Need help

[Florence]

I need help with my college assignment the website is built just need to sort out the form as that is wrong.

But I also need feedback on how the site performs, speeds of pages opening, if any images load slow.

limo2carriages (http://www.kittysworld.co.uk/Limo2carriage/limo2carriage.htm)

All feed back is needed to add into the report.

Thank you to anyone who views and gives feedback greenies on offer. :)

[Raistlin]

Hi Kits,

Just had a quick look, I'll have a closer look tomorrow (on my way to bed now ;) ). On initial inspection my first question is:

Why is the video on the Links page? It might have been better elsewhere (maybe you could have a Portfolio page, showing past work that has been undertaken). I would also have preferred it to have been a link that that the user could choose to open, rather than forcing them to see the video.


Overall the speed of the site seems fine though:

For your stats, I'm on 2Mb Cable BB, Win XP Home, FireFox.

HTH

(Love your avatar btw :) )
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Also, there appears to be a problem with the layout of the Links page.

I need to scroll the top frame to be able to see the logo and the navigation bar (if I don't scroll all I get is the logo, the navigation bar is hidden by the next table row).

The second row of the table also needs to be a bit bigger if you're leaving the video in there as I need to scroll up and down to get to the player's controls.

Hope that makes sense.....

Anyway, off to bed now. Take another look tomorrow.

G'night.

[MovedGoalPosts]

Ok, not sure if its just how the website operates that is of concern of it it's also about the content.

The video on the links page auto starts fine, and then replays over and over. Great. Trouble is whatever the text message is that it is about dissapears off screen so fast you cannot read it.

To me (I'm no english teacher) grammatically the text especially on the home (index) page is poor. I'd avoid abbreviations, and try to shorten some sentences:
Our drivers are experienced limousine drivers, also the members of staff who work with the horses have been working with horses for years with a wealth of knowledge and understanding of our horses, the horses respond well to the staff becomes
Our drivers are experienced limousine drivers. The members of staff who work with the horses have many years of knowledge. This understanding reflects with in the response the staff receive from the horses

Oh, 2MB cable, IE 6, screen resolution 1024x768. As Rasitlin says, not sure that the video should auto open, (maybe a text pop out of some sort) and the links and video (including the media player controls for the video) is not fully visible at this resolution with scoill bars. It's a little awkward to use.

[Graham]

I need help with my college assignment the website is built just need to sort out the form as that is wrong.

But I also need feedback on how the site performs, speeds of pages opening, if any images load slow.

Ok, first thing I note on opening is a horizontal scroll bar on my 800 x 600 screen using Netscape 7.2

Horizontal scroll bars are a *BAD* thing. They're a pain to use, break up the natural flow of reading and, especially on pages like "information about our company" irritate the hell out of me!

The "welcome" text should be broken up into shorter paragraphs, it's too difficult to read at the moment.

The alt tag descriptions on your pictures aren't very useful "merc" or "image of carriage" won't help someone who's using a text reader. You also really need a "Home" link on each page for the same reason.

The links page is a bit of a mess, the small boxes are unhelpful (and there's only *one* 'l' at the end of helpful! ;) ) and the viewer is forced to download a video clip whether they want it or not which could be a pain if you're on dialup!

Also the site images load quickly on 1MB but I don't know what they'd be on dialup connections.

Ok, that's a few comments, I claim my free greenie :)

[MovedGoalPosts]

Ok, that's a few comments, I claim my free greenie :)

Rep whore :D

Oh sorry, that's what got us all to post :disturbd:

[Halcyon]

Well the page loads fine in both Internet Explorer and Firefox so thats good and I notice it is W3C compliant so all good there.

On the design side, it is easy to navigate with your menu bar at the top.
It might be just me, but I have something aginst times new roman font though.
On the "New carraiges for this year" page you have an animated gif of a carraige moving. Is it really necessary ? Seems to fill the screen and not have much of a pupose as the other colour pics are good enough and better.

On the horses page there is that horse music track. Is it needed ? It will consume bandwidth and unless it is part of your assignment to include media, it may be better to take it out.
Same goes for the video clip in the Links section.... people may need plugins or still be on 56k. You should offer a HTML equivilent for users on slow dial up.

Pages seem to load up fast and it gets the info accross in a good way.
Design could do with a few bits here and there but it gives the info the people need which is the main thing.

Also, at 800x600 there are some scrollings on a few pages that you should avoid. Whenever designing you want to make sure the user has to click or scroll the least amount of times to get to the information they need.

For your info, I was using Firefox at 800x600, 1mb Broadband.

Good luck.

Edit: You may also want to look at the sizes of the pics and text. Does the main logo have to be so big. ?

[MovedGoalPosts]

When Im on one of the sub pages say http://www.kittysworld.co.uk/Limo2carriage/Carriage.htm and click on the main logo, which should return me to the home/index page, it does, but by opening a new window in IE, rather than refreshing the existing one.

