New look website

[cwesty]

Hi there,

I've spent a bit of time recently re-developing my site: http://www.snowinfo.co.uk
As far as what it does, it's still in its infancy and I'm thinking of new cool stuff I csn add to bring people back..
Take a look & let me know your thoughts.

Cheers

 

[elppa]

Ok, here are my immediate thoughts:

Many, many things are done very well, please don't get dis-heartened or think I'm criticising for the sake of it - because I'm not and I hope it doesn't come across that way.

• Get some alt attributes on the images that make up your navigation. If someone is using a screen reader, those links will be useless to them.
• The text on the main nav is quite large (not a bad thing), but it looks a bit out of proportion. Also, I don't know which image editor you used, but the text looks kind of jagged, which is a shame as the body text is nicely smoothed (in Mac OS X at least).
• Some of your images are great - use them in your header to catch the eye. Apple have a theme in iWeb called modern - based around snow boarding. You could draw some inspiration from this.
• I don't really like the white flashing on the logo, after a while it gets a bit distracting.
• You have the last updated text and the date in separate places on the page. These might look better on the same line - so the user can see when the site was updated in relation to today.
• I'd put a bit of space (padding) to the left and right of the main column. It looks all a little cramped - especially on the Where to Go page.
• I'm not sure which web server you're using, but if you're using Apache, you may be able to get the URL's to look like http://www.snowinfo.co.uk/wheretogo/ or http://www.snowinfo.co.uk/feedback/ as opposed to http://www.snowinfo.co.uk/index.php?exec=wheretogo and http://www.snowinfo.co.uk/index.php?exec=feedback by modifying the htaccess file. There are some nice examples on the Mod Rewrite Cheat Sheet.
• Get it validating. Having a quick look through those results - it looks like if you added alt attributes to all your images and changed & to & on some of the URLs, you'd probably achieve this quite easily.

Lastly - how does the search work. I can't get it to display anything that is on the site. For example i tried searching for "Val D’Isere" (the first place mentioned on the Where to Go page) and it came up with 0 results. I only ask as it is in quite a prominent place and many people may use it.

 

[cwesty]

thanks for the feedback..
I'll try and implement these updates/changes to my site.

The search is something I plan to remove actually as my site isn't really big enough to get too bogged down the a lot of db maintenance.

I plan to add a forum soon to keep people coming back...slight contradiction of the whole db thing, but a more interesting project to add to my site.
It's difficult to find a happy medium so the majority of visitors like what they see. Though most feedback is positive which is good...

 

[cwesty]

any idea how i midify the htaccess file??

 

[mintlivedotcom]

any idea how i midify the htaccess file??

Drag it to the desktop and remove the front dot. Then use Text Edit or whatever to edit it. Then drag it back into your FTP and put the dot back in the front.

 

[dpaanlka]

Hmm, well in addition to what everyone says above... I'm actually very curious about snowboarding but have never done it. Would be nice for the content to be expanded so I can learn more.

EDIT: I lied I did go snowboarding once, years ago, in Snoqualmie Washington. What I meant to say is "I don't know nothing about it."

 

[cwesty]

Hmm, well in addition to what everyone says above... I'm actually very curious about snowboarding but have never done it. Would be nice for the content to be expanded so I can learn more.

EDIT: I lied I did go snowboarding once, years ago, in Snoqualmie Washington. What I meant to say is "I don't know nothing about it."

*good idea... It's ongoing anyway, trying to put the right amount of info in without losing people in a load of text to read.. i do see your point though, and will work on it... If you keep checking it out hopefully it'll be right..

ANything else you'd like to see on the site??

 

[cwesty]

Drag it to the desktop and remove the front dot. Then use Text Edit or whatever to edit it. Then drag it back into your FTP and put the dot back in the front.

apologies, bad day... where is the htaccess page for me to edit?

 

[cwesty]

i've made some adjustments over the weekend to the site...
added the alt tag in and placed both dates together so you can see current date, and last updated a little easier.

I need to elaborate more on the General info page and liven it up a bit.

Anymore comments guys?

Cheers

 

[FocusAndEarnIt]

Honestly, it's just too big.

It is better to be able to view the entire site in a normal size window (aka not the entire screen), so you don't have to scroll over.

Just constructive criticsm.

 

[wmmk]

no need for the MySQL, Firefox, and Safari buttons, IMHO. The flash white thing on the logo gets annoyiong. animated GIFs can seem gaudy. if you want animation, use flash instead. Also, there's quite a lot of white space. a simple gradient background may help liven up the site a lot.

 

[trainguy77]

The title banner is relative positioning and everything else is not.

 

[cwesty]

my site

I think i've amended most of the things listed on my site...

Still need to add more content for newcomer.. but that's on its way..

Stop by for another peek, perhaps support snowinfo by purchasing some cool merchandise, or get involved in the mothly comps.. or just take it in & enjoy

 

[pavetheforest]

Does anyone remember expage? hahah..........no...actually, at second glance, the site has got a lot of promise. I agree with one of the above posts, you should take off the white shimmer thing on the title bar/logo. The title could also use a bit of smoothing, the image quality is very choppy, check your filetype-go for a png or gif, they seem to work best for me. That can go for the text inside the snowboards on the left side links. When you copy/paste other sites logos, you should try to constrain the proportions so that the images areant distorted...they seem to be a bit. Again I think its your file type, the properties bar on one of them says jpeg, maybe the quality of it is low ...or you didnt constrain when you stretched/skewed. Try the filetype, post back with some results. *If your image looks like that all the time, try other options to smoothing it out.

 

[MacBoobsPro]

From an aesthetic point of view try and limit yourself to one or two typefaces and use different weights for headings etc. It ties everything together a bit more!

 

[lexus]

Very 1996.

 

[tominated]

one word, ugly (no offence). Maybe try and find a web template off the net.