• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Redesigned site, please review!

WorldBuilder

Scholar
W
Joined
Feb 16, 2004
Messages
77
Hello all,

I posted my website for review here several months ago and got some great feedback.

I wasn't satisfied with it, and based on all the reviews, I redesigned it.

What I would like is for as many people as possible to visit the site and give me feedback. Please spend a decent amount of time there, if possible, and give it a really good, thorough review.

I am extremely interested in people's opinions of my work. I know it's only a personal site that won't be interesting to the majority, but there's stories, links, music, and weekly changes, so please continue to come.

For those that don't remember, or want a refresher, the OLD design can be seen here.

The NEWLY designed site is here.

Again, I welcome any and all feedback!

Thank you,

Chris
 
I think that while you've made an obvious effort to make the site accessible, it falls short in just a couple of places:
If you view it without images and styles, you see things like "just a spacer image" and "bamboo grove from digital blasphemy" in the middle of things. You should never need a spacer image - if you do, then you're doing something wrong. Use margins or padding or relative positioning instead.
The navigation sections could be in the same part of the markup, possibly making things more logically structured.
Aside from that technical stuff... well, I'm afraid I'm not much of a graphical critic :)
 
Nice. No real message, though. Too much text with too little content. Nobody is going to read past the first 5-6 lines (test it: write something outrageous near the bottom and see if you get any reactions ...... maybe you already did ;)).

Hans
 
moopet said:
I think that while you've made an obvious effort to make the site accessible, it falls short in just a couple of places:
If you view it without images and styles, you see things like "just a spacer image" and "bamboo grove from digital blasphemy" in the middle of things. You should never need a spacer image - if you do, then you're doing something wrong. Use margins or padding or relative positioning instead.
Click to expand...
You're right. The entire site is 100% accessible and valid Bobby and WAI-AAA. The use of spacer images (which I also despise) is for 1 simple reason. Adjacent links are NOT allowed as a WAI-AA standard. There must be more than whitespace. That's the only reason they are there. Positioning doesn't help because there are simply some places where adjacent links are unavoidable. If you know of a better way, I'm all ears. I know it's "wrong", but it's unfortunately "right", too.

Chris
 
I like it as a personal site, the only problem I have is with the site map.

You should use desciptive names for the links. For exampe instead of "Timeline & Bio - Page 3" use the page title "Gets Worse"

The "oops" and "thanks" pages should not show up on the site map it will just confuse people. They are results messages, nobody has any reason to go directly to them.
 
Anti_Hypeman said:
I like it as a personal site, the only problem I have is with the site map.

You should use desciptive names for the links. For exampe instead of "Timeline & Bio - Page 3" use the page title "Gets Worse"

The "oops" and "thanks" pages should not show up on the site map it will just confuse people. They are results messages, nobody has any reason to go directly to them.
Click to expand...
Those are both good ideas, and I will take you up on them. Thanks a lot for that.

Chris
 
There is a page where you post music.

http://www.chrisbartlett.net/music/music.php

However, this is broadband-only content and will not play properly through an ordinary 56K dialup connection. This is one of my pet peeves. Please provide a alternative hyperlinks will work in Windows Media Player or RealPlayer. Either that, or label the content broadband-only at the top level, so as to avoid irritating people who cannot afford broadband connections.

Also, under Win XP Home, on this page there is an annoying game of chase. The menu moves up and down as the user tries to put the mouse on a specific selection.

Thomas Jones
 
jones172 said:
There is a page where you post music.

http://www.chrisbartlett.net/music/music.php

However, this is broadband-only content and will not play properly through an ordinary 56K dialup connection. This is one of my pet peeves. Please provide a alternative hyperlinks will work in Windows Media Player or RealPlayer. Either that, or label the content broadband-only at the top level, so as to avoid irritating people who cannot afford broadband connections.
Click to expand...
While I can understand this, making it WMP or REAL compatible won't solve anything. It DOES work with 56k, but because of the file sizes, it's so slow that it isn't worth it. Changing format won't help. I might very well label the preceding page with a notice about broadband requirements. Although... I would think that anyone would assume that since they know they are going to a music section, they should realize that it'll be huge... It's only logical.

jones172 said:
Also, under Win XP Home, on this page there is an annoying game of chase. The menu moves up and down as the user tries to put the mouse on a specific selection.

Thomas Jones
Click to expand...
First of all, which menu? Secondly, since I've heard this complaint from no others, I assume it's something other than WinXP Home. Your resolution? Screen size?

Chris
 
WorldBuilder said:
While I can understand this, making it WMP or REAL compatible won't solve anything. It DOES work with 56k, but because of the file sizes, it's so slow that it isn't worth it. Changing format won't help.
Click to expand...

From: Thomas L. Jones, Ph.D., Computer Science

Have you actually tried it with a 56K dalup connection? It will play for about five seconds, then halt for a much longer time period to rebuffer.

As far as providing another stream for people who, like myself, have dialup connections, or, at you put it, "changing format," there is plenty of music on the Web which will play just fine with a 56K dialup connection. Some examples are:

http://www.vivalavoce.com
http://www.wgms.com
Also, http://www.live365.com provides many thousands of 56K dialup compatible streams.

Thomas L. Jones, Ph.D., Computer Science
 
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