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yankeegraffix
Posts: 6
Joined: 8/15/2007
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Please critique me....be brutal - 8/15/2007 20:57:42
please visit my sites and be brutally honest what you think, I'm no code junkie, just WISYWIG programming. Let me know what you think, and what errors you can find....
http://www.yankeegraffix.com
http://www.kylesplayground.info
http://www.10yearvampfans.info
Also check out my brownsville radio site, I never got a chance to sell it, the woman I was working for (web designer) didn't like it, it wasn't her style...her version: http://www.brownsvilleradio.com.
All sites have been designed in FrontPage except Kylesplayground, which I am currently still working on. I utilize Fireworks for all graphics and templates.
Thanks for any honesty you can give.
Mark
Yankee Graffix
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treetopsranch
Posts: 1156
From: Cottage Grove, OR, USA
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RE: Please critique me....be brutal - 8/15/2007 23:12:16
Third page: Dark Dark Blue font on a black background. How do you expect someone to read that?
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Don from TreeTops Ranch, Oregon
"I've got a taste for quality and luxury"
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Tailslide
Posts: 6295
Joined: 5/10/2005
From: Out here on the raggedy edge
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RE: Please critique me....be brutal - 8/16/2007 3:21:37
I don't like the text within graphics thing - very bad idea for several reasons:
1. If you're not using a visual browser you can't read it at all (if you're blind or partially sighted)
2. If you're not so young anymore and your eyesight is suffering then you can't increase the size of the text as you can normal text.
3. Search engines can't read it so can't decide if your site has any useful information which will make your search engine results suffer
4. It's a real pain to change the text
Most of the sites seem to be old-school slice'n'dice in table layouts which is slightly old-fashioned now (sorry - well you did say be brutal!) although the Tammy site is very pretty. To ensure that your sites are lighter weight, more accessible and easier to maintain then you should look at using semantic HTML and CSS layouts. You can still use your graphics obviously - you just use them slightly differently as background images (unless they're informational in which case they're in the code itself). You should also be able to get around the site without using a mouse.
I know you say you use a WYSIWYG editor - but to produce really good quality sites you also need to understand the markup and how it should be used. If you prefer to use a WYSIWYG then fine - but you should be checking the markup in the code view as most (all) wysiwyg editors can't be trusted to do the "right thing" code-wise. I believe that EW is better than FP however - even so you need to keep an eye on them all.
You should also ensure that all your sites work cross-browser and if possible cross-platform. If you're on the pc the that means: Firefox (use this as your primary checking browser), Opera, Safari, IE7 and IE6 at the minimum.
This is an excellent tutorial site for CSS: http://www.cssbasics.com/
Good luck with it!
_____________________________
"My strategy is so simple an idiot could have devised it"
Little Blue Plane Web Design | Blood, Sweat & Rust - A Land Rover restoration project
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womble
Posts: 5702
Joined: 3/14/2005
From: Living on the edge
Status: offline
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RE: Please critique me....be brutal - 8/16/2007 8:25:44
In addition to all of the above, can I just add on the fonts front on most of them - yuck!  I'm one of those people who have some visual difficulties, and at times I use a screen magnifier/screenreader combo, and even with the magnification on, those fonts aren't easy to read.
Yankee Graffix - no idea what the font is, but it certainly isn't easy to read. I didn't even try reading the text on the home page because at my normal magnification it's just so blurred for me it's just too much like hard work. No indication of what's clickable and what's navigation without hovering over it. As Tailslide said, sites need to be keyboard navigable as well as with a mouse. Not everyone can or does use a mouse, and on some site's it's practically impossible to navigate them easily without a mouse. Never make things hard for visitors, or make them have to thing. A good website should be intuitive to use, not have you searching around looking for the navigation.
The other pages with plain Arial (at least that's what I'm getting because my default browser font is Arial or sans-serif), are much easier to read but lack any kind of "designed-ness" about them - tables - some with borders, some with out, and text just sitting there on a plain white background (good contrast, but black on huge expanses of white can cause glare problems for some users), on some pages, small columns (height-wise) with text then spanning columns with no breaks between them - difficult to read because it's difficult to follow the flow of the text.
Kyles Playground - tiny text in a virtually unreadable font to anyone without perfect eyesight. "The Story" page - one huge expanse of text - no padding, no margin, and no paragraph breaks. While the font's clear, it isn't easy to read because there's nothing breaking it up.
