Keane16, Welcome to Webmaster-Forums. We like for new visitors that post their sites for review to help us out by reviewing other sites in this forum. This does a couple of things. One is that different perspectives are brought to the webmasters attention. Two it helps you to build a great site if you see what works and what doesn't on other sites.
The Critique
CoolNaleen - you must first help us Americans by providing us with a translation of what coolnaleen means if anything.
Plainess - for a gaming site, yours was a bit on the plain side. I think that you need to liven things up on your homepage. There is a certain Frontpage look to it. I would change the background color from white to a darker color maybe and leave your tables with a white background.
Frames - Me hate frames. In your case it appears that you are using them to disguise them from the fact that it is actually on this site http://gofree.indigo.ie/~eganp3/ . Frames are not friendly to search engines so avoid them if you can.
Code - whoa Nelly. It is not uncommon to see HTML code like your site has with sites that have pages generated by perl or PHP. Originally I thought that it was PHP. But now I am thinking Perl. Anyway the code was awful. There is no possible way to decipher anything there. So I am kind of thinking that you just dropped in the content and it loaded things and generated thumbnails. There are a lot of font tags, line breaks and hrefs with no " in them. It would be pretty hard to fix something that was broke in there by looking at the code.
800x600 - Horizontal scrolling at 800x600, the most common res out there.
Any way I think the main thing that you need is some more excitement on your page.
Mark Irving I have a mind like a steel trap; it is rusty and illegal in 47 states
Welcome to TWF! We'd appreciate it if you could help us out and review a couple of other sites before asking for your own review
Your site is taking a bit of time to load on my cable modem here. I definitely think that the design needs some work. It just seems to be rather poorly thought out. The table alignment is weak, the colour scheme doesn't seem to be well coordinated, there is little consistency among design elements, there is no consistency in design from page to page (actually, the other pages don't seem to have a design at all!), the logo is poor (it actually looks to be resized in a weird way) etc.
I would suggest that you start over. Think about what you're doing. Get a defined colour scheme, get a good logo, keep the layout simple in a way that emphasizes your important content (what really stands out in this design is the game sales, which link to amazon.co.uk - why would I bother going through your site when I could go straight for the source? Emphasize your own unique content to keep people coming back). Create a design template that can be used on every page - the navbar and logo should appear on every page of your site.
First thing i noticed was how hard your logo was to read, so i downloaded it and here what i found, the image itself is 13kb (way to big for a logo) but the worst thing is the size of it, its 476x167 but you have it resized on your site at 50x300, Never resize images with width and height tags
It took me 5 mins to find the size in your code, I am so glad your the one editing that and not me, wow
I forget what %7 is, but %20 is space, and you have a lot of these in your source code relating to your images, use either underscore or make it one word, some browser dont like spaces in names.
Looking at your site in Netscape4.7 it looks like you have many table coding problems, I cant read and wont even atempt to try to read your code, so your on your on for checking all the tags are there, maybe use a validater to try help you out.
in your code you have things like <div align=center><table ... if you want your table centered, use align=center in the table tag
in netscape it looks like table borders are set to 1, and it shows all the table cells, unlike IE, example you have 3 cells wide in your top table, but you only use 1.
when people make a site they dont think of the actually .html file as the final site size (file size) they just add up the graphics, your .html page is 27.5 kb of text, your logo is 13kb, so theres 40.5kb just there.
(The .html file does add to loading time but its not a true size vs time.)
I reckon you could chop your .html file sie in half if you set out your coding nicely and get rid of all the bits not being used, div, tbody, extra table cells ...
you are linking all yoru graphics to gofree.indigo.ie/%7Eeganp3/ if this is where the .html pages are then just add the folder/file name, this to will speed your loading time. your using a lot of the same things over and over, fonts bgcolors etc, these could be done with an external style sheet
disaster-master posted this at 15:00 — 16th October 2001.
I agree with Mairving on the code...WHOA NELLY...LOL (only from the south mairv)
The logo looks distorted and squashed. It is not very readable. I saved the logo to my hard drive and sure enough...it is actually width="476" height="167" and you have it in your code as height="50" width="300". That explaines the squashed look. You should either manually resize it or fix the img width height values in your code.
There is a wee bit of a horizontal scroll at 800 X 600 in Internet Explorer 5.0.
Coolnaleen is just the address of where Iam living in kerry.Ireland
Believe it our not I wrote the website mainly using Dreamweaver 4.Iam not using frames. my .com is providing a url cloak.
I appriciate everyone's Criticism and I will change things...It's better to hear these things from webdesingers than praise from ordinary web surfers.
mairving posted this at 21:41 — 17th October 2001.
