Familyman said:
Hi,
I've just uploaded my website and would appreciate some valuable feed-back
from the HTML peer group. Any suggestions for improvement? Comments?
Its at
www.astutechoices.com
Hank
Familyman,
I will provide some comments below, but I'd like to ask something in
return. Can you tell us how you learned HTML? Which books or web sites
did you use? Which one did you start with and then what were the
others? Which did you like best and why? Which did you like least and
why? If you had a question on HTML today, what would you do to find an
answer? How about CSS?
OK, feedback. I looked at the site on a (unless stated otherwise) 600 X
800 CRT display, with the browser window occupying the whole screen. I
used Netscape 7.1, IE 6, and Opera 8.51.
The home page looks substantially the same in all 3 browsers.
The font size used for navigation and the detail paragraphs is smaller
than I usually prefer. Using IE I was unable to increase the text size;
this usually indicates that the size has been specified in pixels.
In the left-column navigation, 'little kids' is the only navigation link
on the page that does not start with a capital letter.
The hover effect is inconsistent between the horizontal navigation
(which has none) and the left-column and bottom-of-page navigation
(which bolds the font).
When you hover over the bottom-of-page navigation, the text is bolded.
This results in the width of the text increasing and the other entries
on the same line 'jump' away from the one you are hovering over.
If the inner window width is reduced below about 740 pixels, a
horizontal scroll bar appears. On the other hand, if the display is
increased to 1024 X 768 and the window is maximized, the paragraph text
expands nicely to fill the available space.
If the display is increased to 1600 X 1200, the text still expands to
fill the space. At this resolution, however, it is much too small to
read. Using Netscape, I increased the size 3 times (to 200%) and 4
times (to 300%). In the first case, the left-column navigation started
to overlay the vertical roses which make up the visual border of this
area. In the second, the navigation spilled well across that border.
I looked at the page with a text-only browser and things looked pretty
good, except I could not find the "learn more" links at the end of each
paragraph. I then looked at the source and determined that these links
are actually images of text rather than text. These are therefore
invisible to a text browser, so users of such a browser would not be
able to follow them (although they could follow the title link, which
leads to the same location). I also verified that they are not resized
by any browser, hence may become invisibly small on high-resolution
displays with large windows.
I looked at the HTML, which led to my questions in the first paragraph
of this response.
I followed the 'Site map' link, which went to a page with that file
name, but it is a duplicate of the home page.
On the press.htm page, you have an image of a newspaper item. I could
read it only with difficulty because of the font size. I understand the
attraction of showing the article as printed, but I would capture just
the picture and transcribe the text into HTML paragraphs. This would
potentially allow the user to increase the font size.
I did not detect any errors in English, which is almost unheard of.
From a user perspective, it looks very nice and functions quite well in
the most common environments. Under the covers, well... let's hear the
answers to my early questions.
Chris Beall
