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| carshouses@hotmail.com 2005-08-14, 4:19 am |
| I would appreciate your critiques on this website
http://cars-houses.com/
Thanks.
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| Leonard Blaisdell 2005-08-14, 4:19 am |
| In article <1123990494.001603.20230@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
carshouses@hotmail.com wrote:
> http://cars-houses.com/
I expect that you haven't been here before. Your site looks OK compared
to a zillion on the net. Here are a couple of purely subjective comments
regarding style. You are using several font sizes. Why? Your main page
loaded quickly (hurrah!), but it is mainly because your main page is
really bland. And it's locked into a table that isn't needed.
There are countless structural problems with your markup.
But your page loaded quickly on 56k, and that's important to me. It even
seems to work in Lynx which is a big plus. Congratulations and you have
a lot of work to do to make a real impression in this group.
And I mean no offence. To my mind, your site is better than fifty
percent that are out there. Ugly and functional is much better than
beautiful and nonfunctional. There are exceptions, but I'm too old to
remember what they are.
leo
--
<http://web0.greatbasin.net/~leo/
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| Barbara de Zoete 2005-08-14, 4:19 am |
| On 13 Aug 2005 20:34:54 -0700, <carshouses@hotmail.com> wrote:
> <http://cars-houses.com/>
>
Before I go to the design, why on earth do you offer both cars and houses in the
same site? What do they have in common?
To your site then. Well, where will I start:
- First of all: when I open the site, it looks rather messy. That's probably
because of the use of fonts and the way the different frases are arranged in the
viewport. The text column to the left is really tight and doesn't invite to read
at all. It also might have to do with the fact you didn't provide a background
color for the page, so at the moment for me the pages background is _not_ white
but some bright green.
- Second of all: 'under the hood' your code is bad. It relies on techniques that
are so outdated. It looks like something I saw children do somewhere in the
early ninety's:
o no doctype? See <http://www.google.com/search?q=doctype>
o tables for layout? See <http://www.google.com/search?q=tableless+design>
o no attempt to separate the design from the markup? See
<http://www.google.com/search?q=separate+design+markup>
- Thirdly: it is not valid. See
<http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=h...s-houses.com%2F>
- Finally: you provide some extensive content to the meta-tag 'keywords' in the
head of your index page, but fail to give any relevant information on the pages
that are the rest of your site. Remember:
o Hardly any search engine still uses the description and keywords provided in
the head of a html page to determine what the page is about. They were to easily
abused.
o Meta information, like title, keywords, description, should be about the
page they're in, not about the site.
o Especially the title of each page is very important for search engines.
To me it all looks amateurish. You want to enter a vast market (cars and
houses). You will need to create very good pages (well structured, good
accessibility -remember: Google is just a blind user without any plug-ins
running and not able to do anything with scripts-, good content). These pages
don't qualify as such.
It makes no sense to me, when a webauthor offers a site for a critique,
seemingly without any attempt to find out in advance what in that group the
general standards, 'beliefs', demands on quality actually are. You have not read
one critique to other peoples works in here. You've not visited groups like
alt.html or some of the ciwa* hierarchy. I just don't understand what you expect
to hear in this usenet newsgroup.
--
,-- --<--@ -- PretLetters: 'woest wyf', met vele interesses: ----------.
| weblog | http://home.wanadoo.nl/b.de.zoete/_private/weblog.html |
| webontwerp | http://home.wanadoo.nl/b.de.zoete/html/webontwerp.html |
|zweefvliegen | http://home.wanadoo.nl/b.de.zoete/html/vliegen.html |
`-------------------------------------------------- --<--@ ------------'
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| carshouses@hotmail.com wrote:
> I would appreciate your critiques on this website
> http://cars-houses.com/
Hi there,
Your markup is very much outdated, using elements such as <font> that
should be handled by a stylesheet instead. Nevertheless, I won't go
into that because I think you'll get plenty of comments from others. I
don't like the evangelism that's attached to it these days.