Quote: Originally posted by disaster-master I agree with Mairving on the code...WHOA NELLY...LOL (only from the south mairv)
Watch out about that south thing. Actually I think it was from some cowboy movie. The guy talking to his horse. I think though that it was somewhat popularized by Keith Jackson, a college football announcer. For those of you that are not from these parts, it basically means stop quick.
Mark Irving I have a mind like a steel trap; it is rusty and illegal in 47 states
disaster-master posted this at 21:50 — 17th October 2001.
I am a true Southerner and we use that term frequently around here. That is what I tell my mule every morning when I come out of dem dare hills to go to work.
Don't think of it as criticism , think of it as helpful, friendly advice.
I made a BAD site to use as an example for my old HTML site, of what a bad use of gimmicks were, my friends and family (non web people) thought it was neat, all the animation, flashing text, moving things, even thou it had massive scroll bars in the frames part. I had to show them how to "work" the site, as they couldnt find how to work it.
Its like a horse, if you fall off, get back up, if you fall off again, try a pony and work up to the horse
or something like that lol
dcdomain posted this at 10:14 — 22nd October 2001.
Well since everyone commented about the code already, I'll talk about the colors. They don't really mesh well. I like the fact you are using the same colors for similar modules of the site (all the tables using the grays) but that blue background is VERY BRIGHT. I'd go with a much darker or washed out blue for hte background. Also why the orange links on top of the gray? Overall not bad, I count three different blues, two shades of gray, white and orange on your site It might be a good idea to get rid of the orange perhaps as it doesn't really fit in with the color scheme and rop the blue count to one or two.
The text on the upper top would be a little easier to read if it were left justified. Do keep the space/margins between the text and the left tables though.
took a little long to load (I'm only on 48k) but still...
im not a huge fan of the grey as your main second colour - maybe if it was broken up a bit by some other shade of blue with some buttons etc as part of the menu?
also, the headings of the lower sections of the page...the `cheats' headings...the white text and the grey background are too similar - they don't seem to stand out as well as the other headings further up the page do...
`Imagination is more important than Knowledge' ~ Albert Einstein
TheGizmoid posted this at 20:18 — 24th October 2001.
BTW, that "max payne.gif" isn't displaying in NS because of the space in the file name.
Why do you have an auto refresh? It's rather annoying.
As for the code, you might want to do a search for "HTML Tidy", a free program available for various platforms that will strip your code of extraneous tags, etc.
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mairving posted this at 01:33 — 16th October 2001.
They have: 2,256 posts
Joined: Feb 2001
Keane16, Welcome to Webmaster-Forums. We like for new visitors that post their sites for review to help us out by reviewing other sites in this forum. This does a couple of things. One is that different perspectives are brought to the webmasters attention. Two it helps you to build a great site if you see what works and what doesn't on other sites.
The Critique
Any way I think the main thing that you need is some more excitement on your page.
Mark Irving
I have a mind like a steel trap; it is rusty and illegal in 47 states
Megan posted this at 01:35 — 16th October 2001.
She has: 11,421 posts
Joined: Jun 1999
Welcome to TWF! We'd appreciate it if you could help us out and review a couple of other sites before asking for your own review
Your site is taking a bit of time to load on my cable modem here. I definitely think that the design needs some work. It just seems to be rather poorly thought out. The table alignment is weak, the colour scheme doesn't seem to be well coordinated, there is little consistency among design elements, there is no consistency in design from page to page (actually, the other pages don't seem to have a design at all!), the logo is poor (it actually looks to be resized in a weird way) etc.
I would suggest that you start over. Think about what you're doing. Get a defined colour scheme, get a good logo, keep the layout simple in a way that emphasizes your important content (what really stands out in this design is the game sales, which link to amazon.co.uk - why would I bother going through your site when I could go straight for the source? Emphasize your own unique content to keep people coming back). Create a design template that can be used on every page - the navbar and logo should appear on every page of your site.
Megan
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Busy posted this at 04:34 — 16th October 2001.
He has: 6,151 posts
Joined: May 2001
First thing i noticed was how hard your logo was to read, so i downloaded it and here what i found, the image itself is 13kb (way to big for a logo) but the worst thing is the size of it, its 476x167 but you have it resized on your site at 50x300,
Never resize images with width and height tags
It took me 5 mins to find the size in your code, I am so glad your the one editing that and not me, wow
I forget what %7 is, but %20 is space, and you have a lot of these in your source code relating to your images, use either underscore or make it one word, some browser dont like spaces in names.
Looking at your site in Netscape4.7 it looks like you have many table coding problems, I cant read and wont even atempt to try to read your code, so your on your on for checking all the tags are there, maybe use a validater to try help you out.
in your code you have things like <div align=center><table ... if you want your table centered, use align=center in the table tag
in netscape it looks like table borders are set to 1, and it shows all the table cells, unlike IE, example you have 3 cells wide in your top table, but you only use 1.
when people make a site they dont think of the actually .html file as the final site size (file size) they just add up the graphics, your .html page is 27.5 kb of text, your logo is 13kb, so theres 40.5kb just there.