Odd this only seems to happen when I have first accessed the site throuhg you link in post one. Once the new IE window has opened, then the clicking of the link behaves as I would expect refreshing rather than opening a new window :confused:

[Florence]

The frames page is a pain and I am still thinking what to do. I had to set it to open in a new page as if you clcked on any link while on links page the page you selected opened in the top frame. :(

Any suggestions welcome on remedy.

Moving giff has to be on a page on requirement. The Video is another requirement and the music on one page alsoe required to show I know how to do these. Myself I would never put a video on a webpage... The video has been compressed and I have a friend on 56K testing the site today so await his feedback.

Will work on the sizing as my resolution is 1280x1024 and the frames page was fine there will consider making it one frame with a link to the video above the helpfull links. Thanks for the feedback.

[MrBen]

Any suggestions welcome on remedy.
Personally I hate frames, but I guess you have to include those somewhere too...

I'd suggest you add the "frameborder=0" attribute to the frame elements. This will get rid of the large bars and improve the look some.

<frameset rows="42%,35%,*" cols="*">
<frame src="links.htm" name="top" scrolling="no" noresize frameborder="0">
<frameset rows="35%" cols="50%,*">
<frame src="video.htm" name="middle" target="left" align="middle" scrolling="yes" noresize frameborder="0">

<frame src="link1.htm" name="middle" target="right" scrolling="yes" noresize frameborder="0">

</frameset>
<frame src="footer.htm" name="bottomframe" target="middle" scrolling="no" noresize frameborder="0">
</frameset>
You've also set some of the frames to specific dimensions based on a percentage with the no scrolling option. When I view the page at an 800x600 screen size - I can't see the top links and only about 2/3s of the main logo! Since the content in that frame is fixed, perhaps looking at setting the dimensions of that frame in pixels (e.g. 250px) rather than percent. This means it will be the same height on all computers.

Ben

[Angua]

I am not a web designer just a general surfer so please take any comments accordingly. The general look and flow of the site is reasonable (I don't get any sound, the horse and carrage is a bit jerky, nor can I access the vid) and I have seen many worse. However the grammar is dreadful and there are some odd spelling errors (correctly spelled but wrong word i.e. "none" should be "non"). I would suggest reducing the number of words by cutting out repetitions and making use of a thesaurus.
:idea:e.g. "The company employs five drivers on a full time basis and has another six drivers who are casual drivers but all drivers having had experience of driving limousines for a number of years."

Would become "The company employs five full time drivers and a further six on a casual basis, all of whom are experienced limousine drivers."

This reduces the number of words in that sentence from 33 to 22 and still gives the important information.

I have 1mb Broadband and Firefox.

Hope this helps,and good luck

[Graham]

Ok, that's a few comments, I claim my free greenie :)

Rep whore :D

Yes, and...?! ;)

Oh sorry, that's what got us all to post :disturbd:

Takes one to know one...! :D
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Moving giff has to be on a page on requirement. The Video is another requirement and the music on one page alsoe required to show I know how to do these.

You could put a link to that page from one that has a message saying "if you click on this link you're going to be downloading video and music (file size)"

[Millay]

First of all, nice site, for a college assignment i think its pretty resonble and you should be proud of it.

i valideadted your site using the w3c validators, and well it failed both, although these might be poor interpretations by the validation engine, I would spend the time fixing them, so that any prospective marker or visitor doesnt get confused and think your lying!

To test the speed of your site, the following is a good link.

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

to get the links to open in the freame you want, then where you add target="_blank" replace with target="nameoframeelement" this should open the page you require in whatever frame you specify
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Ive gotta add, that the site really needs to work in 800x600 screen resolution, its still a highly popular res especially as its xp's default resolution...

[zovat]

Just a few comments - from the point of view of using Firefox on Linux..

no "back to home" button on any of the sub pages.

selecting a different sub page in a sub page (select limos from the links page for example) results in a new window, rather than refreshing the existing one. :mad:

Selecting the main logo also opens a new window.... :mad:

Small (but one the tutor will doubtless notice) - only 1 "l" at the end of "helpful" (on the links page) ;)

video did not appear to load - but mp3 on the horses page played ok (although the black box could be better handled).

As ever - just my 2c - certainly better than my first (and indeed first few dozen) attempts at web pages.

[Florence]

Taken on what a lot have said and had my pc using 800x600. I have no uploaded the website again. All pages validate apart from the horses page as the validator seems to not like the embed tags, and the contact us page which still needs some work. The links page now loads back into the parent window. As before any logo on the website top or bottom of the pages will return you to the main page.

Would like some feedback again please and anyone good with php and java.

[Millay]

There are some great php gurus, and those in trainging on here, and was that jave, or javascript?
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great works really well in 800x600, if i were splitting hairs i would say that your horizontal rule and copyright text appear left justifued within a table or something as they are off centre...
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You may want to experiment with justifing your paragraph text as this can make a web page look a little neater..

[Raistlin]

Looks a lot better, you might want to change the Links page title to "Links" instead of "Linksf" though ;)

Otherwise, looking gooooooooooooood :tu:

[Florence]

What is going to college later today is now onlilne. Thak you to all who gave feed back and a special thank you to Nemmy Frames all sorted now.

[ikthius]

I have commented on the form

ik