Site Ratings & Reviews - Review please

Author

Review please

gekkie

2004-08-13, 3:20 pm

http://www.citydate.com

we are getting ready to launch our site and want to get some professional feedback. FYI: there are not meta tags yet, No PR becasue marketing hasnt begun, some things still need finalization. Thanks for the help.

The Doormouse

2004-08-14, 4:17 am

gekkie <gekkie.1ay9m7@mail.forum4designers.com> wrote:

> http://www.citydate.com
>
> we are getting ready to launch our site and want to get some
> professional feedback. FYI: there are not meta tags yet, No PR becasue
> marketing hasnt begun, some things still need finalization. Thanks for
> the help.

1. http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=h...citydate.com%2F

No validation means no verifiable quality checks, which means that you
are playing roulette with the result in other browsers. Your page will be
prone to errors and may not render properly, if at all. It will not be
future-safe for newer versions of current browsers.

2. Javascript is embedded, not linked

Therefore, successive pages cannot benefit from similar function calls.
You cannot reuse code across the site, nor make global changes easily.
Site maintenance is made unnecessarily complex.

3. CSS is not used for presentation where it should be. HTML is used for
presentation where it should not be. Cell/Row Spans are not used, and
should be.

4. If you go to the "join" page, the default nation is (*LOL!*)
Afghanistan, and the default state is Alabama ... uhhh, check a map,
dude. And the date of birth? You are aiming at enrolling senior citizens?
Your site will attract Afghani senior citizens ... :D

Since those are default values, it is a coding issue.

I left off all my potential critique of the visual design.

The Doormouse

--
The Doormouse cannot be reached by e-mail without her permission.

gekkie

2004-08-14, 2:24 pm

Yes we havent inserted our meta tags which will include the charset. And the join form is not yet complete so the defaults will be different.

Thanks for the review we appreciate it very much

quote:
Originally posted by The Doormouse
gekkie <gekkie.1ay9m7@mail.forum4designers.com> wrote:

> http://www.citydate.com
>
> we are getting ready to launch our site and want to get some
> professional feedback. FYI: there are not meta tags yet, No PR becasue
> marketing hasnt begun, some things still need finalization. Thanks for
> the help.

1. http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=h...citydate.com%2F

No validation means no verifiable quality checks, which means that you
are playing roulette with the result in other browsers. Your page will be
prone to errors and may not render properly, if at all. It will not be
future-safe for newer versions of current browsers.

2. Javascript is embedded, not linked

Therefore, successive pages cannot benefit from similar function calls.
You cannot reuse code across the site, nor make global changes easily.
Site maintenance is made unnecessarily complex.

3. CSS is not used for presentation where it should be. HTML is used for
presentation where it should not be. Cell/Row Spans are not used, and
should be.

4. If you go to the "join" page, the default nation is (*LOL!*)
Afghanistan, and the default state is Alabama ... uhhh, check a map,
dude. And the date of birth? You are aiming at enrolling senior citizens?
Your site will attract Afghani senior citizens ... :D

Since those are default values, it is a coding issue.

I left off all my potential critique of the visual design.

The Doormouse

--
The Doormouse cannot be reached by e-mail without her permission.

Ben Measures

2004-08-16, 11:16 pm

gekkie wrote:
> http://www.citydate.com
>
> we are getting ready to launch our site and want to get some
> professional feedback. FYI: there are not meta tags yet, No PR becasue
> marketing hasnt begun, some things still need finalization. Thanks for
> the help.

I really like this site and think you've done a great job. It looks very
professional and if I were wanting a dating service I'd probably pick
you for this very reason.

There are just a couple of issues with the coding though.

The page seemed extraordinarily large (including all the graphics) and
it may well take over a minute on a 56k connections (which is much too
long to wait). I'd be searching for ways of reducing this, by
compressing the graphics better and doing as Doormouse suggested and
putting the javascript into an external file.

You're also using table layout. CSS is preferred over table layout for
maintainability and filesize reasons. To make a change to the table
layout is likely to require reworking of the HTML on every page
affected. In contrast, CSS allows for the styling to be placed in an
external file which reduces the overall download size and means that you
only need to edit one file to make the required site-wide changes.

And last but not least, your page won't validate (for at least two major
reasons) and so cannot satisfy any standards. The first stumbling block
to validation is the charset but even when this is specified, it
discovers there is no doctype! All of the HTML 4.x standards require at
least these two.

HTH,

--
Ben M.

PS.

> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Posted via http://www.forum4designers.com
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> View this thread: http://www.forum4designers.com/message107366.html

This is a (rather bad) gateway to Usenet. Your message has simply been
forwarded to alt.html.critique and replies regularly get misplaced.

I recommend you find this newsgroup with a newsreader. This way replies
won't get lost and you'll gain features such as threads - vital for any
sort of public discussion.

The Doormouse

2004-08-19, 10:38 pm