your valued opinion please...

DJB

Ok, I put up 2 posts over the last 2 months regarding a design and css layout for a site I was designing and got some great feedback on it. Much appreciated!

I just launched the site and would appreciate any final critieques of it, e.g. design, layout, content, structure, etc.

www.teammanager.ie :cool:

Looking forward to hearing from ppl.

Rgds,

Dave

Ph3n0m

at a glance

This is a great use of CSS and Tables - which is exactly what people should do, aim for maximum audience viewability and usability (without killing yourself with massive stylesheets, nested tables)

On Opera, Firefox and IE it looks great, with no noticeable problems.

Have you tested on a mac?

DJB

Thx! It was my first site using pure css for the layout. There are tables in the content but this was unavoidable in some cases.

I have tested on the major browsers: IE, Opera, Firefox, etc. When doing the html/css layout, one of the lads with a mac did some testing for me and posted up some screenshots. It looked fine at the time so hopefully still is. Maybe he'll post up again. I'll also get my graphic designer to have a go and tell me how it fairs out.

Thanks,

Dave

thedesigntribe

Nice job DJB

I just powered up the Mini Mac and had a look. I checked it on Firefox, Safari & IE5 - it is identical to how it displays on the PC (use PC's myself) on all the MAC browsers! Nice job.

Can't get you a screen shot - I don't have any software, bar browsers on the MAC.

DJB

thedesigntribe wrote:

Nice job DJB

I just powered up the Mini Mac and had a look. I checked it on Firefox, Safari & IE5 - it is identical to how it displays on the PC (use PC's myself) on all the MAC browsers! Nice job.

Can't get you a screen shot - I don't have any software, bar browsers on the MAC.

Excellent Mr. Tribe. That's great news. Thanks for checking that for me.

By the way... I may have mentioned it before but I think you've got a cool looking site yourself there :cool:

Cheeurs,

Dave

kjt

Nice site Dave, REALLY fast loading times too.
Slick, to the point. Just the way websites should be!

mneylon

About time somebody posted something here that was actually attractive and close to w3c compliant.

steve-hosting36

Great job Dave, looks amazing

Webmonkey

Excellent. I like it.

DJB

Thx for the feedback. I'm chuffed with it!

When you post up here and you don't receive criticism, I must be on the right track.

blacknight... css is valid W3C... HTML is missing an alt tag on a spacer image and i've redefined a div id, which doesn't cause a problem so... i'm happy that it is HTML valid too

Thanks...

mneylon

Err.
No Doctype definition.
Unescaped ampersand, which should be put in as:

&

two warnings about DIV tags
table - height is not a valid attribute

maxheadroom

DJB wrote:

Thx for the feedback. I'm chuffed with it!

When you post up here and you don't receive criticism, I must be on the right track.

blacknight... css is valid W3C... HTML is missing an alt tag on a spacer image and i've redefined a div id, which doesn't cause a problem so... i'm happy that it is HTML valid too

Thanks...

Oh well, if you insist

You've got a rendering problem with your select boxes on the demo page - see the attached screenshot. Screenshot taken with FF 1.02 on WinXP

But the design is really nice, clean, professional, easy to follow. Well done

DJB

I'll look into the FF issue with the drop down menus.

Blacknight... went through the whole site and made it all W3C compliant - CSS and XHTML 1.0

Only 1 thing I couldn't fix... http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A//www.teammanager.ie/v1/onlinedemo.asp

There is no attribute onSubmit... any ideas on how to fix this? Everything else on the site is valid, just this one thing and I'll leave the code alone then.

Thx for pushing me to get it fully W3C compliant

Rgds,

Dave

maxheadroom

DJB wrote:

Only 1 thing I couldn't fix... http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A//www.teammanager.ie/v1/onlinedemo.asp

There is no attribute onSubmit... any ideas on how to fix this? Everything else on the site is valid, just this one thing and I'll leave the code alone then.

Google says : http://lists.evolt.org/archive/Week-of-Mon-20030901/147873.html

Basically, in xml the attributes need to be lowercase. Change onSubmit to onsubmit and you'll be fine.

DJB

That's done the trick! Thx maxheadroom!

I now have a fully validated W3C CSS and XHTML 1.0 website....

Thanks for the feedback lads!

