Some critique and pointers please

dod

dod

dod

Soldato
Joined
31 Oct 2002
Posts
4,165
Location
Inverness
I'm no expert on HTML but have made this up through a combination of dreamweaver and integrating a Jalbum gallery template.

I know there are a couple of things I'm not entirely happy with re fonts in the gallery but apart from that are there any obvious major faults/defects you experts can see?

www.enduropics.com

Thanks for looking :)
 
I think the links could do with being a different colour or underlined as it's not too obvious what is a link and what isn't. (on the pages, not the navigation).

Also the banner isn't all too great IMO.


The icons in the gallery might look better if you changed them so they fitted in a bit better, but thats not a major problem. And you may want to add a title to the site

Other than that, it looks good to me :)
 
Good points.
  • Nice imagery
  • Fast loading
  • Simple, clean design
  • Nice concise gallery

Bad points.
  • The logo/banner is awful. It's in the overused Comic Sans font, with the overused bevel and the overused dropshadow. It's also terribly anti-aliased. No offence, but wordart can look better.
  • The navigation is flat boring and jaggy. Use a cleaner font and put a bit of colour into it.
  • You've used tables, for what is a very simple site. Using CSS to style your elements would make things a lot easier for you and more accessible.
  • Images instead of text, for your text-looking navigation. Why? Why use an image that limits accessibility and readability, when you could have made those as text links. The mind boggles.

Read up on CSS and how it controls webpages.
 
iCraig said:
Bad points.
  • The logo/banner is awful. It's in the overused Comic Sans font, with the overused bevel and the overused dropshadow. It's also terribly anti-aliased. No offence, but wordart can look better.
  • The navigation is flat boring and jaggy. Use a cleaner font and put a bit of colour into it.
  • You've used tables, for what is a very simple site. Using CSS to style your elements would make things a lot easier for you and more accessible.
  • Images instead of text, for your text-looking navigation. Why? Why use an image that limits accessibility and readability, when you could have made those as text links. The mind boggles.

Read up on CSS and how it controls webpages.
Click to expand...
No offence taken believe me, the opinions appreciated :)

I know the headers bad, I'm just not particularly creative but it is a work in progress. This has to be up and working properly by next weekend so if necessary I'll just have to live with it.

Thanks for letting me know I've used tables, that's NOT sarcastic, just an indication of my level :p CSS looks complicated but presumably it's not too bad once you get into it, any recommended beginner links?

What sort of fonts would you recommend/suggest? I do prefer those like arial, tahoma etc.
 
I'm glad you didn't take offence, too many people have come here for a critique but started mouthing off as soon as they was given negative comments. It's nice to talk to someone who listens and learns from it. :)

Arial would be fine for that menu, just make sure your navigation items are text based instead of images. Images are used if the type of menu you are building is not possible by just using text.

Like so:

Code: 
<a class="navigation" href="about.html" title="About Us">About Us</a>
 
Title all thy web pages!
There's ? instead of £ in your prices.
Agreed on comic sans, it's a joke (guffaw). If you haven't got any good quality sans-serif fonts have a look at dafont for something nice and clean, and make it a lot smaller, and I would drop the www. and the .com, they already know the address...
Drop either the gallery or the events button, or make it "Events gallery" as they both lead to the same info no?

Apart from that it's a nice clean and consistent layout.

Good css layout starting point http://www.inknoise.com/experimental/layoutomatic.php
 
paulsheff said:
Title all thy web pages!
There's ? instead of £ in your prices.
Agreed on comic sans, it's a joke (guffaw). If you haven't got any good quality sans-serif fonts have a look at dafont for something nice and clean, and make it a lot smaller, and I would drop the www. and the .com, they already know the address...
Drop either the gallery or the events button, or make it "Events gallery" as they both lead to the same info no?

Apart from that it's a nice clean and consistent layout.

Good css layout starting point http://www.inknoise.com/experimental/layoutomatic.php
Click to expand...
Brilliant, thanks for the comments and links. I've actually asked this on a photography site I'm a regular at as well and the sort of replies I'm getting are consistent, just coming at it from a different angle/viewpoint :) Nobody likes the header :D

I'm going to drop the gallery and just use the events link. I don't like the folders in there anyway and it gets rid of another headache.

The ?/£ bit I know and I've emailed paypal about it, it's their code I used and I can't work out why it's doing that, it shows fine on my machine off line. Going a stage further if there's nothing in the cart it shows the balance as $0 as well which is neither professional or reassuring to customers.

Keep throwing in the observations guys :D
 
hi. don't like the header either.

firstly

-you need a title -without, no one will find you from search engines
-the intro sentence "welcome ..."is not gathering enough attention.
-you have no meta tag keywords or description. This is still important because -without, google will either leave it blank or will take a random section of your text.

I know there is no option around this using the jalbum, but I don't like it how you have to be taken away from site to add things to the cart. For some reason it takes up to 20 seconds for paypal to do its bit .. and you have to do that for every image. If someone wants 10, it's quite cumbersome.

sorry for all that... I know how hard it is to do a photography site as i am helping to someone to build one at the present.
 
dod said:
The ?/£ bit I know and I've emailed paypal about it, it's their code I used and I can't work out why it's doing that, it shows fine on my machine off line. Going a stage further if there's nothing in the cart it shows the balance as $0 as well which is neither professional or reassuring to customers.
Click to expand...

I take it they are hard coded into each page? You could try finding them in the html and replacing £ with &pound;.

£95.00 = &pound;95.00

As for the USD issue, have you checked to make sure Pound Sterling is the primary in Manage Currency Balances under Profile? That's the only thing I can see of Paypals admin that might affect it.
 
I've got the message on the header :p

paulsheff said:
I take it they are hard coded into each page? You could try finding them in the html and replacing £ with &pound;.

£95.00 = &pound;95.00

As for the USD issue, have you checked to make sure Pound Sterling is the primary in Manage Currency Balances under Profile? That's the only thing I can see of Paypals admin that might affect it.
Click to expand...
Thanks, I'll try that when I get home. Pound Sterling is primary though so it still leaves an issue for paypal to advise on for the cart.

blade007 said:
I know there is no option around this using the jalbum, but I don't like it how you have to be taken away from site to add things to the cart. For some reason it takes up to 20 seconds for paypal to do its bit .. and you have to do that for every image. If someone wants 10, it's quite cumbersome.
Click to expand...
There is a plug in to Jalbum/breezebrowser/PSCS I seriously considered but eventually decided to save the $100 it costs. I'm beginning to think it's a false economy as it actually looks and feels very professional. I might just bite the bullet and order it if I can't get entirely happy with this. I think the final stage will still take you off site but it's only the once and very slick before that.

If it's any help to you have a look at this
http://www.eostemplate.com/eos/examples.html#exam1

and an actual site using it
http://foxphotographics.co.uk/galleries/070506 grampian mcc/
 
The £ issue is related to character encoding. Those characters and your pages are designated as ISO-8859-1, but the webserver is sending them as UTF-8 (probably via AddDefaultCharset).

Create a .htaccess file and add the line
Code: 
AddDefaultCharset Off
Upload it to your root directory. If there's already a .htaccess file in there, just add that line to the bottom of it.
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/core.html#adddefaultcharset

If that doesn't sort out the problem, change the line to
Code: 
AddType 'text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1' html
:)
 
I've still got issues on the gallery and havent changed the templates yet, still not named the pages but I've done a quick redesign.

I'm still trying to keep it clean and simple but what's the view now? I'm not sure about the grey, might change it back to a white background but it looked a bit harsh.

www.enduropics.com
 
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