Web Developers Resource Center Website Critique

I think aliens have done something with this page:

http://www.designerwiz.com/wizview.htm

When I tried to scroll down the page, that annoying "please do not take anything...COPYRIGHT something, something something" kept popping up. I have never had one of those pop up when I tried to scroll on MY scrollbar. They usually come up when you right click. Anyways...All you seem to have on that page is other peoples resources. What exactly are you copyrighting?

disastermaster

I just wanted everyone to note that I do read and consider your advice. I want to thank you all for your input to change recommendations.

It is a bit annoying. You have to keep the mouse over to the right, unless you want to scroll though one of the boxes, so you move the mouse over the box & scroll away, then you get to end and the whole page scrolls, damn scroll back up and then another box scrolls, oh I give up!!!

The logo is way too big now!

David, I use a wheel mouse also. I didn't notice it because the site has changed quite a bit since my review and your review.

One thing i noticed apart from all of the above was that when I scrolled with my mouse button it either scrolled the whole page, one of your little frames with a croll bar or a combination of the two. very annoying and very hard on the eye...
Am i the only person who surfs with their roller or did other peeps notice this...
DavidJaymz

There must have been a few changes made since the previous posts - I can't even find a nav bar.

A "Web Development Resource Center" that isn't crossbrowser compatible? You've lost all credibility right there.

I really have no idea where to go here - perhaps due to the missing navigation? All your links open new windows and since there is no design consistency, it is hard to tell what is yours and what is not.

Serif or Sans-serif - pick one and stick with it.

Logo is too big - pretty much fills an 800x600 screen.

About the only thing I do like is your background colour, although I wouldn't recommend using it as a background for text-based sections

Quote: Originally posted by DesignerWiz
I'd appreciate your honest opinions of the website. I am not interested in the fact we are not netscape friendly, I hate their browser...lol.

Everybody that designs websites hates Netscape. Just too many problems. I just spent some time trying to get a table to line up in Netscape. The reason I had one too many colspans. Every good web designer will take Netscape into consideration. I usually make sure that everything lines up and sorta works in Netscape.

Review:

• The you've gotta be kidding things
• A text logo that is 468x90 pixels with a ton of white space, blinking no less.
• A clip art bee stuck in the logo
  Both are copyrighted? Both are right click protected. I don't know how you managed to copyright Welcome to DesignerWiz.com. Does that mean that I can't use that phrase or that I can't ever use Welcome or to, since those are part of the copyright scheme. That is funny. But seriously the only reason that you would have the no right click script is to annoy people.
• Another you've gotta be kidding - Website Optimized For:
  Internet Explorer 4.0 & up - reminds me of the old days where sites said optimized for IE or NS.
• Still another - no home button in your navbar.
• Yet another - a site for creating, maintaining, enhancing, checking or simply monitoring your Web Site presence (this is all copyrighted too) that is made with Frontpage.
• Another - the navbar disappears when you click on one of the links. Where am I?
• Upon using the back arrow to return to the previous page, (I have to use the back arrow since there is no navbutton) I have a popup box giving a 404 error.
• Layout - the layout of the site is terrible. The home page (not the entrance page) is too long. Tables that start out wide and narrow down or start out narrow and widen out.
• Text - awful - white bolded text on a blue background intermingled with blue (yes blue on blue), yellow and green.
• Navbar - I would have to say that your navbar is one of the worst that I have ever seen. Buttons that are too small for the text that is in them, with a little bit of drop shadow, then cycling through text that gets bigger or bolder or changes colors. It should also be on every page.

I could go on and on. Your website needs some major work IMO.

I agree with Megan. I don't think any site should tell people how to set up their pc and what browser to use. If you can't do an interesting site that's suitable for all then it needs to be rethought, especially this kind of site!

The buttons are awful, so old hat and as Megan says cheesey and they all go to the same place anyway! The rest of the text obviously has your main links in it but faced with all that text I would give up so I would rethink navigation as well.

The logo needs work too as the text just looks blocky and very unprofessional. You don't need flashing stuff to entice people to use your site, make it neat, clean, easy to find things & professional and it could be a nice site.

Can you also help us out on the forum and participate in some of the other threads. This will help others and help you at the same time with getting ideas.

Thanks Megan,

I value your opinion on these factors. I agree with you on the content focus, this is why I am currently redeveloping the site.

I have been arranging quality content partnerships with other well known services and will be orienting links toward their services offered through us.

I'm assuming you were talking "useless links" as being the wizview.htm page. I'll re-evalute the usefullness of these services, for the developers needs.

Thanks for your insight.

No right click scripts are annoying. They also don't work in all broswers/OSs. I'm on a Mac and could save anything I wanted, but I have no desire to.

Hey DesignerWiz - welcome to TWF! We're glad you're here

Just because you hate NS doesn't mean that your visitors do too. I just don't think it's right to blow of that sector of your user base (I'm using mozilla 0.91 here BTW)

To be honest your site has a lot of problems. The splash page is useless and annoying in this case - the logo is cute, but the serif font looks cheesy (use sans-serif on the web - it looks better), the Entrance link wasn't immediately obvious to me and I really don't care how your site is best viewed - I'm not about to change my setting just so I can view your site as you intended it. I think that webmasters really should cater to the user not the other way around.

Once I'm inside the site I'm having a hard time reading your text there - bolded text with centered paragraphs isn't exactly easy to read. For paragraphs of text it's best to just use regular text - no fancy formating or alignment changes. Now I'm looking for a navbar and I'll I see is a cheesy line of buttons there that look like they're going to send you me to another site. So those buttons really need to be re-done. I also don't see any links to content that suits the stated purpose of the site - just a bunch of chessy freebie-type stuff. I clicked on the one of those links and I couldn't even find the content among all the other uselss stuff that's on there.

So now I scroll down, thinking maybe there's something lower down the paeg, but all I'm seeing is bunch fo junk here.

Overall the deisgn isn't too bad - the buttons are but the rest of it is okay. What you really need to do is focus on your topic and your audience and provide some meaningful content in a way that's useful to them.