Rgds,

Dave

Webmonkey

Well done once again, looks damn amazing and is fully valid xhtml.

seo-ireland

Great looking site DJB. I recently created my first CSS based XHTML compliant site as well. It is a great feeling.

A quick note about the page titles though, I would move the company name to the end and try to shorten them to below 65 characters.

Well done.

DJB

seo-ireland wrote:

Great looking site DJB. I recently created my first CSS based XHTML compliant site as well. It is a great feeling.

A quick note about the page titles though, I would move the company name to the end and try to shorten them to below 65 characters.

Well done.

Hey SEO... it is a good feeling when you see that "valid xhtml 1.0" pop up! happy days

I updated the page titles... shortened them with the main kewords I wanted. So, I'm hovering around 70 characters depending on page heading. Went the extra mile and set up individual keywords on each page relevant to the text on that page and all that lark so hopefully get a good listing in the search engines. We'll have to wait and see... will report back in about 2/3 months unless it's faster nowadays?

Rgds,

Dave

seo-ireland

I've noticed something else DJB that could seriously effect your search engine rankings. When I enter the address 'www.teammanager.ie' it redirects to 'www.teammanager.ie/v1/home.asp'. How are you performing the redirect? You should be using a 301 redirect.

Also try to get a listing in the DMOZ and Yahoo directory for a start. Also build links from other search engine friendly directories. There is a great list here http://info.vilesilencer.com/main.php?rock=seo-friendly-list.php, here http://www.thebestwebdirectories.com/ and on my forum.

Hope that helps.

rsynnott

seo-ireland wrote:

I've noticed something else DJB that could seriously effect your search engine rankings. When I enter the address 'www.teammanager.ie' it redirects to 'www.teammanager.ie/v1/home.asp'. How are you performing the redirect? You should be using a 301 redirect.

If you can possibly avoid it, don't redirect the home page at all; Google likes it not. Have a look at URL Rewriting.

seo-ireland

rsynnott wrote:

If you can possibly avoid it, don't redirect the home page at all; Google likes it not. Have a look at URL Rewriting.

Not necessarily rsynnott, as long as it is a 301 redirect it is perfectly acceptable. URL rewriting is used primarily to make URLs more search engine friendly (e.g. removing querystring variables) and easier to spider.

DJB

Any site I have built, I have always put the main site pages into a subfolder. It just makes for managing the sites easier with templates in one folder, content in another, etc. I've never experienced any problems with google or any of the search engines in getting listed.

I use a 302 redirect:

<% response.redirect("/v1/home.asp") %>

I spent a good while adding my site to a load of irish search engines / directories. Cheers for the links... when I get more time, I'll get my copy and pasting cap on and go advertise on those directories.

On another note... what the hell ever happened to the doras directory?

Rgds,

Dave

rsynnott

seo-ireland wrote:

Not necessarily rsynnott, as long as it is a 301 redirect it is perfectly acceptable. URL rewriting is used primarily to make URLs more search engine friendly (e.g. removing querystring variables) and easier to spider.

Hmm, ah, right, I've always gotten very poor results with it...

seo-ireland

DJB wrote:

I use a 302 redirect:

<% response.redirect("/v1/home.asp") %>

On the subject of 301 redirects vs. 302 redirects you may want to read this article DJB http://www.seotoday.com/browse.php/category/articles/id/477/index.php

Jezz I don't know what happened to Doras. Google is not showing a cached version of their home page http://www.google.se/search?q=www.doras.ie&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official
(always a sign that something is wrong). Maybe they went belly up, I know they switched to a Pay For Inclusion model a while back. Or maybe they did something to get banned by Google. Or maybe it is just because their site is down

DJB

Ok, just to be safe than sorry... I've changed to a 301 redirect.

I've set up in IIS to do an exact permanent redirect to the site home page.

Cheers,

Dave

DJB

Nope... I've actually turned it off again. It started causing problems. Have to stick to the 302 for the moment.

seo-ireland

Better to be safe than sorry, as long as your site works properly that is ultimately the most important thing

BTW how old is the site? It's just that it doesn't seem to be indexed by the major SEs yet.

DJB

It's not even a week old... so don't expect to be in the major search engines till may/june or so. Have told them all about it but checked the logs and no spiders on the site just yet. Getting added to lots of directories so that will have to do for the moment.

rsynnott

Google will generally add you fairly quickly; a few days seems to be normal, if you link to the new site from an existing one.