the site. It looks clean and organized. I looked at the old site and actually I like the blue and dark red colors that were used there but the new site looks great too.

Good job.
DM

Busy's picture

He has: 6,151 posts

Joined: May 2001

ummmm, in Netscape 4.7 all i get is:

Quote:
About SBIC / Services / Products / Tools / Training / Community / Events / News / My SBIC
Copyright © 2000 The Electronic Commerce Center
Webmaster -Craig Wedge
Best Viewed at 800x600 and higher
with IE4+ or NS4+

thats the whole page, white background with very small dark blue text up top center? took a few minutes to load just that, refreshed, get the same thing.

opended it in IE 5.0, took ages to load, then displayed nice except none of the icons loaded, OK, something flashed me, have no idea what it was, looked like it came from the right side of the page maybe?

I looked at your source code in Netscape, (looked to see if the page was there) and noticed you have a </body></html> tag half way down your page (after the menu code), as well as at the bottom of the page

maybe run your site through a validator.

Keegan's picture

They have: 300 posts

Joined: Aug 2001

say that it was a very hard load. I do not know if it is your host or not, let me check.

Quote:
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms resources.mshome.net [192.168.0.1]
2 155 ms 131 ms 136 ms max5.sktn01.pbi.net [63.200.104.134]
3 147 ms 139 ms 135 ms dist1-vlan10.sktn01.pbi.net [63.200.104.154]
4 132 ms 136 ms 142 ms edge1-fa4-0-0.sktn01.pbi.net [63.200.104.97]
5 120 ms 120 ms 133 ms 208.30.216.37
6 123 ms 127 ms 140 ms sl-bb20-stk-8-2.sprintlink.net [144.232.9.77]
7 176 ms 187 ms 189 ms sl-bb20-pen-10-1.sprintlink.net [144.232.18.45]

8 185 ms 180 ms 189 ms sl-bb20-nyc-13-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.18.38]

9 178 ms 188 ms 189 ms sl-gw9-nyc-8-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.7.94]
10 194 ms 186 ms 179 ms sl-Nexxia-2-0-0.sprintlink.net [160.81.43.14]
11 200 ms 178 ms 190 ms Ncore2-newyork83-pos9-0.in.bellnexxia.net [206.1
08.103.189]
12 193 ms 212 ms 189 ms core3-montreal02-pos6-3.in.bellnexxia.net [206.1
08.103.213]
13 204 ms 207 ms 193 ms dis12-montreal02-pos10-0.in.bellnexxia.net [206.
108.99.170]
14 211 ms 207 ms 208 ms alnb-cr02-pos2-0.aliant.ca [206.108.111.174]
15 201 ms 205 ms 210 ms alnb-dr02-g1-0.aliant.ca [142.166.181.14]
16 197 ms 207 ms 222 ms alnb-ar03-f1-0-0.aliant.ca [198.164.200.213]
17 209 ms 215 ms 212 ms unb100.nbnet.nb.ca [207.179.172.101]
18 218 ms 227 ms 209 ms sj1.ecn.unb.ca [198.164.163.10]
19 213 ms 206 ms 210 ms business.unbsj.ca [138.119.1.234]

Looks like something in your page is slowing down as the tracert looks good.

I think it is a good looking page, I agree about the people image, poor quality over here in California (But You know us!, hehehe) Good work all in all, I like the idea and the layout.

K

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