(The .html file does add to loading time but its not a true size vs time.)
I reckon you could chop your .html file sie in half if you set out your coding nicely and get rid of all the bits not being used, div, tbody, extra table cells ...
you are linking all yoru graphics to gofree.indigo.ie/%7Eeganp3/ if this is where the .html pages are then just add the folder/file name, this to will speed your loading time. your using a lot of the same things over and over, fonts bgcolors etc, these could be done with an external style sheet
disaster-master posted this at 15:00 — 16th October 2001.
She has: 2,154 posts
Joined: May 2001
I agree with Mairving on the code...WHOA NELLY...LOL (only from the south mairv)
The logo looks distorted and squashed. It is not very readable. I saved the logo to my hard drive and sure enough...it is actually width="476" height="167" and you have it in your code as height="50" width="300". That explaines the squashed look. You should either manually resize it or fix the img width height values in your code.
There is a wee bit of a horizontal scroll at 800 X 600 in Internet Explorer 5.0.
keane16 posted this at 21:24 — 17th October 2001.
They have: 3 posts
Joined: Oct 2001
Coolnaleen is just the address of where Iam living in kerry.Ireland
Believe it our not I wrote the website mainly using Dreamweaver 4.Iam not using frames. my .com is providing a url cloak.
I appriciate everyone's Criticism and I will change things...It's better to hear these things from webdesingers than praise from ordinary web surfers.
mairving posted this at 21:41 — 17th October 2001.
They have: 2,256 posts
Joined: Feb 2001
Watch out about that south thing. Actually I think it was from some cowboy movie. The guy talking to his horse. I think though that it was somewhat popularized by Keith Jackson, a college football announcer. For those of you that are not from these parts, it basically means stop quick.
Mark Irving
I have a mind like a steel trap; it is rusty and illegal in 47 states
disaster-master posted this at 21:50 — 17th October 2001.
She has: 2,154 posts
Joined: May 2001
I am a true Southerner and we use that term frequently around here. That is what I tell my mule every morning when I come out of dem dare hills to go to work.
Busy posted this at 21:51 — 17th October 2001.
He has: 6,151 posts
Joined: May 2001
Don't think of it as criticism , think of it as helpful, friendly advice.
I made a BAD site to use as an example for my old HTML site, of what a bad use of gimmicks were, my friends and family (non web people) thought it was neat, all the animation, flashing text, moving things, even thou it had massive scroll bars in the frames part. I had to show them how to "work" the site, as they couldnt find how to work it.
Its like a horse, if you fall off, get back up, if you fall off again, try a pony and work up to the horse
or something like that lol
dcdomain posted this at 10:14 — 22nd October 2001.
They have: 24 posts
Joined: Oct 2001
Well since everyone commented about the code already, I'll talk about the colors. They don't really mesh well. I like the fact you are using the same colors for similar modules of the site (all the tables using the grays) but that blue background is VERY BRIGHT. I'd go with a much darker or washed out blue for hte background. Also why the orange links on top of the gray? Overall not bad, I count three different blues, two shades of gray, white and orange on your site It might be a good idea to get rid of the orange perhaps as it doesn't really fit in with the color scheme and rop the blue count to one or two.
The text on the upper top would be a little easier to read if it were left justified. Do keep the space/margins between the text and the left tables though.
DC Domain r5
"What I had, I gave today.
What I saved, I lost forever."
tania721 posted this at 11:45 — 24th October 2001.
They have: 39 posts
Joined: Aug 2001
my two cents worth...
took a little long to load (I'm only on 48k) but still...
im not a huge fan of the grey as your main second colour - maybe if it was broken up a bit by some other shade of blue with some buttons etc as part of the menu?
also, the headings of the lower sections of the page...the `cheats' headings...the white text and the grey background are too similar - they don't seem to stand out as well as the other headings further up the page do...
`Imagination is more important than Knowledge' ~ Albert Einstein
TheGizmoid posted this at 20:18 — 24th October 2001.
They have: 168 posts
Joined: Apr 2001
I would seriously consider eliminating the scrolling news feed applet. It really has nothing to do with your site.
The link to your Max Payne cheat is pointing to your hard drive: file:///E:/gamesite/pcfolder/m/max_payne.htm
BTW, that "max payne.gif" isn't displaying in NS because of the space in the file name.
Why do you have an auto refresh? It's rather annoying.
As for the code, you might want to do a search for "HTML Tidy", a free program available for various platforms that will strip your code of extraneous tags, etc.
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