Site Critique

impr0v

It's a redevelopment of a site for Mullingar Lions Club.

Mullingar Lions Club

It isn't lauched as yet, but is mostly finished.
What's in the public tier of the site isn't really very interesting, 90% of the site is behind the login, so what I'm looking for are comments on the layout and general look of the site.

If you have comments or find a mistake, please state your browser, res, and connection speed if relevant.

I know the white space stasi might have a comment or two, but personally I'm a fan.

blobert

I like it.

Very straightforward and easy to navigate around.

Well done.

mneylon

Nice and clean.
XHTML compliant as well

cgarvey

Yup, I concur.. nice and simple and clean. Don't underestimate the positive in that!

The negative is just that the various sections are a bit too randomly placed, that is that they don't align. A solution might be to differentiate the headers of the current pages' main content boxes from the global navigation ones.

But yup, nice and neat, well done.

.cg

LoLth

very nice indeed. Just had a quick browse through it and cant think of anything offhand that I would change...

buddy

A fine piece of work indeed.

Kai

Very nice site, very clean and simple looking which is great.

a minor thing i found was the copyright text at the bottom of the main page look like its been shrunk, hard to read and it only appears on the home page but not on the other pages i viewed. Im using FireFox 1.0 PR on windows 2000.

impr0v

Thanks for the compliments guys.

Kai wrote:

A minor thing i found was the copyright text at the bottom of the main page look like its been shrunk, hard to read and it only appears on the home page but not on the other pages i viewed. Im using FireFox 1.0 PR on windows 2000.

Yer, this seems to happen when the first choice font, Verdana, gets replaced with an alternative sans-serif, like Arial, which dosen't display well at low sizes. I'll see how it looks when I up the size a pixel or so, but I want to maintain it's place at the bottom of the hierarchy of information visually, since it's not really important informaition. The reason it's only on the home page is that it isn't aligned in the centre of the page at the bottom, but to the right of the main content div, and would display half-way up the page on some of the other sections with less content in that container, e.g. on the 'History' page, it would be higher up the page than the sponsor and events section. Perhaps someone here can tell me otherwise, as it's my first time using CSS instead of tables to layout a site, but as far as I can see there is no way to reliably align a div to the bottom of a page across the main browsers, it must follow from the containers/layers above it.

Other problems with the CSS is that the dotted borders display as dashes in IE, and it won't change the link backgrounds on rollover either. IE 5.0 is the worst of the lot, the whole site being aligned to the left because it refuses to recognise auto positioning, the spacing between each news post is less than other browsers, and it also won't even display the borders between the links. NN 7.0 has a weird bug which means the label on the form buttons is only partly visible.

EDIT: Copyright and standards information should be more legible now.

Kai

Yep looks perfect now, im trying to find an article i read on aligning text at the bottom of the browser window. might be of some help.

Edit :
I found this which may be of some help if you look at how the CSS footer div is done in the second last post:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum83/501.htm

impr0v

meh, I can get their code to work in IE, but Firefox won't play ball, it displays the footer in the top center of the page.

I'm handing over the site this evening or tomorrow morning, so I'm happy enough to put up with being only on the front page, though the issue will undoubtedly come up on other projects.

dangerman

I agree with the others its very nice.

One thing I dislike is the

Mullingar Lions Club > Home Other Lions Clubs

at the top above the logo. I would prefer if the logo was up at the top and then these links were underneath the logo.

My eye went straight to the Other Lions Clubs link...why is that given such importance at the top right of the page? I would think it's not that important and could go into the navigation?

Also, the Site Sponsor - that graphic is far too ambiguous, and a bit messy imo. I'm guessing maybe thats just a place holder until the actual lions club sponsor(s) are in place though.

One other point springs to mind:

What's in the public tier of the site isn't really very interesting, 90% of the site is behind the login, so what I'm looking for are comments on the layout and general look of the site.

If the members area is that important, and hence logging in...would it not make sense to have the login form on the main page? Requiring a click to get to the login page seems a bit of a waste usability wise. You've a perfect place to slot it in to the right of the lions club logo in all that white space. I guess if your using cookies to remember logins then this isn't such an issue but it's just something that struck me.

Anyway, these are all just suggestions, as I said it's very slick looking, good job.