New Website - critique welcome, and "value"?

chat2joe

Hi guys,

Just launched a website I've done up for a college scuba diving club. All comments and suggestions very welcome...
www.galwaydiving.com
(The committee page is a work in progress as the new committee was just elected!)

Also, I've always been thinking about web design as a career. I'm currently studing for engineering though. If that site was to be done for a commercial company, how much could you charge for it? And is there much work out there for web design...?

Thanks,
Joe

EKRIUQ

Best of luck with the website

What points would you like your website to be judged by?

Design
Content
Clarity
Ease of navigation
W3c Standards
Website Optimisation
Compared to similar websites
Components and Modules used

Pick the most important of the above list and I'll tell you what I think

chat2joe

Well I suppose mostly...
Design
Clarity
Ease of navigation
Components and Modules used
Compared to similar websites

As regards...
Content - It's mostly content taken from an older site, presented hopefully better. It's what was requested by the members.
W3c Standards - I'm total amateur so I'm sure i've broken lots of rules but yea - hit me!
Website Optimisation - Yeah but I'm aware of the images on the site being a bit on the heavy side. Most of the visitors is from within the college network where it's a very fast connection so I was designing for that.

chat2joe

Oh and by the way some features you can't see...
When the committee logs in with username and password they get additional menu on the left;
- Add News (Form which they can fill and set publishing settings on)
- File Manager (For uploading and sharing committee files)
- Email - just a link to club email account login. (Google Mail for the site).

snollup

HeyJoe!!!, bet youve never got that b4???!!! Anyway, site look really good. On thing tho, when viewen in Firefox on a mac the nav bar on left colours done come out the best. the two greens youve use clash a wee bit and the members & log in buttons alinment is a little off, prob borders on table!
Best of luck, hope this helps.

chat2joe

the two greens youve use clash a wee bit

That the menu and the forum green?
If so, I realised that alright. I'd got the forum up and running on the old site from a few months ago so the theme was set to work with that. I must redo the theme/template on it to fit in better here now, the header on the forum is much too big for my liking too.

snollup

not to sure if i should say this here but you should also post on creative irelands forms. loads of web devs post there.
sorry boards!!!

EKRIUQ

snollup wrote: »

not to sure if i should say this here but you should also post on creative irelands forms. loads of web devs post there.
sorry boards!!!

"heathen" (looks away in disgusted face )

Gordon

Looks nice, is it joomla! that you skinned?

chat2joe

is it joomla! that you skinned?

MAMBO actually! Very little difference. I like the new Joomla, I'm using it for another site. Joomla seems to be progressing a bit faster now it seems. I'm happy with Mambo for this though!

chat2joe

BingoBongo: Pick the most important of the above list and I'll tell you what I think

Well BingoBongo, I was expecting some critical comments! :rolleyes: Any helpful pointers...?

EKRIUQ

Don't worry Joe, I won't let you down

chat2joe

Don't worry Joe, I won't let you down

Uh oh... calm before the storm!

tricky D

Hi Joe,

here's some of my thoughts:

Design

- you seem to have 3 homepages:
new/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=15&Itemid=39
new/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=28
new/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1
the text content on these is very similar and could easily be consolidated into a single page, and the different pics
Itemid=1 also has the current weather, the others don't.

- the weather info is hard to read (dark on black) and could be on all pages.

- tides has (Add 1hr for Summertime). can you do this on your end?

- Login form should be on all pages - users don't always arrive thru the front door. See if putting a dark or black border around the 2 text fields and login submit button looks better

- for this kind of site, I would generally try to keep the header and righthand and lefthand content areas the same
- I would also usually put a footer on all pages with a line of text nav links, line of contact info and copyright line

- there seems imo to be one colour too many on the homepage. I suggest you try changing the background colour for the 'LATEST NEWS', 'MOST READ Content' etc to one of the colours you are already using (blue, orange or green). Make the .moduletable text bold. Do these .moduleheadings need to be transformed by css to uppercase, when all the other headings are consistently mixedcase?

- on many pages:
some of the headings are in Times New Roman(.contentheading) and some are Arial (h2), they really should be all headings and all text content should be Arial or other sans serif. The general guideline is serif for print and sans serif for screen


- where's the contact page? I can't find your address or a contact form. I know it is 'buried' in the FAQ, but it should be a left hand nav item. The map pic isn't very legible and consider adding directions.

- do you need to display the 'last upated...' info? Personally I wouldn't bother with it

- can you rewrite the url's to something 'nicer' e.g. about_us/committee.html instead of /new/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=29&Itemid=45

Content
seems fine. haven't checked much of it.


Standards compliance

- lots of 'bad' xhtml. see http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fgalwaydiving.com%2Fnew%2Findex.php&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0
you have lots of components/bits and bobs so making the code valid is going to be tough, very tough, if you decided to try
similar for the css
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fgalwaydiving.com%2Fnew%2Ftemplates%2Fwaterandstone_greenandblack%2Fcss%2Ftemplate_css.css&profile=css21&usermedium=all&warning=1&lang=en

actually the code is so messy I don't think it'll be worthwhile trying much. Better to check that it displays satisfactorily in all the main browsers http://browsershots.org/

gotta go
hth
\r

EKRIUQ

What tricky D said all good points

Well first off I’m not going to criticise your site because I’m sure you’ve put a lot of time and work into the website and I presume it’s on a voluntary basis of which you’ll probably get little thanks and praise and all you hear is “you never put this there” or “there’s a spelling mistake there”.

First off your on to a winner with using a CMS system like mambo as it can grow as your website grow with plenty of open source resources that can help improve the website.

On first impressions the website looks a bit dark, and would go with a lighter background around your main body and under the weather clock there’s a square, I don’t know what’s that is about. The backgound on the original is better I think as you can see here http://www.exilenetworks.com/demo/index.php select the waterandstone_greenandblack in the template chooser on the left. So if you want to put your own mark on it I’d change the css and bit and more colours and example of the same template is here but a lot more customisation.
http://www.continencevictoria.org.au

I’d turn off the last updated on articles as from the front page it says this site is updated regularly and at the bottom it says Last Updated ( Nov 24, 2007 at 11:41 AM ) and the next article says Last Updated ( Oct 13, 2007 at 09:13 PM ) and again Last Updated ( Oct 12, 2007 at 03:58 PM ) so that a bit of a white lie,

(You can change this in article parameters)