Site Ratings & Reviews - Critique and Advice Requested

Author

Critique and Advice Requested

2005-07-12, 11:29 pm

G'day folks,

If you have a moment, please take a look at our website for "Slovenian
language and culture lessons in Switzerland, Liechtenstein and
Vorarlberg, Austria" - http://www.slovenskiotroci.ch/

All usability comments welcomed.

I'm also interested if anyone has a solution to the W3C Markup
Validation Service warnings about "reference to non-SGML character".
The webserver is presenting the page as ISO-8859-2 and yet the W3C
doesn't like my č (c-caron) and ž (z-caron) etc. characters.
Unfortunately HTML 4 only seems to provide character entity references
for s/S-caron. Is there some trick to get around these warnings?

Thanks in anticipation.

RB

Terry

2005-07-12, 11:29 pm

rb wrote:
> G'day folks,
>
> If you have a moment, please take a look at our website for "Slovenian
> language and culture lessons in Switzerland, Liechtenstein and
> Vorarlberg, Austria" - http://www.slovenskiotroci.ch/
>
> All usability comments welcomed.
>
> I'm also interested if anyone has a solution to the W3C Markup
> Validation Service warnings about "reference to non-SGML character".
> The webserver is presenting the page as ISO-8859-2 and yet the W3C
> doesn't like my č (c-caron) and ž (z-caron) etc. characters.
> Unfortunately HTML 4 only seems to provide character entity references
> for s/S-caron. Is there some trick to get around these warnings?

I do not like the navigation images - I find them very difficult to
read. When javascript is turned off the problem gets even worse (a good
number of people surf with it turned off). The all center justified
text is a little more difficult to read for anyone with any of several
vision problems - left is preferred.

The a lot of classes that (it seems) could be consolidated.
<td height="25" class="twelfebcss" width="33%">
replaced with
<table class="twelfebcss">
eliminating (I think) 24
class="twelfebcss"
This was from uciteji.html.

All of the css and js could be moved to external files for ease of
maintenance and speed of loading.

I do not know if it will work but I would try
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> and
see if that worked.

Looks like quite an ambitious project - you are obviously trying for the
best product possible and I look forward to seeing future efforts.

--
TK
http://www.wejuggle2.com/
Still Having a Ball

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is it such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet?

..

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Beauregard T. Shagnasty

2005-07-12, 11:29 pm

rb wrote:
> G'day folks,
>
> If you have a moment, please take a look at our website for
> "Slovenian language and culture lessons in Switzerland,
> Liechtenstein and Vorarlberg, Austria" -
> http://www.slovenskiotroci.ch/

You have not assigned a background color, so my browser uses the
default aqua that is set. Looks pretty bad that way. (Why do I set the
default to aqua? Now you know ... <g> )

--
-bts
-This space intentionally left blank.

Chris Beall

2005-07-12, 11:29 pm

rb wrote:
> G'day folks,
>
> If you have a moment, please take a look at our website for "Slovenian
> language and culture lessons in Switzerland, Liechtenstein and
> Vorarlberg, Austria" - http://www.slovenskiotroci.ch/
(snip)
> Thanks in anticipation.
>
> RB
>
RB,

Reviewed with Netscape 7.1, generally at 600 X 800 full-screen. I did
not read the comments of others before doing this review.

I like the general layout, with just enough color to make it attractive.

I like the 'last update' at the bottom of each page. Not for every
site, but the content on this one is likely to change often and visitors
will want to know if there's anything new.

Navigation is simple and intuitive.
- Self-pointing links are not disabled, ex: when you are on the
'Teachers' page, the link for that page is still active. I prefer that
redundant links be disabled.
- The first time I mouse-over a navigation link, there's a noticeable
delay before the link is highlighted. (Preload images or use text links
and CSS for highlighting). Hmmm, I see preload code in the source;
perhaps it isn't working for these images.
- If I increase the font size, everything on the page gets bigger
except the navigation. It's pretty big to begin with, but why not make
it into text so the user can size it to his or her liking, as with the
rest of the page?

Horizontal scroll bars appear (home page) at about 513 pixel window
width, the combined width of the navigation and the image of the <object
that looks like a high-rise yurt>. If you floated both of these to the
left, they could stack at very narrow window widths. The Children,
Parents, and Events pages have horizontal scroll bars at 600 X 800
Full-screen, which again could be avoided by floating things.

Page <title> text is in Slovenian, even on English pages. It is also
identical on all pages, thus providing no clue regarding which page you
are on (significant for tabbed browsers).

I generally don't care for validation icons, such as those at the bottom
of each page, but the ones you've used are subtle enough that they
didn't bother me.

The Children page took a LONG time to load. Not being able to read the
text, I can't tell where to break it up, but I sense that there are
logical divisions here that could be used to make this into several pages.

Teachers page:
Tatjana Vuc(ajnk looks awfully stern. She looks a lot more cheerful
(though perhaps a bit nervous) in the Events photo, where she's sitting
on an older fellow's lap...
The image of Marija Rogina is noticeably more grainy than the others
on this page. Oops, if I view the image itself, I see that it is
square; you've forced it into a vertical rectangle, which distorts it
and creates jaggies. Distortion is also present on other head-shots on
this page; you should specify the correct height and width for each
image (or crop the image to the dimension you want ahead of time).
I get a 404 error on the image of Mateja Kregar.
The motto is important. If you want to attract non-Slovenian
speakers, you should get it translated into all of the target languages.

Parents page:
I see a LOT of white space between the headings, such as Address:, and
the following data. If I enlarge the text, this space is gradually
absorbed, but this indicates that fluid design is not being used. As
noted before, this page has horizontal scroll bars, to no purpose.

Links page:
Some of the links are to .pdf documents. I like to see a size stated
for such links, so I know before clicking how long I will have to wait
for the document, ex: (Program prireditev za leto 2005) (451KB).

Events page:
Again, long load times because of the number of images. You've tried
to compensate by compressing the thumbnails to the point where many are
very grainy. A better approach would be to have one image for each
event, with a link to a page of the images for that one event.
This page also has horizontal scrolling, because the images are nailed
down in rows of four, rather then letting each image in a cluster of
four float to the left. Read up on the CSS 'float' property.

This being alt.html.critique, I looked at the source. You are using a
Transitional DOCTYPE, which is quite outdated. Moreover, you have not
included a URI for the definition of this type. Try replacing it with
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> (all on one line).

You have used styling to suppress the usual display of underscores below
links. I know that makes them prettier, but it also conceals the fact
that they are links and is therefore considered to be bad practice. I
recognized them by their color, but some folks set their own colors,
which would make the links quite inconspicuous.

I see lots of <br> tags used within a single <p> to split the text
into...paragraphs. Instead, just use the necessary number of <p> </p>.

Regards,
Chris Beall

2005-07-13, 4:33 am

Thanks to all of you for the valuable feedback. I don't promise to be
able to act on all of it at once, but I'll try to act on most of your
comments in due course.

The 100Kbit/sec connection the home-hosted server uses would explain
the long image load time. We really must re-organise these pages as
you (Chris) suggested. (We don't notice the problem when we access it
via our LAN) Hmm, I wonder if this might also explain the preload
problem for the navigation images.

Anyway, thanks again for the comments. Much appreciated.

RB