REVIEW REQUEST: Lifeline Aquariums
Hi I have been tweaking my site for faster download times.
Could some of you let me know how fast the site opens and performs? Any help greatly appreciated.
http://www.lifelineaquarium.com
Thanks.
Mike Caskanette.
LifeLine Aquarium Systems.
http://www.lifelineaquarium.com
The Webmistress posted this at 09:33 — 3rd September 2003.
She has: 5,586 posts
Joined: Feb 2001
Loaded pretty fast for me.
I'm not keen on the darkness of the page and the neon colours make it look tacky IMO, I really had no inclination to look any further as it was so hard on the eyes! I also didn't like the navigation system as I think a link should be one or two words not a paragraph and I hate it when the navigation spawns boxes that cover up the rest of the page - just my personal tastes though.
I also find the fancy font for the graphic text a little hard to read and the white kind of bleeds into the blue making it harder to read. I like the font and graphic for the middle part of the header, bold & colourful but I don't think it goes with the other fonts.
You have a lot of content and a lot of the things I have pointed out are personal taste things so good luck with the site
Julia - if life was meant to be easy Michael Angelo would have painted the floor....
Megan posted this at 13:47 — 3rd September 2003.
She has: 11,421 posts
Joined: Jun 1999
Menu Loading .....
I agree about the darkness of the site, although it is somewhat appropriate in this case. Maybe you could liven it up with some other aquariam colours like other shades of blue or green. I also find the site to be very hard on the eyes, especially with the small fonts you've used everywhere. It's difficult to read. I'm sure you could do some really neat things with your header area too.
One thing you really need to work on is the boxy layout. This page just looks like a bunch of boxes that have no relationship to each other. I also think that you're trying to put too much on the front page. Those lower sections with the video spotlight and such, with the updater timeout and next/last forward buttons are really confusing. Especially since those buttons don't seem to link to anything!
Menu Loading ..... looks like you're using a script that isn't cross-browser compatible.
Your code is a mess, you know that? You might want to find yourself a better HTML editor, and learn something about the code while you're at it. If you know what your editor is trying to do it'll give you a lot more control over your layout.
Overall I think you need to go back to basics. Get rid of the fancy scripting stuff and start fresh. Work on doing a layout without boxes (or at least not visible boxes, or so many of them). There's too much going on here and it's detracting from the real focus of the site. If you're trying to sell a product here, focus on that - you can always create another site for all the extra screen savers and reef articles etc.
Megan
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fiesty_01 posted this at 04:18 — 8th September 2003.
He has: 173 posts
Joined: Nov 2002
Took around 45 seconds to completely load for me, but my system is only 28.8k. I figure it'd be less than half (or even 1/3 of) that time for faster systems. Hey, I look at it like this: it gives me plenty of time to go grab a snack if I want one.
There's 2 additional things I noticed. I like most of the colors on the site, but those 2 bright yellow links at the top are very "loud" IMO, but maybe that's how they're supposed to be. Also, I didn't understand the purpose of the "Menu Loading" message, with what I perceived as the menu already loaded underneath this message.
Nice overall, and the colors (except for the bright yellow) seemed fairly appropriate to me . . . the green-blue could possibly be a shade brighter (or a bit closer to blue), though.
Renegade posted this at 06:15 — 8th September 2003.
He has: 3,022 posts
Joined: Oct 2002
Your site is quote slow and I'm on 33.6k which is not quite so different from a 56k (reason why I haven't switched). Anyway...
Your site looks very busy, you have too much happening at one time and one may suffer from a visual overload. Leading me to ask.
What are you trying to sell? Lighting systems? Some sort of battery controller? Screensavers? Webmaster tools? Reef resources? All of the above? What?
You are using a lot of images as heading, to speed up the loading of the site you might want to replace those with text headings.
Looking at your code, it looks quite messy, try cleaning up your code too.
Personally, I think your site has quite a long way to go before it looks even remotely finished or professional but you are however on the right track by asking for help
viekoslav posted this at 22:45 — 9th September 2003.
They have: 10 posts
Joined: Sep 2003
I am getting an "Index of" page when I access your site.
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