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Site Review Time! 4

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ecobb

ecobb

Programmer
Dec 5, 2002
2,190
US
I'm in the process of finishing a forum website, and I wanted to get some opinions on it. I'm mainly interested in hearing what you think about the aesthetics, ease of use, navigation, and things of that nature.

From a technical standpoint, I know it doesn't validate and I'm working on that. (I get weird validation errors, for example it doesn't see the opening <head> tag, but if you view source it's there). I'm also cleaning up a few inline styles that I used during testing/debugging.

A few people have already started using it and making posts, so feel free to roam around and contribute to a few posts if you'd like. [smile]


Thanks!


Hope This Helps!

ECAR
ECAR Technologies

"My work is a game, a very serious game." - M.C. Escher
 
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Hi

I would grow the [tt]font-size[/tt] in the topMenu class.

No idea if is up to you, but looks ugly to list one thread twice in search result just because contains the searched word twice.

Regarding the 30~40 markup errors per page... I would correct them.

Feherke.
 
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I've only had a very quick glance at the homepage.

2 comments

Up the font size. Really, don't be afraid to make it big!

'Forum' is spelt incorrectly in the page title.

<honk>*:O)</honk>

Tyres: Mine's a pint of the black stuff.
Mike: You can't drink a pint of Bovril.
 
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Thanks guys! This is good stuff!

Thanks for the spelling tip, Foamcow.

feherke, what validator did you use to find those errors? I'm using the W3C validator, and I'm having trouble understanding what it's finding wrong in some cases. Many of the errors seem to be link paramaters and alt attributes, which I'm already working on, but it's giving me strange errors on other things.

Oh, and I'll increase the font. [thumbsup2]


Hope This Helps!

ECAR
ECAR Technologies

"My work is a game, a very serious game." - M.C. Escher
 
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Everything I see looks fine. The one little thing I'll comment about is when you hover over each of the title headers, you notice that they are hyperlinks. (I read the querystring to see what it does) Assuming you know nothing, you don't know what clicking on the header will do. I just recommend a small tool-tip telling the user about the sortability of each header.



[monkey][snake] <.
 
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Hi

ECAR said:
what validator did you use to find those errors?
Click to expand...
Html Validator extension for FireFox with Algorithm set to Serial.

Which is strange ? I think this :
Validator said:
# Error Line 21 column 6: end tag for element "HEAD" which is not open.
Click to expand...
Remove the XHTML style slash from the last [tt]meta[/tt] tag's end.

Feherke.
 
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In the table of "conferences" on the home page, I think you should mark up all the column headings and the first column (the conference names) as <th> elements instead of <td>s. You can style the column headers to look the same as they do now, but make the conference names bold (or something) to highlight them.

The same goes for the forum name column in the second tier.

I would suggest, in the interests of getting a forum going, not subdividing it into quite so many subforums - having fewer, more active forums is more likely to attract new posters. Subdivide it later when you have the traffic to justify it.

Good luck with this site, but I imagine that most people who don't like celebrity culture will express it by not spending their time on a forum which discusses celebrities - even if it's from a negative perspective.

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd
 
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Alright, now we're cooking! Thanks for the advice, I've spent some time cleaning it up and now it's a lot closer to validating. I'm only getting 2-3 errors per page instead of 30-40. [thumbsup2]

The one persistent error that's giving me trouble is the "absmiddle" alignment for a couple of my images. When I change it to middle, I don't get the results I want. I'll have to play around with the code some to get that straightened out. The funny thing is, when I use an editor (Homesite), it doesn't recognize "middle" and only puts "absmiddle" for the alignment. Oh, well...

Thanks for your tool-tip suggestion monksnake! I had never thought of that.

Feherke, aside from the head and body tag problems (which were fixed by removing the XHTML closing slash), and the "absmiddle", I kept getting an error on a specific </p> tag. It said there was no opening tag for it, even though it was just a few lines up. I wound up just removing the <p> tag set and the error went away.

Thanks, Chris. I'll mark up the conference names when I make the rest of the text larger. Interesting suggestion about the subforums, I'm going to run that past everyone involved and see what they think.
I imagine that most people who don't like celebrity culture will express it by not spending their time on a forum which discusses celebrities
Click to expand...
You're probably right, but this is mainly just for fun. It was thrown together for a group of people who wanted their own personal little "rant & rave" space on the web.

Thanks for the help! Any other suggestions are welcome!


Hope This Helps!

ECAR
ECAR Technologies

"My work is a game, a very serious game." - M.C. Escher
 
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ECAR, I find the page a little bland - might be nice to throw a celebrity photo into the mix (at least on the homepage)! Or maybe even have a randomly selected celebrity photo each day.

Clive
Runner_1Revised.gif

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer." (Paul Ehrlich)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To get the best answers from this forum see: faq102-5096
 
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