New Meta Search Engine - Please Review

Your site looks great! The color scheme is nice and you have a cool logo. The only problem I find with your site is that your text is too big.

Shrink them down.

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Goodbookmarks.com - If you understand the name, you'll understand the site.

good job, it looks good, loads fast, but jack is right, if you make the text smaller, visitors wont have to scroll soo much for the news etc

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Daniel, you might want to check your code on the first page. Nothing beyond "Navigation > Spot Way" displays in NS.

I didn't check the code, but I'd bet there's a missing /td, /tr, or /table tag somewhere.

What I can see looks good though.

Oh, yeah- you might want to check this tip out. It tells you how to get rid of the background color around your radio buttons.

Bimjo

Daniel,

I think it all looks pretty good. I might add one more color. It's too blue for me persoanlly. I agree with everyone else about the font size too. I might also add that you change fonts about half-way down the page. On some of your secondary pages, the CSS that changes the mouseovers to bold forces the line to shift. Definetly fix that. Other than that, it really looks good.

John

Thanks alot for all your responses. I have gotten it to work in netscape now, so could you netscape users please try again now and see what you think.

I will be attampting to make it so it only changes the color when you go over a hyperlink. And I will be fixing the search form button backgrounds for netscape and will try make all the fonts arial.

What do you guys all mean by the fonts are to big?
Can you please tell me what you have your text size set to under view/text size. Because 90% of the fonts are arial and size 2. Very few are size 3, and I find that size 1 looks very small. I have my view/text size set to very small. What is the default for that?

Thanks again for all the comments so far. Please keep helping me to improve it, these are much needed advice, I really appreciate it.

Daniel,

Got my text size set to medium in IE, which I would assume about 90% of other internet users do too. Got to go with the majority of internet users on things like that, I think.

John

i got it set on medium also!

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Join The Rest Of The Webmasters On The Net!!
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I had a look in medium. Did you mean like how it made the news have 2.5 lines with the text in the middle.
I made the date and time smaller and now it looks as though it should be fine.
Could you please all see if the text if now fine for your viewing size.

Thanks and please keep the comments comming.

1) Why is it called Spotway? If I visited the site I would have no clue what it is about, since the name doesn't help. You might want to add a line of text that explains it.

2) Change the text logo to a graphic logo.

3) Center the banners.

That's all I can really see...

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My name is Nitsuj. I bet you're thinking WTF...

Justin, in answer to 1)
Spot Way, as in Spot the Way. Even if you don't understand that, yahoo really dont mean anything, neither does amazon, or microsoft or anything. Also if you get something like thebestsearchengine, since thats all thats avaiable, its really long and hard to remember. Plus once people get to it, I do believe they will see what it is.

2) Change the text logo to a graphic logo.
I decided not to do this, as it would increase the size of the page and will make the page slower.

3) Center the banners.
This I will look into, the bottom banner is allready centered. Do you really think it would look better having the above the fold one centered?

Thanks again for the comments so far, please keep them comming.

The site only takes a few seconds on my 56k modem to load, so it wouldn't hurt to add a graphic logo that would only take 1 or 2 extra seconds to load. It would look much better anyway...

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My name is Nitsuj. I bet you're thinking WTF...

Daniel,

I agree with Justin, add a graphic logo. The improvement vs. download time, to me, would be worth it. Also, do something other than the w w w . s p o t w a y . c o m in the upper righthand corner to get back home. How about a link that says HOME? And change that particular roll over to some thing other than red. The red sure looks ugly against that deep blue.

Hi,

Very nice "Meta" search engines and the layout looks very professional.

By the way, may I know which Anaconda software are you using. A free one or the script for Amazon ?

[This message has been edited by NSS (edited 08 May 2000).]

[This message has been edited by NSS (edited 08 May 2000).]

Ok, I'm on my way to the site now.

-It is taking a while to load on 56K. It could be that I am downloading on Napster though.

-Colors look very nice. Blue is overused on the Internet though.

-The text all the way on the left is to close to that darker shade of blue. It looks strange.

-The link on the top to the main page looks very bad. Put it on the left menu thing not all the way at the top.

-I love the mouseovers. Make those changes and it will look great.

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~Parker Trasborg~
TWF Moderator and Dumby of the 21st Century

I disagree about the mouseovers - red on light and medium blue is rather hard to read.

I also agree that there's a little bit too much blue. Maybe you should give the main content area a white background, or incorporate some of the yellow and green in your logo. As I've said before, pale, monochromatic colour schemes can be difficult when you've got ads - the bright, colourful ads really stand out against your shades of blue. I guess it could help if you're counting on click throughs to earn money, but it does detract from the content

Actually, I would get rid of the two lighter blue's and incorporate white, yellow, and green (from the logo) instead. It would probably require quite a lot of change to the design though...

Also, narrow your main table just a little bit to show more of the background.

On the sub-pages, move your main content away from the edge of the main table. Also do something about that grey background. Hmmm... I really think that you should set this up more like Yahoo! does, unless you put the grey part on the right.

Thank-you very much for all the comments thus far.
I have changed a few things around and hope you can add comments on those.
1) I removed the www.spotway.com at the top.
2) I changed SPOTWAY at the top into a graphic SPOTWAY.COM
3) I changed the colors around slightly on all pages, and did a few major changes on the Search and Directory pages.

Please have another look around and find what you can comment on.

Thanks.

The logo looks better as a graphic, but the font doesn't go with the rest of the site. Try a different one. Also, you might want to add a slogan or something so it fills up the whole top part.

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My name is Nitsuj. I bet you're thinking WTF...

Hello Again,

I have done a complete work over of both the colors and the design, could you all please go and re-review my website.

Thanks

Wel, I liked the layout, colors, images. But it took a litle while to load on the bottom part of the page (and i'm on a cable modem).

So you may want to check that out.

1) The site scrolls 1 pixel for me on 800x600 resolution. I think the top bar may be a little too wide.

2) The logo needs some work. It's too boring, and the font looks like it was hand made. For a portal site it needs to be really eye catching, so people remember the name and come back.

3) I usually like greys, but definitely not for this portal site. They need to keep the user there, so the colors have to be nice and cheerful. Overall you need more colors.

I don't like the new version at all.

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Critiquing over 1000 sites on the Internet today...

I don't seem to be able to get it right for all of you people.
Could you all please list what you think are the best designed, laid out and colored sites on the internet?

Thanks
Daniel

I like the design www.iwon.com uses is really good. You might check out www.coolhomepages.com for some more examples.

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Critiquing over 1000 sites on the Internet today...

CALANDER on the bottom is misspelled
(calendar)

what host are you using?

--it really is too gray.

--1 pixel too big on 800x600

--calender spelled wrong