Test site on a PC

[stevo]

Does anyone here have access to a PC browser? Site works fine on Safari and Firefox OSX but I think that text might be dropping off in explorer etc.

Screen grabs of the problems would be handy!

Many thanks again.

www.traffic-design.co.uk/gandg

[EC]

looks fine on 7, problem in 6 though http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/7345/untitled7rb7.png

IE 6 doesn't support transparent .png that's why the funky blue color. :(

[mandy wong]

Looked at it on aol on a PC. It appears to load each layer at a time i.e your black background, then header, then white boxes then text etc. I personally like looking at sites that loads up straight away. What software did you use to put it together?

[M @]

Change the name of your "banner". Some virus/firewall software will ban any image with "banner" in the filename or path. Looks great otherwise.

[Drazan]

Freeway 4 Pro

A wysiwyg editor that lets people design webs without known code...

And it shows.

Your site is loading one thing at a time because there is a style sheet and yet every single line also has inline style tags. Anyone who has javascript turned off or an older computer may have trouble viewing the site.

The content and code is not SEO (search engine optimized) which means that the search bots will have a hard time indexing the site.

Also because of the dirty code anyone with accessibility needs won't be able to make heads or tails out of the site and become very fustruated and leave the site.

The slow loading pages are because everything is javascript engine scripted. The browser has to load the code, figure out where everything placed then load the images ---- for every single page. I'm on a 3mb connection and it took nearly 10 seconds for the page to load. In a dial up world (still) this means that the dial up people won't wait 2-3 minutes for the page to load.

The images *.png are not suported by all browsers and you will have sever compatability issues with them.

The design overall is a functional site. I would change the front image of the text to actual text. A person who has images off or uses a text reader will not be able to tell what the site is at all.

This is the main reason that I really dislike off brand off the shelf wysiwyg editors. Learn the code, and do it the right way to better service your customers. IMO

=)
Jade

[cnic]

Stevo - for not being a designer / developer (assumption).... I think the site looks pretty darn good. I have seen much worse. With a little research I'm sure you can make this site load faster. Otherwise, I thought the site looked pretty nice. I looked through it.... my mother and father in-law have a home in northern mass. along the coast. They recently added one of these gas insert fireplace thingy's and they love it!!

Dont mind Drazan... she knows what shes talking about, and I dont think she means for it to sound as harsh as it reads.

Good luck!!

.

[Drazan]

Design wise = good

Code wise = bad

Jade rating = 50%

you can make this site a winner with a little more effort.

=)
Jade

[mandy wong]

yeah the design isnt bad... for a fireplace website, I just dont like how it loads. Dreamweaver is the way to go forward!!!

[ecsyle]

Ecsyle Rating = If the site meets the clients requirements and expectations, and is under budget, it's a success. Clients dont give a **** about clean code, accessibility (well, mine do, because my clients are awesome), or what program was used to create it. They just want their product.

I give the site 1 gold star for effort, and the judges have ruled it a 6.8. You stand in 3rd place, with 3 men on base, with 1 timeout left. Just nail this 3 point shot and you will save the rec center from the evil corporation with bulldozers. Plus you get the rad 80's girl who never acted again :)

[dyers78]

loaded ok for me (DSL). A tad choppy, but I would not have noticed if you hadn't brought it to my attention. looks pretty good

[Drazan]

Actually clients do care about accessibility and clean code when they can't find their website in google or find it nearly a thousand results into it.

I've taken over three sites just in the last two months and converted from the dirty code to something much better.

Last year I took one site that was +500 rank and took it up to top ten in nearly every search term in their store. Some even outranking the manufacturers of the products.

Trust me when I say it counts. Not visually, but the days of just having a good visual site is long past. With thousands of websites emerging daily it takes more that a site that just looks good to make it's presence on the net.

At least that is my experience.

[ecsyle]

No, not all clients care. Not all of them care about their google ranking or placement. Some just want a tool for existing clients. I have had some that just do not give a flying **** about it. My current client base does care, but to assume that "all" of them do because you feel they should is nonsense.

[chris_bcn]

VERY few clients give a crap. If it looks good then they're happy. THey couldn't care less about pretty much anything. It's annoying, and they'll always get great code from me, but the vast majority, meh!

Trust me when I say it counts, but is discounted by most clients. Believe it or not, but a lot of us have also been doing this for a long time, and are very skilled at our craft, and produce fantastic work that is visually very pleasing and impeccably coded - but a lot of that goes unseen.

Good design, and coding, and typography is invisible

[EC]

word.

I have clients that care, especially those that are monetizing sites. Clean code can be "sold" as a benefit to SEO and long-term site maintenance cost savings. There's no question that to do it right you have to get away from the WYSIWYG editors. But I wouldn't expect every person who ever builds a website to start out knowing how to craft perfectly accessible, optimized, standards-compliant code and go after them with a pitch fork if they don't. lol My god I think the first website I built was in FrontPage "Hello World" or on geocities or something. :D

The poor guy just asked for a browser check. :(

[Drazan]

I think that this is a good discussion about web building.

Maybe the person posting doesn't know that there is more efficient way of displaying the page. Maybe they don't care and neither does the customer - yet for others it does matter. I don't make that decision, and I'm not saying my way or it's crap. I've posted here and in other threads to show people what's going on behind the scenes. Do they have to do what I say or else burn in the seven hells of the net? Nope. Will I be angry because they don't make that effort? Nope. Will I stop posting the possibilities to improve ones site and avoid pitfalls? Nope.

I'm not saying Death to the Wysiwyg editors. Use them to hearts content, but be aware of what they do. If the end product fits the client's need then all is good and my post is superflouous and can be ignored. If the client wants more and the person using the wysiwyg doesn't realise the detrimental effects of bad code, then my post is helpful.

I care, thusly I posted my opinion - in text. It was meant to be educational, not rip up on someone. Everything is my opinion - opinions may be accepted or discarded at will. Lovely thing about the net, everything is up to interpretation.

On that note here's something that I posted in another forum.

Words on the net will always be misinterpreted based on the readers mood, expectations, morality, education, assumptions, preconceptions and misconceptions, and mental capacity at the time of reading the posted content.


=)
Jade

[ecsyle]

Not every discussion about websites needs to turn into a platform to push web standards and compliant code. Sometimes they just need an answer to a simple question. If you want to debate the pros of coding to standards it's probably best to do that in a new thread instead of hijacking someone elses. It's like constantly telling me about jesus and religion and that im living my life wrong when all I asked for is if the curtains match the living room. The more you preach, the more I am not going to listen to you at all. And maybe they just don't want to hear that there is a better way to do what they are doing right now. Perhaps they are just learning and want to solve their immediate problem without being told there is a better way to do something that doesn't involve the question they asked.

As for wysiwyg editors, obviously you haven't used any decent modern ones. They are not writing garbage code like they were 7 years ago. The code they "generate" is clean and valid if you know what you are doing. The software is not the problem. It's the user. I use dreamweaver often and my code is clean and valid. Someone else could use dreamweaver and their code will probably unlock some secret gateway to satans bathroom.

[Drazan]

I think we are on the same page Ecsyle. Honestly I was just trying to be helpful to the person.

Maybe I shouldn't post about web stuff anymore if it's seems like I'm "preaching" - never my intent.

[ecsyle]

Haha, no, i'm not saying stop posting :)