Review Request TheProjectorGuide.Com

Have you posted this before? It looks familiar.

Well the first thing I did was dive in to the code to check out the dropdown menu as I've been looking for one that works on a centered layout. What a whack of code! Can this be externalized somehow?

On to the site:

There are various inconsistencies in your border widths. Some boxes appear to be lined with 1px, others as many as 3px. Likewise, the alignment is all over the map. The resulting look is rather disorganized.

Colour scheme: Well, there's blue. There actually appears to be a couple of blues. If you are going to work with minimal colours (and I'm often guilty as charged) use them consistently. Perhaps get some of that logo red into play?

Underlined Text: Is it a link? Hmmm, it looks like one. Oh no, it isn't. But wait, this one is! Underlined text screams hyperlink to a user. Don't use it otherwise *especially* if you are using it for links also.

Font: Try a sans serif? I also recommend you look into CSS.

Quick Post dohicky: Well, it's a "dohicky". I was pretty annoyed by the slowness of the scroll speed - especially once I got to the bottom and wanted to go back up

Other qick observations:

- horizontal scroll at 800x600 (IE6) on some pages
- no site navigation on your forums page

I know about the borders and going to get them all the same.

I also knew about the blues again I will get that done.

The links arnt fully live yet so I havnt linked them. Remember site isnt live yet.

Ive been pondering fonts for a while now. I dont want to get into css

Scroll speed of the quickpost Ive heard a few comments about that and will change soon.

800 x 600 scroll - Looking into
forum nav - trying to figure out how to do this

Thanks youve helped me alot

Why don't you want to get into CSS? It's the way forward for any serious webdesigner! Veranda is my personal favourite but arial is good too. CSS just makes life easier all round.

Horizontal scrollbar on index page for me at 800*600 is being caused by the total size in pixels of the tops graphics in the 782 table. Maybe making your page margins 0 will help but generally I think the most you should go for is 770.

Is this a personal site or business site? I'm somewhat confused as to why there are things like 'Get This I'm Engaged' on there?

This is a personal site. Alot of people have made this mistake. What makes you think its a business site ?

I havn't got time to learn css at this time, I know the basics. Once the site is live I look into css which I know will make it easier for me.

Im looking into the 800 x 600 scroll

Thanks

Steve

I'm obviously not the only person to make this mistake but I guess it doesn't look like a hobby site or a personal site. It looks like a site selling projectors. Just seems an odd combination IMO.

How does it not look like a hobby / personal site ?

Its just a guide for people who are thinking of buying projectors and for projector owners a place to ask questions and get the lastest info.

Looks to proffesional ?

Maybe I should change to a black background with red text, lots of animated gifs etc etc.

Any more information would be greatly appreciated.

It really is shocking how many people think the site is made by a company...

Steve

If I was looking for a site giving advise on projectors, I would expect it to be professional looking, otherwise I probably wouldn't take heed of the advise so much and because of that I wouldn't particularly be interested in the person who made the site's home life. Don't take offence at this as it's just my opinion.

I think that a name like "Projector Guide" makes it clear that this is just a guide and not any sort of a business. However, I think it would be a good idea to keep the personal information out of it. Separate the hobby from the person moreso. I have run a couple of hobby sites in the past, and have visited a lot of them too, and I think it's best to keep these things separate. Mixing in too much personal information could actually hurt your credibility. Better to make a separate site for blogging and personal info.

(I'm distinguishing here between personal sites, business sites, and hobby sites, which fall somewhere in between and are their own website genre IMO. This is a hobby site, not a personal site I think.)

Now that I'm actually nagvigating the site, I'm thinking that such a complex navigation area isn't really necessary. What you could do is just create two separate navigation areas. I like to keep the main content navigation separate from the site admin stuff. So, you'd keep everything under the "The guide" section along the left side. Lose the pop-out script completely, and just list the sub-sections there. You don't need to list all the "projectors" on the navbar, since they're all on the same page and people can just use the sub-nav that's on the page there. So you'd have something like this:

Projectors
Accessories
Broken Pixels
Buyer's Guide
DIY
Jargon Buster
Gallery

Homepage
Forums
Contact
About Us

This way you've clearly got your navigation sections separated from each other (find some way to locate them differently or style them differently, or otherwise make them clearly separate from each other). The main content section (first list) should be visually more important than the other. Also lose references to "me". You could bury the link to your blog in the "about us" section, but don't keep it on the main navbar. Listing all of this in plain HTML will save you a lot of headaches with the dHTML script.

As for the design, I think I've commented enough on that in previous critiques. I would still like to see this with a sans-serif font but since you're not using stylseheets it might be better to not bother with that for the time being.

The reason I have put personal information on there as well is to take a light hearted approach personally I like knowing what kind of person is managing the site, espicially this kind of site it's the personal approach and users like sites built by REAL people not large businesses Its a fact !

If I get a lot of comments about this I shall remove data from the homepage and leave the blog link as Ive had quite a few good comments about it.

I like your idea megan of simplifying the navigation, I'm trying to make the site as simple as possible to navigate and that might just be the ticket

Thanks

Steve

{Added} I just noticed I removed the: Off Topic - My Life header and not put it back on the homepage. i thought it would seperate Projector content from personal{Added}

Well, that's a good way of doing things then.

Just to cite a personal example, at one of the hobby sites I'm involved with we did include a little bit of personal bio information so people know who we are and why we're credible. We did try to keep it in a professional style and buried under "site info" so it's there if people want to see it but otherwise it's not too prominent.

I guess it's up to you how you want to balance the personal with the professional. I think there's a lot of grey area between being too businesslike and getting too personal.

why are the bottom borders missing from some of the boxes? are they ment to be?

I think it's the image of the ticket and maybe the projector (top far right) that gives it that "shop" look

you also need to set your background to white, currently you have none, and the main page as zero margins, the others don't
This is a good example of when CSS is very easy, if you have a .css file linked on all pages you could fix these two things and others with just one line (body {background:white; margins:0;} ) and all pages are changed

Well the ticket is a cinema entrance ticket aka home cinema.
The projector is there because its a projector website simple as that, if I put a fluffy bunny there will that make a difference ?? LOL

I know I need to sort background colours and the margins. CSS will come later...

Thanks a bunch.... of banana's LOL

Steve

The site is now live @

http://www.theprojectorguide.com

Thank you all for your help and support

Hi,
I like the colors. One question: Why can't the forum background be the same as the rest of the page? Or at least similar? White background seems kinda foreign to the rest of the site. Other than that, nice job!!