Site Crit Please 1

[gwrman]

Please view and comment on all aspects of my <a href="

http://www.billiardsforum.info/">Billiard

site</a>:

http://www.billiardsforum.info/

 

[johnwm]

General appearance is very nice, even though much of the world will be misled by the title! (Many of us see billiards as a game played with a single red ball and 2 distinguishable cue balls, and would describe your game as Pool )

You will need to get your site to validate to have a better chance of appearing the same on different browsers. See

http://validator.w3.org/

or

http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/

The other stuff is just a few little niggles:

It's not obvious how to get back to the site's home page from the pages on the tabbed menu, and the tab for 'forum' changes to 'fourm' on the forum page.

The sub navigation (under the tabbed) is inconsistent, with 'home' appearing first or second, depending on which page you're on, and 'pool rules main' being used instead of 'pool rules home'.

The 'Pool Playing Tips Home' link on the 'choosing the best shot' page is currently giving a 'The system cannot find the file specified.' error message

Choosing the best shot page has 'gracious' spelt as 'grascious' so it's probably worth spell checking the whole site.

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[Rieekan]

Just a couple of things I saw:

[ol]
[li]Take a look at building the site using a tableless design[/li]
[li]You don't give your visually impaired users the ability to skip by the navigation on any of your pages[/li]
[/ol]

- George

 

[gwrman]

johnwm,

Thank you so much for your keen and sharp eye.

"You will need to get your site to validate to have a better chance of appearing the same on different browsers."

...yes, I knew this one was coming and I will be fixing some of the major errors, but at the risk of upsetting everyone here, I must say that i've decided not to spend hours chasing an error free page. Even google's code for the search box (per the TOS, I can not alter) has validation issues.

"It's not obvious how to get back to the site's home page from the pages on the tabbed menu"

The large name/logo at the top links back, which I thought was pretty standard way to nav to the homepage these days. Any other suggestions?

"...and the tab for 'forum' changes to 'fourm' on the forum page."

Fixed. Thanks! I've got a sort of blindness at this point to things like that on this site.

"The sub navigation (under the tabbed) is inconsistent, with 'home' appearing first or second, depending on which page you're on, and 'pool rules main' being used instead of 'pool rules home'. "

Fixed. All tabs should be consistent now. Again, silly mistake on my part.

"The 'Pool Playing Tips Home' link on the 'choosing the best shot' page is currently giving a 'The system cannot find the file specified.' error message"

Fixed. Thanks!

"Choosing the best shot page has 'gracious' spelt as 'grascious' so it's probably worth spell checking the whole site."

Fixed and will definitely SP-CHK the whole thing shortly.


Rieekan,

"Take a look at building the site using a tableless design"

I knew this one was coming too. At this point, I agree with the benefits of a CSS layout, but time is a factor. Ive assessed the browser incompat. issue here, and have determied that it renders generally the same in the big three, IE, FF, OP and thus have made a conscious decision to put this off for a while.

"You don't give your visually impaired users the ability to skip by the navigation on any of your pages"

Sorry, what do you mean by this? Are you saying that there should be a sitemap?

Thanks again for all of your feedback.

 

[Rieekan]

The tableless design was just a suggestion, mostly in regards to how a screen reader will list your site. Here's a sample from Fangs:

Page has seven headings and forty-six links
Billiards dash Internet Explorer
Table with one column and thirty-five rows
Table with five columns and three rows
Link billiardsforum.info Billiard and Pool tips, resources, forums, and billiard information.
Link Graphic billiards
Table with seven columns and one row
Link Billiard Terms
Link Billiards Tips
Link Billiards Rules
Link Billiards Room
Link Billiard Forum
Link Billiard Blog
Table end
Table end
Table with four columns and two rows
Welcome to the complete billiards resource! Thank you for visiting.
Table with seven columns and one row
Edit site colon
Radio button Not checked billiard terms colon
Radio button Checked
Searchbutton
Table end
Table end
Table with five columns and twenty-seven rows
...

If you try to "read" the site with the aid of a screen reader like Jaws or the Firefox plug-in Fangs, users aren't given an out to skip by the navigation and get directly to content. Generally, a link is added to some global navigation (above the main menu) that links to a named anchor at the start of the actual content in the page.