I find the design of the site doesn't look very professional, in fact,
there is no design as such, it's basically a plain text format flanked
by ads. Even if that was your intention, you should provide a layout
that is much more orderly. In my opinion, the success rate of sites
such as yours rely very much on identity. Create a logo, use a colour
scheme, etc.
You provide three options for the visitor; by a car, rent a house, buy a
house. Why not separate the site into a 'cars' and 'properties' section.
Under the 'Submit Ads' section, there's a small question mark next to
'Individual' and 'Business' options. People won't know what this
question mark is for until they click on it. Why not separate the
Submit Ads section into 'Single listing' and 'Multiple listings'.
The form to search for cars... When choosing a price range, you display
'99,999,999,999' as a maximum. Why not cap it at let's say 200,000 and
have an additional 'no limit' option. You can still use
'99,999,999,999' as the value for that option so you don't have to alter
your search function.
There's a mistake in the 'year range' select box (cars form). Instead
of '2005' it displays '2155'...150 years have been added somewhere.
You have used select boxes for things like 'sorting order' and 'number
of ads per page'. These select boxes require 2 clicks if other than the
default value. If there are very few options, you should use radio
buttons instead, they only require a single click. When you design
forms, it is extremely important to reduce clicks, especially when your
site relies on these forms. You have to make the process of searching
as easy as possible. And, think about ways to add additional
functionality. Let's say I do a car search for an Alfa Romeo
model...give me the option to save my search criteria and send me the
results via e-mail, for example on a weekly basis. That saves me from
having to return each time to enter the same information. I did a
similar thing for a property site - users enter their search criteria,
and they are notified when a matching listing becomes available.
Good luck,
Ed
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| Leonard Blaisdell 2005-08-14, 7:14 am |
| In article <opsvhizzmux5vgts@zoete_b>,
"Barbara de Zoete" <b_de_zoete@hotmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 13 Aug 2005 23:23:14 -0700, Leonard Blaisdell <leo@greatbasin.com>
> wrote:
>
>
> <http://www.csszengarden.com/> ?
We'll pretend this isn't an international forum and that I'm only
joking. I was thinking of a certain female societal class :-p
On second thought, I shouldn't have posted that at all.
Now, why are we chopping up the Zen Garden? I really have missed the
discussion. After looking at it in a modern browser, it's nice enough,
loads quickly, resizes well, and it even works in Lynx :-)
leo
--
<http://web0.greatbasin.net/~leo/
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|
| In article <1123990494.001603.20230@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
carshouses@hotmail.com says...
> I would appreciate your critiques on this website
> http://cars-houses.com/
>
> Thanks.
>
>
My first impression is that it is "choppy" and unprofessional. As an
outsider looking at your site, I would move on to your competitors.
Very outdated look - it looks very 1995 to me. Plain and simple is not
bad when it is well-designed, but this is not attractive.
Are you listing cars or houses? Why both on the same site? They are
two completely different audiences.
Your meta tags have nothing to do with your text. Your meta tags must
match your text. Although Google is starting to ignore meta tags, other
search engines do not. You will eventually get penalized in ranking for
this.
Your coding is littered with errors.
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| <carshouses@hotmail.com> wrote:
> I would appreciate your critiques on this website
> http://cars-houses.com/
>
> Thanks.
>
I can review this one without visiting the site.
cars-houses suggests either a weak combination of two dispararate topics
or a blatant ripoff. Either way i would assume your site would offer me
lies and spam based on the URL alone.
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| carshouses@hotmail.com 2005-08-17, 4:26 am |
| Your logic is not understandable: a weak combination of two dispararate
topics means lies and spam.
I am grateful for the above people (Leonard Blaisdell, Barbara de
Zoete, Ed, saz) who have given many good advices. We are trying to
improve the website. We believe this website will be helpful to people
if it is successful. We also understand that it will hurt those
who are making money in this business.
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