1st website - comments v welcome

Suebee

Hi all

I'm interested in furthering my skills in the webdesign area, and
who knows from there.. so am starting to get some kind of portfolio going.

Would love to know what people think about this first attempt,
all comments very welcome, I have no doubt the site is far for perfect.

www.pembrokewanderers.ie

Thanks folks
S

AARRRGH

It doesn't display properly in my browser. See the attached screenshot.

IE 7.05
1440 x 900
Widescreen monitor

Suebee

arrgggh is right. the highest res i can test here is 1280x1024
hmmm....

p

It's a fairly basic site. It does the job, but it's nothing special. To be completely blunt it doesn't really look designed at all. It looks like a programmer built it. It does the job, but it could be a lot better.

For a first website though, it's pretty good, it works, it will be useful to visitors and it does the job. Keep at it.

Areas you should try to improve are, using tables less, making sure your HTML & CSS are valid, moving the CSS into an external file and other best practices. You also need to work on your design. Learn about typography, layout, contrast and colour theory.

Creamy Goodness

i'd agree with the other guys, good first website.

a few little bits though, you've done well to incorporate purple into the site design - since it's a club website you're kind of restricted to which colours you can use successfully - but i'd like to see a bit more of the other jersey colours there, the yellow/goldy colour would be nice.

also the league tables are images, now i can see this having problem, it will be a pain in the ass to update every week or after every game. would be nice to have this tied into the fixtures part of the site.


it may be to your advantage if you can look into some sort of script that will take the scores from a weeks games and automatically update the tables based on the scores.

also having the sponsors on the right there is a little off putting.

forbairt

few comments / thoughts haven't really read through the others...

Menu is broken... (broken - border isn't appearing on the right
All the text feels left aligned ... leaves a lot of white space on the right
The logos right aligned float very far to the right
Imagery used on the social page seems WAY out of place too many different styles
There aren't strong enough colours used on the site ...
Fonts / Colors seem a bit all over the place
The logo has quite a cool purple yellow and black ... maybe use those
Some of the photos are truly hidious .. (gum shield pictures of some of the women) really don't do anything.
Not too keen on the title text moving around all over the place on the banner images.


All that said ... great for a first website.

Suebee

thanks all for taking time to view site and post comments.
will take all on board, some very valid points.

I agree there is alot of white space on the site, and i'm not completely
happy with that. Some of the banner images arent great, the club
didnt have that many high quality images i could squeeze into
such a tight space. Does anyone think the banners are too big?
(800x175px). They will be chnaged and updated overtime tho.

Next on the list would certainly be to automate the league tables,
could this be run off an excel spreadsheet? I havent done much investigation
into it to be honest. Maybe using a DB would be better way to go..
I have a little bit of ASP from college i could go back and see if that could help me.

The club are also keen to get a password protected area up where they can get training set piece videos online. Which preference do programmers have to achieve this, folder protection done using the webhost control panel, or to
have a login.asp etc. I had thought i could use .htaccess but this only works on unix platforms I believe. I have no experience with php but there is loads of stuff on the web if I need to turn to that i suppose. The easiest and quickest method would be my preference at the moment for a variety of reasons.

Anyway, thanks all again for comments, am going to stick at...all a bit of a learning curve at the moment.

Out of interest, any idea how much a Professional Web Design company would charge to develop a fairly static site like that..with 60 pages roughly, some basic programming and graphics? A difficult question I know as obviously the results would be quite different to what I have produced!!

Thanks all
Sue

Webmonkey

.htaccess is part of apache. Is your server running Apache on Unix/Linux - most are.

htaccess is easy option for a secure area.

p

A professional company would do that for about between 3000 (at the budget end of the market) to 10,000 roughly. They probably wouldn't do a static site at all though.

You should take a look at www.teamsnap.com for the private part of the site. It's free at the moment as it's in trial, but it provides stuff for organising a team that might handle all of that for you.

Suebee

excellent, thanks 'P' - will do

Bluefrog

First off I think this is really good work for a first site but regardless of the comments you are getting here, if the client is happy you'll get more work.

Takes guts to post a site here for review so good for you!

Somebody said reduce the table usage and they are right. Start as you mean to go on - develop your knowledge of CSS layouts. Also inlining the CSS takes away from some of the usefulness of them.

While Dreamweaver can be a very useful tool I think it can blind you somewhat so I would try to avoid the WSIWIG and menu facilities and make sure you understand what is going on in the code it produces.

Also, you should be thinking about SEO (search engine optimisation), the CSS will help but the most glaring issue I see on the site as it stands is that all the pages seem to have the same content in the title tag. This will greatly limit the performance of the site in the search engines. Think of titles for each page that users would be likely to search on.

Keyword meta tags don't really matter that much any more though the description one is still used by search engines in result display. Getting links in from other clubs' websites would be a good move and submitting the site to regional web directories.

You should also have a look at Google and MSN Live webmaster tools, Analytics and Yahoo site explorer.

Also, why not put the URL to the site in your signature here

Finally I think the scores idea is a nice little project to get your teeth into. You could use a third party service but you may be left stranded if it becomes a paid for thing and also you would learn more if you made your own system. I'd recommend database storage of the results so the site builds up an archive that people will reference - another pull feature for the site.

You seem to have a talent on the programming side and I would also say that it is difficult to be solely a web designer these days without some development knowledge to back it up.

Looking forward to seeing how it develops.

Suebee

thanks, will certainly have a look at the search engine optimistation, the site is linked on a good few other sites so thats a start.
The bit I really struggle on is design, am coming from a programming background, so I know I really need to work on that area.
thanks all for comments...