Something to the effect of:
<html>
<body>
<div id="globalNav">
<a href="#content"><img src="/images/x.gif" alt="Skip Navigation"></a>
<!-- x.gif is a one pixel by one pixel transparent picture -->
</div>
<div id="mainNav">
<!-- Main nav goes here -->
</div>
<div id="secondaryNav">
<!-- Ditto -->
</div>
<div id="content">
<a name="content"></a>
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. . .
</div>
...

Hope that makes a bit more sense.

- George

 

[gwrman]

"If you try to "read" the site with the aid of a screen reader like Jaws or the Firefox plug-in Fangs, users aren't given an out to skip by the navigation and get directly to content. Generally, a link is added to some global navigation (above the main menu) that links to a named anchor at the start of the actual content in the page."

This makes complete sense, and i'll suggest it to the site's project co-ordinators.

Thanks again for the feedback

 

[ChrisHunt]

I think it looks OK. Perhaps too many different fonts used together, but otherwise unremarkable. It does break a little when you resize the text one stop bigger - the tabs at the top repeat vertically. A quick way to fix this would be to change the tab background image to extend further down vertically, to allow further expansion.

A lot of the copy seems to have been written for search engines instead of people:

Welcome to billiardsforum.info online billiards resource, blog, and forums. Browse to the right, and find extensive articles pertaining to all aspects of billiards, including billiard rules, billiard tips and tutorials, player profiles, and much more. We also have the largest and most complete list of billiard terms and definitions in our billiards database.

OK, I get it, the site's about billiards. You don't need to repeat it every other word. Writing copy that people find easy to read will pay dividends in the long term, let the machines look after themselves. It's possible that SEs will penalise you for overusing a keyword anyway. Try taking out some of those "billiards"es for an easier-to-read result (reading your copy aloud is a good way to validate it).

Under the hood it's not great. It's not valid, of course, but that's already been mentioned. There's a lot of elitist rubbish talked about validation, with much willy waving over "my site's more valid than your site". What all that nonsense obscures is that validation is a useful, free tool for avoiding silly errors in your site. For example: I ran a website for 6 months before discovering that it just showed a blank page in a particular version of Netscape (we're going back a bit here!). I'd made a tiny error in tag order which validation would have pointed out straight away. The trick is to start with valid code and keep it so, validating as you build. That way you never have to "spend hours chasing an error free page".

OK, sermon over, but there's more to look at in your source. You've got more than a touch of classitis, together with a lot of old school presentational elements like <center> and <font>. You've also got a lot of redundancy in your stylesheet. For example, here's the code for one of those orange tabs, and the CSS applied to it:

-- HTML --
<table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr>

<td class="oj">
  <center>
    <a class="lvlonenav" href="[URL unfurl="true"]http://www.billiardsforum.info/billiard-terms.asp">Billiard[/URL] Terms</a>
  </center>
</td>
...

-- CSS --
a.lvlonenav:link	{font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; color: #000000; font-weight: normal; padding: 0; margin: 0;}
a.lvlonenav:visited 	{font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; color: #000000; font-weight: normal; padding: 0; margin: 0;}
a.lvlonenav:active  	{font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; color: #000000; font-weight: normal; padding: 0; margin: 0;}
a.lvlonenav:hover   	{font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; color: blue; font-weight: normal; padding: 0; margin: 0;}

.oj 		{width: 105px; background-image: url('[URL unfurl="true"]http://www.billiardsforum.info/images/Learn-to-Play-Pool.gif');}[/URL]

Here's a simpler version:

-- HTML --
<table class="menu">
<tr>
<td>
<a href="[URL unfurl="true"]http://www.billiardsforum.info/billiard-terms.asp">Billiard[/URL] Terms</a>
</td>
...

-- CSS --
table.menu {
   border-collapse: collapse;
}

.menu td {
   width: 105px;
   background: url('[URL unfurl="true"]http://www.billiardsforum.info/images/Learn-to-Play-Pool.gif')[/URL] top left no-repeat;
   vertical-align: bottom;
   border: 0;
   text-align: center;
}

.menu a:link,
.menu a:visited
.menu a:active	{
   font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
   font-size: 12px;
   color: #000000;
   font-weight: normal;
   padding: 0;
}

.menu a:hover {
   color: blue;
}

Using a <ul> instead of a table for that row of tabs would be better still in my view, but YMMV.

That's enough for now, though you should maybe know that "pocket billiards" has a totally different meaning on this side of the pond!

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd