Looking for feedback and answers

pepsiman

Hi there.

I'd appreciate it if any of you out there would want to give me some feedback on a web site of mine:

http://www.ipctool.com/

Anything from design and grammar (English not being my first language) to feel and ease of use.

It's a web site for comparing prices on various products and services; at present only for telecom and Internet. Designed to be light and fast loading.

Also; I've included one of my own web sites in the comparion tables. Should I mention this? And should I use 'I' and 'me' and not 'we' and 'us'? Comments appreciated.

Thanks,
Thomas

cgarvey

Nice idea, and it certainly is nice, quick and simple, well done. The only thing that struck me was that the important navigation looks a bit lost within the content. Simple CSS formatting (e.g. shading or bordering) would make it stand out much better.

It might be also worth while making the different sections available globally, as also might having a printer friendly option.

Good luck with it.

.cg

pepsiman

Originally posted by cgarvey
The only thing that struck me was that the important navigation looks a bit lost within the content

It might be also worth while making the different sections available globally, as also might having a printer friendly option.

I've made some improvements and added a Navigation block which is the same on all pages.

There's now a 'Printer friendly page' available linked to below the tables, you can try here:
http://www.ipctool.com/broadband/index.html

The 'Printer friendly page' show the table only and URL's rather than company names (the URL to the company web site). Not all pages have a printer friendly option yet as it takes (me) ages! to make the table scripts printer friendly

I don't want to do all pages now if the solution is no good (yes, I'm lazy) and I've to come up with something else When looking for a suitable way to make a printer friendly page (i.e. html to pdf) I noticed that I haven't been good at validating the HTML code. So, I'm working on that too.

Thanks for your feedback.

/T

cgarvey

Much better.. and printer friendly a good idea.. I'd still push for a more "obvious" navigation area (common to all pages as it is now). This is especially important as your site has so little visual aids to denote navigation. I may be just picky though!!


.cg

bizmark

Damn pep thats a handy Broadband comparsion list

well done

flywheel

might be good to add in number of users that can share the connection / available bandwidth under a 'contention ratio' column?

BrianG

pepsiman

Originally posted by cgarvey
Much better.. and printer friendly a good idea.. I'd still push for a more "obvious" navigation area (common to all pages as it is now)

I've added some common navigational links under the top logo; and now I don't know what to do with da box to da right...

Originally posted by bizmark
Damn pep thats a handy Broadband comparsion list

well done

Thank you!

Originally posted by DubWireless
might be good to add in number of users that can share the connection / available bandwidth under a 'contention ratio' column?

I have a table column initially meant for Invoicing fees. But since that's not something the Irish providers use it got 'Reserved' instead. So I could use it for Contention ratio.

Since all the information on IPCtool should be easily verifiable I guess such a column would be for wireless access products only. I can't remember having seen Eircom, IOL or UTV have anything on contention ratios (or do I need new goggles?), but it's a feature on the wireless products.

/T

bizmark

iol esat netsource and Utv Radsl has a contention ratios of 48 : 1

i cant remember the adsl ratio of the top of my head though :rolleyes:

i think eircom and co adsl Contention ratios are 24 : 1

wirerless is 8 : 1

you should check them up just incase im wrong btw (its known to happen to offen lol)

Fergal C

Best of luck with your site.

I'd suggest removing the shading from the tables in printer friendly pages. Also, as these pages will be printed having your site address clearly displayed on them could be useful.

Links to other consumer information or price comparison sites would be beneficial to browsers and have the additional advantage of increasing traffic to IPC, if you can get these sites to link back to you.

What about adding a forum?

p

Hi, cool idea for a site. It's great to see.

One suggestions is to try breakdown the information in a more useful way. Perhaps graphs, pie-charts & summaries would be useful in addition to the tables of data. making the information easily understood is half the battle I think.

www.edwardtufte.com has some examples of how to do that

tricky D

When looking for a suitable way to make a printer friendly page....

eh save yerself a shed load of work. If you're using css you shouldn't need to make any new pages at all as long as there reasonably well constructed in the first place. Just create a new style sheet for print media, which uses display:none for all those element you don't want to print and declare both the styles: one for print, the other for screen media

eg
http://www.coillte.ie/about_coillte/coilltes_history.htm
prints with no top or side or bottom stuff.
Take a look under the bonnet for more or compare the

print css and the screen css
which is called from a cookie in which there is the plain ole css call... link rel="stylesheet" href="../css/coillte2-screen.css" type="text/css" media="screen"

most printers i've used honour the media=print call

pepsiman

Thanks all for your feedback. I'm working on the issues and will hopefully have something more presentable ready soon ;-)

/T