10 Year Vamp - Blue text on a black background in an unclear font? Hmmmm. "The Band" - again a huge expanse of text with nothing breaking it up. That was as far as I got on that one.
Brownsville Radio - again, on the home page (didn't get any further), sites need to be keyboard navigable. There's initially no clue as to where the navigation might be, and to anyone who's not used to using the internet, I'm guessing that home page is as far as they'll ever get because they won't know how to get anywhere else on the site.
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~~ "A cruel god ain't no god at all" ~~
~~ Erase hate. Practice love. ~~
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yankeegraffix
Posts: 6
Joined: 8/15/2007
Status: offline
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RE: Please critique me....be brutal - 8/18/2007 8:14:40
Thanks to everyone for their assistance, but you have raised more questions. How do I make a keyboard Navigateable website??? How do you create a website that looks a certain way without tables?? I Thank you for any help, I will be working on these sites soon, but I will probably start with Yankee Graffix.
Mark
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d a v e
Posts: 4179
Joined: 7/24/2002
From: England (but live in Finland now)
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RE: Please critique me....be brutal - 8/18/2007 9:26:10
the slices are falling apart - white gaps - in firefox for yankee graphics
"the key to your success" it's a bit cheesy! (i.e. corny) and the white glow AND drop shadow makes reading the text underneath the key too difficult
i don't like the logo for yankee graphics either as it looks dated (circa 1990's) in both colour scheme and the 3d look :(
your links are the default blue and should be something that fits in with the colour scheme
i had a look at the radio site that you did and i thought that looked good!
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David Prescott
Gekko web design
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Tailslide
Posts: 6295
Joined: 5/10/2005
From: Out here on the raggedy edge
Status: offline
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RE: Please critique me....be brutal - 8/18/2007 10:14:33
quote:
ORIGINAL: yankeegraffix
Thanks to everyone for their assistance, but you have raised more questions. How do I make a keyboard Navigateable website??? How do you create a website that looks a certain way without tables?? I Thank you for any help, I will be working on these sites soon, but I will probably start with Yankee Graffix.
Mark
If a site's got "normal" links in it then it's keyboard navigable (use the Tab button on a PC). However it can be hard to know where you are tabbing around the page from link to link. So you add a "focus" effect which looks like the normal hover effect via CSS. That way the links "light up" as you tab through them and it's easier to see where you are. IE, being IE is unable to do this properly so you need to add an active rule in for IE to do the same thing.
This is missed off in many CSS tutorials so you'll have to remember!! You'll usually see links styled in a stylesheet like this:
a:link, a:visited {color:red; text-decoration:underline;}
a:hover {color:blue; text-decoration:underline;}
You just need to add in a bit more on the hover line like this:
a:link, a:visited {color:red; text-decoration:underline;}
a:focus, a:hover, a:active {color:blue; text-decoration:underline;}
And they need to be in that order to work properly.
As far as building sites without tables - have a look at the link in my last post for CSS basics - it's a nice tutorial. Also HTML Dog is good.
Keep it simple when you start out with CSS until you get used to the browser "quirks" (mainly IE). Also download as many browsers as you can so that you can test on them all - they're all free! You should at least have IE7, Firefox, Opera, Safari and possibly IE6/5.5 and 5 (use the multiple IE tredosoft to do that)
_____________________________
"My strategy is so simple an idiot could have devised it"
Little Blue Plane Web Design | Blood, Sweat & Rust - A Land Rover restoration project
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yankeegraffix
Posts: 6
Joined: 8/15/2007
Status: offline
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RE: Please critique me....be brutal - 8/18/2007 21:12:40
Okay, I'm concentrating now on Yankee Graffix,
I have altered the homepage to be easier to read, better logo design, etc...I'm still working on it, I have to change the CSS still, but I think it's coming along.
I'm also working on the interior pages, any other ideas on how to fix those up??
Thanks for all of your help.
Mark
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weblaunch
Posts: 15
Joined: 4/26/2005
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RE: Please critique me....be brutal - 8/22/2007 15:45:10
Regarding http://www.yankeegraffix.com, for some reason the design looks outdated...it strikes me as a site from several years back.
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dpf
Posts: 7126
Joined: 11/12/2003
From: India-napolis
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RE: Please critique me....be brutal - 8/22/2007 18:11:20
being brutally honest: amateurish
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Dan
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yankeegraffix
Posts: 6
Joined: 8/15/2007
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RE: Please critique me....be brutal - 8/25/2007 20:40:39
Thanks for all of the feedback, there was some great critiques in there.
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