Review Request: School-Library.net

Hey, I just realized that I haven't reviewed this yet. I haven't read all the comments in this thread, so forgive me if I'm repeating anything. I understand the look and feel that you're trying to accomplish here, but I think you could use some refinements.

Firstly, your graphics could use some work. The left sidebar would look a lot better if all of the text was done in the same font size and style ("site map" and "what's new" are slightly smaller, right? It's not just me?). For the page header, try looking for a different font. Something in an old english style would be appropriate, and would add interest to the site. Also make the text a bit smaller, and try doing something different with the edges of that graphic. Another idea would be to have that graphic stretch all the way across the page (not sure what would be the best way to do this, but it would provide a more solid foundation for the rest of the layout).

On the "stacks" page, the text is really hard to read against those blue books - those should be lightened up in some way so it's moe readable.

I am encountering a lot of horizontal scrolling here, and I'm also finding myself getting lost and confused quite often. Something needs to be done about all these ad banners and such. Remove anything that's not absolutely necessary and/or content specific.

At one time the entire site was blue with white text, which, for me was easier on my eyes than a white screen (I get up very early in the wee dark hours of the morning to work on lesson plans and grad school work, check my e-mail first thing, and the brightness of many white sites is blinding), but others complained that they could not read it.
Alas, it seems that there is no way to please everyone!

this logo is WAAAAAAAAAY TOO BIG! I thnk this one looks much nicer anyway, and i love blue. I think you should use the blue logo and incorporate the blue into your navigation.

Actually, the nav bars are photos of books from my own collection. I think they are hard to recognize in that size, now, but, I had larger books, vertically oriented and received comments that it was unwieldy, taking up too much space.
The logo is from another photo from the same collection and the background is intended to represent parchment or old paper, too.
the wood is an interesting concept to which I will have to give more thought.
thanks

tony

If you need a library effect how about a wood finish on the web Site .
or a book effect..

the site has to be more profecianal and jazzy pictures

Shareek

One of the best ways to deal with rendering differences in various browsers is to validate your HTML: http://validator.w3.org/. Browsers definitely have a few quirks when rendering valid markup, but it is nearly impossible to predict how your page will be displayed when different error handlers come into play. One browser might guess right, another might not.

I’ll bet that most visitors would prefer a line length and font similar to those on your What’s New page; its much, much more readable than your home page. Please lose the adds below your top banners; they pull eye focus away from your content text.

The What's new page is a Tripod blog, over which I have little control. It works to post a what's new column.
You must be viewing at 800x600 or something.
All of the pages that have been updated are consistent, now. The stacks await next weekend, likely, to be completely updated to reflect the changes on the others. They have the blue logo (the site was once all blue with white text), still, but that will change soon.

Thanks for the advice about tables, I have had some troubles manipulating them, most of which I seem to have overcome, but, what the heck. Mostly issues with different rendering in differen browsers. I write my pages in code and mostly use Mozilla or Netscrape myself, then find that they look silly in IE.
I've seen some very complex layouts with many tables within tables that I would never attempt to write in code. those folks seem to be using templates and css. I need to learn css, I think.

Anyway, you gotta admit, teh site is getting better. And, I am but an English teacher who has only owned a computer for about two and a half years.
I'll get there!

Thanks,

tony

In IE and Opera there is about a 170 pixel horizontal scroll. Looks like the email login box at the top right may be causing most of that. What you could do is move the email login below your nav on the left. I would also move the edubanner down below the main content but that is just my preference. I dislike banners when they get in the way of content.

On the contact page, the image and text are not visible unless you scroll to the right. About a 340 pixel horizontal scroll there. Teachers page has this huge scroll too.As a matter of fact, all of the pages have varrying degrees of horizontal scrolls.

On the what's new page, the background has a break in it.

If you are having trouble with tables, find one of Busys posts and follow the link to his EZHTML site. He has some good tutorials there.

I noticed on some pages, the logo banner has a blue tint to it instead of the brown color. You should try and make all of your pages consistent (including the navigation- it should be the same on every page)

Keep tweeking.

Okay,
I made a template with a navbar down the left, pretty typical, and I have been replacing pages. the entire tech-tools (software) section has been redone and other major pages. I have not redone the 7 stacks pages, but they are likely to get done this weekend or next week. It looks very typical, very standard, now. I have removed a lot of clutter, as mentioned above, as well.
I have also checked it out in all major browsers, except Opera (I have konqueror, galeon, mozilla, and netscape on my Linux boxes and Safari, Netscape and Internet Exploiter on my Mac).
Personally, I think it looks good, if not trite.
I don't think any of the previous complaints should now apply, but stop in and let me know what you think, please.

Tony

Oh,
I wanted to address an earlier comment.
My site has a nostalgic look and fee becuase that is what I wanted it to have.
I do feel that it reflects a "library atmosphere".
I suppose some people would rather have flashy colors and bells and whistles, but my site is for academicians and tech admins, like myself, who are less interested in flashy looks and more interested in information.
I make no apologies for various aspects that some seem to find less than perfectly aesthetic. Beauty is, after all, in the eye of the beholder.
I like the way my site looks.

I did hear your comments on navigation issues and page layouts. The clutter had to go, for sure, but as far as the look and feel: it stays.

tony

I noticed that a few pages looked like that in Konqueror and made some changes.
I suspect that you are using Internet Explorer, since IE and Konq seems to render the same. In Nestcape, Mozilla and Galeon I did not have that problem. IN any case, I believe the issue is solved also for Konq and IE.
I'm not sure what was causing the problem, but I pasted the header and nav from pages that were rendered correctly into those that had that rather unfortunate look about them and they all look fine now.
I have not updated all of the Stacks pages, but most of the site is pretty consistent now.
I also redid all of the google searches, since they had previously been done some time ago when the site had a different look and feel which was reflected on search pages. Now the search pages have the same background and color sheme, as well as SLN logo, as the rest of the site.
What a load of work I have done toady!

thanks,

tony

I have merged this thread with your other one as per the web site critique area posting notice.

Since I am posting screenshots tonight...do you mean for your page to look like this with this logo over to the left instead of across the top?

Well, folks copmlained about inconsistent navigation and cluttered pages (and a few other things).
So I made some changes.
I haev not updated every page, yet, but the software section that was crammed onto three pages is now on 5 pages, navigation/look and feel has been updated for most sections, I moved the newsfeeds to their own page (and added a weather.com box to it). Etc., etc.

Please let me know whatcha think

tony

http://www.school-library.net
Freedom to Learn!

Display: 1024x768

On my display the pages are too wide so you have to scroll across to find the content, not good.

Page layout in general needs attending to. An example would be the lessons page, there are ads, boxes, content sections seemingly placed at random across the page. And the huge gaps between elements doesn't help.

Stick to one form of navigation across your site. The more time ppl spend searching for things the more chance you have of them going elsewhere. I know you state you get 800-1000 hits a day but how many of those actually stick around to use your site?

Takes too long to load pages. I clicked on one of your nav links (when I'd worked out where they were!) and by the time the page had loaded I'd forgotten which link I'd clicked on.

As far as your forum goes I'd take a look at other forums to see why yours doesn't appeal. There are also no links back to the main site.

There's potential to do something good with this site but I'd suggest stripping it right back and starting again. Look at the sites you like and use regularly and see what makes them work, then apply that to your site.

Good luck

Hello MrBaldwin,

I was not impressed with the books. They might work for you, but personally I would list the links vertically on one book. They take up quite a bit of realestate that could otherwise be utilized.

Clicking on Front Desk, the entire navigation changes! I prefer a consistent navigation throughout the website, but I did prefer the text links to horizontally on the first page, just make them a bit larger as they are hard to see at first.

I thought the Google search was ok, but did not like the blue background or the pink font. Note that the banner inside the Google Search is not working. I found the best page to be the "What's New", but did not like it loading up in a new window. Why not get rid of the books on the front (add them to the text links horizontally on home page), make them larger, and then move the whats new page to your homepage?

You need to make up template (layout) for your site and stick with it throughout your site, especially things like navigation, this should be the same throughout and on every page.
looking at your site on 800x600 moving the scroll bar you can kind of make it look like two different sites just from the content, try it on the teach.html page.
Another thing you need is page headings, example the teach.html page, i got to that from the 'lessons' link, on that page there is news, links, games, banners but nothing to do with 'lessons' and lessons should be the main content of that page.
Try loose some (if not all) of the banner and adverts, maybe keep the ones you actually earn a dollar or two from to pay for hosting etc but dump the rest. plus you'd probably find you'd earn more with just one or two than 10 or 20. Move things like the webrings to a seperate page, they do good for creating traffic but usually most sites involved in them are pretty cheap and nasty. (no offense to anyone in one )
I just noticed in your forum you mention the site is for teachers to share their lessons etc but also have you posted some pages for your students, I can't remember seeing that bit, so maybe break the site into two sections - teachers and students but then your making the site a local school site

I'm getting a horizontal scrollbar at 1024x768. That navigation is way too wide, your gonna have to find a new way to display it. But, if you removed the buttons/banners down the bottom and got rid of the "current news" on the right next to the navigation, things wouldn't be so cramped up. Having the ad banner next to the site logo is also a bad move which is causing the page to stretch.

I clicked my way over to your "software" page only to be bombarded by two search bars (google and linuxlinks) and once again the bottom of the page is filled with advertisements. You should spread your content out over a few more pages, try not to put everything you can into one page.

You are also missing a doctype definition at the very top of your page. http://www.silonetwork.com/tools/doctypegen.php

An ok effort, but you need to revise the way you are ordering and displaying your content.

It is very slow loading and I'm on cable connection! I would personally use the domain name on paid hosting so that the domain shows and not redirect to free space - it will look more professional.

Unfortunately my first impression is that it looks very cluttered and somewhat drab. The colours are very muted and give it an old feel, which is what a lot of 'real' libraries feel like but not such a good feel for a website and that background doesn't help, just go for white to give it a fresh, clean feel.

There is a massive scrollbar at 800*600 because you have too much width ways on the page. I don't think that this type of site needs a newsfeed, you really want to have the site conent on there - a paragraph explaining what the site is about etc. At the moment it's just a jumble of stuff that looks kind of thrown together.

The navigation is quite clever but takes up too much space and again at 800*600 you don't actually see all of it at one time. People need to see and easily understand the navigation of the site.

I have just clicked onto 'lessons' and the page isn't opening. It hangs and that could be down to what you have on it or more likely the hosting is slow. This could be a major factor for people leaving the site!

I went to 'software' and you have a differnt coloured logo - the site needs to be consistant with the logo, it's what brands the site. But again it's far too cluttered and far too hard to read anything (default TNR font doesn't help matters here).

You have a good site as far as content it seems (when you can get to it) but the site looks fairly ameteurish and old (background, table borders on, banners cluttering each page at the bottom). My advise would be to clean it up, give it a clean layout so everything looks part of it and not disjointed as it does now and rethink the navigation.

One of the bigest questions I have is:
Why is it that I get plenty of traffic (okay, well placed in google for certain keywords, plenty of reciprocal links, etc.) BUT, I get little feedback from guests and almost no activity on community forums or web-based e-mail accounts?

tony