Site Ratings & Reviews - Dirt Bike Cambodia site critique

Author

Dirt Bike Cambodia site critique

cruiserweight

2006-03-05, 6:15 am

This site is nearing completion, and I'm interested in any and all
ideas/critiques. Load times, color schemes, copy, photos, any and all
thoughts and ideas.

http://www.cambodiaexpeditions.com/beta/

You can drop the 'beta' part to see the current/old site, if you want.
Thanks very much in advance for your efforts.

mbstevens

2006-03-05, 6:15 am

cruiserweight wrote:
> This site is nearing completion, and I'm interested in any and all
> ideas/critiques. Load times, color schemes, copy, photos, any and all
> thoughts and ideas.
>
> http://www.cambodiaexpeditions.com/beta/
>
> You can drop the 'beta' part to see the current/old site, if you want.
> Thanks very much in advance for your efforts.
>
Validates nicely, both markup and CSS.

Bad idea to set basic font to 80% -- leave that decision to the visitor.
Opening photo of bikers could be improved by running it through a
sharpness filter. Thumbnail-to-enlargements seem to be handled well.
Nicely handled contact page.

The black background is a bit too severe for this kind of business,
perhaps. I'd bring it up to, say, #200, #020, or #002.
--
mbstevens
http://www.mbstevens.com/

Nik Coughlin

2006-03-05, 6:18 pm

cruiserweight wrote:
> This site is nearing completion, and I'm interested in any and all
> ideas/critiques. Load times, color schemes, copy, photos, any and all
> thoughts and ideas.
>
> http://www.cambodiaexpeditions.com/beta/
>
> You can drop the 'beta' part to see the current/old site, if you want.
> Thanks very much in advance for your efforts.

Hi,

My laptop screen is 1400x1050 and the background image (media/header.gif)
isn't wide enough to fill the .header div.

Cheers

Fig

2006-03-05, 6:18 pm

On Sun, 05 Mar 2006 08:47:21 -0000, mbstevens
<NOXwebmasterx@xmbstevensx.com> wrote:

> cruiserweight wrote:
[color=darkred]
> Opening photo of bikers could be improved by running it through a
> sharpness filter.

I don't think a sharpness filter is going to do it. It's a poor choice of
photo IMHO. The composition of the photo is good, but the focus is way
out. The eye fixes initially on the left hand biker but because he is so
out of focus, it's not clear that he is actually riding a bike. To me, it
looks like he is riding Johnny 5, from the film Short Circuit. The eye is
led back down the track to the other bikers but keeps coming back to
Johnny 5 to figure out what exactly is happening. You have a 'ton of new
photos'. Choose a different one.
Otherwise, the site looks excellent. A vast improvement on the current
one. Home page loaded in 2 secs here on 512kB cable. Site looks
professional and feels good.
If I was looking to buy an expedition in Cambodia I would be interested in
your products, but how do I move on with my purchase? The only way forward
is via 'contact us' but it does not feel obvious that this should be the
next step. I realise you are selling a bespoke product and that a
'shopping cart' solution would not work for you, but I can't help thinking
that your visitors might appreciate a little help in getting their money
out of their pockets. Or am I missing something?

--
Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/

Jim Moe

2006-03-05, 6:18 pm

cruiserweight wrote:
> This site is nearing completion, and I'm interested in any and all
> ideas/critiques. Load times, color schemes, copy, photos, any and all
> thoughts and ideas.
>
> http://www.cambodiaexpeditions.com/beta/
>
Overall I really like the layout and color scheme.

- XHTML 1.0 Transitional was only meant for transitioning legacy pages to
XHTML.
Use XHTML v1.0 Strict:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
HTML v4.01 Strict is a better choice unless you have some compelling
reason to use XHTML.

- The body text font size is 80% of my preferred default making it hard to
read. Most body text should be left at 100% (1 em).
- The text contrast is too low. It is hard to read especially since the
font size is reduced. Light text on dark background is inherently harder
to read because of background bleedthrough, particularly on CRTs.
And I have seen some monitors whose contrast is so poor that your text
would disappear altogether.

- As Nik pointed out the header image needs some work. Rather than have
one huge image the fill the largest possible screen, x-repeat a small
section from the left side of the image; it is all uniform on that side.
Place the logo and buildings-outline image on top of that. The background
extends and fills to fit the viewport.

- Fixed width design. Not very friendly for small screens like handhelds.

- The <Hx> elements are not very well used. Each page at least should have
an <h1>, for instance on the home page, placed around flag.gif in the
header. In general the <Hx>s are used in descending order to outline the
document structure.

- You have both "navon" and "navoff" in the menu list. "navon" is all that
is needed. Set the <li> elements to default to whatever "navoff" is.

--
jmm (hyphen) list (at) sohnen-moe (dot) com
(Remove .AXSPAMGN for email)

cruiserweight

2006-03-09, 6:26 pm

Thanks everyone for execellent feedback. ( I love the Johnny No. 5
comment; takes me waaayy back... )