Readabilty of Site

[john tindell]

Hey i was wondering if anyone could tell me what your opinion on how easy it is to read the content on my site and whether they could suggest any improvments on it. Like colour scheme, fonts, size of text etc.

Heres the site I would like to you to help evaluation for me

http://www.worldoverride.co.uk/


Thanks for the feedback.

[Sgt. Hairy]

The website is very nice. The only thing that is negative about it is that you can hardly read the logo and other choises under it. Very confusing. And some people will think it is Russian(like me ) and get even more confused. But the whole layout is nice.

[john tindell]

cheers the title logo ive had lots of people saying the same thing, did you have trouble reading the articles, was the text too small or did the colour scheme make it harder to read?

Thanks for the feedback

[Sgt. Hairy]

Everything on it just feets together. The only thing that doesn't feet is the Russian words make out to look like English. Everytime I try to understand what it says my brain starts to hurt.



PS. Ouch, my brain!

[damasterjo]

if the site worked I would try it!

[john tindell]

Hmm having server problems, seems the whole host has gone down grrr. Give me a while so i can moan at my host. Thanks for the feedback

[john tindell]

Ok it seems to be back up but working a little slow, still no word from my host, but back to the quesion at hand, what do y ou think?

Cheers

[thegreatone]

Its all perfectly good colours/fonts etc. The only problem i encounter is the menu font. It does look Russian :s

Thats it though, it looks great otherwise

[penagate]

I think you could use the centre column space a bit better, there is lots of blank space around each post and the posts are rather small. Also I think you need more padding inside each posts, the text is very hard up against the border. The colours are OK.

[Merri]

Instead of telling only about the readibility, I'll give some general site creation tips. I'll go right ahead to the "bad things" so take a deep breath and prepare yourself!

It would be good if the welcome page told what the site is about. As such the page is completely useless. Also: why I would register first if I didn't even know what the site is about? This didn't actually become very clear to me at any point: the only real content I noticed was the articles. I didn't get to know what I get if I register or what the members' area is about.

As Penagate mentioned, it would be good if there was padding to the text elements, now the text is too close to the border in the home page. Also, you've used &nbsp; to give some padding effect to the first line of the text: use of paragraphs (<p>...</p>) would be better. You could then add the padding to the paragraph tags (and they actually have some by default, but you probably want to rip all that off with CSS).

Support page would be more clear if it was "support us". Now I first thought you'd give support to something (although had no idea what it would be). The textboxes in the left panel aren't clearly textboxes, imo the left panel doesn't work visually very well. The most important thing for the user would be the textbox, but instead it seems to be the least important and hardest to notice.

Technical issues:

• Some pages have the <title> tag, but still lack content (search page).
• There are duplicate id-attributes (this is not allowed, use class instead). http://validator.w3.org/ is your friend!
• Site main navigation is made using an image map, which is very hard to use in a text browser for example.
• Generally there is no thought given at all to presenting content: this makes the site unattractive to search engines and anyone who isn't using a regular desktop browser.
• Use of tables to make the whole layot is 90's stuff: there are better ways these days and learning to use tables doesn't really give anything besides Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape 4 support.

There is more I could tell, but it would be too much. You might want to read about CSS and accessibility, they're good reading to anyone who makes websites these days. They also give a better image on how you should use HTML to describe the structure of a page and what the content is about.

[penagate]

I might also add that once you start on the road Merri is pointing down you will end up pulling out your hair trying to make it work in Internet Explorer. It has laughably poor support of CSS.

Also, the paragpaph indent thing is text-indent.

p
{
    text-indent: 5ex;   /* first line indented 5 characters */
}

W3Schools is an excellent place to start learning CSS.

[Merri]

Well, IE6 as such doesn't have "poor" CSS support, it just has tweaks and bugs, some of them very annoying. And of course it doesn't support as much CSS as the newer browsers, but it supports enough for it to be useable.

When making a CSS file, I've found that:

• NEVER comment, IE has parsing bugs that cause weird results.
• If you want to use a strict doctype, you must place DOCTYPE in the very first line. Can't use <?xml...> in XHTML documents for example. If you don't do this, IE6 will go to quirksmode/transitional anyway and you'll be pulling your hair when comparing the results between IE6/other browsers.
• If you have to do a CSS trick to fool IE6 to work like the other browsers, use conditional comments via HTML to add a separate CSS fix file. Otherwise you're likely to have a broken site when IE7 is released.

I guess these are the three special rules to make sure you support IE6 "properly". Anyways, these things become more important to an advanced webdesigner (although I've been writing a beginner's guide in Finnish which takes these into account pretty much right from the beginning).

[penagate]

I have to disagree. I don't think Internet Explorer supports enough CSS to make it worthwhile. It does not support most of CSS 2 and has not even full support of CSS 1. Firefox on the other hand has full CSS 1 support, very good CSS 2 support and has some CSS 3 selectors even though the spec is still in draft. Opera also has very good CSS 1 and 2 support.

And as for XHTML, if you use strict XHTML you MUST serve it using the application/xhtml+xml MIME type, which Internet Explorer does not support. So there's no point trying to get XHTML working in IE. If you serve XHTML using text/html, which is only applicable for transitional XHTML 1.0, you cannot include the XML prolog anyway as it is parsed as an SGML rather than XML document. So the quirksmode behaviour in IE is actually correct.

IE 7 will also not support XHTML or have good CSS 2 support either. So (at least if you ignore the 80-90% market share it has) developing for IE is pointless. That's my view. And the way to change that huge market share is not to support it in the first place...

[Merri]

Your view misses one important point: whatever you make to the web, you should support as much people as possible. IE6 is still too popular to be ignored when making a website. For example, no company can do a website without ignoring it. If you care about correct XHTML strict mimetype, you make the server serve application/xhtml+xml to every browser except IE6. There is still a difference between "what works" and "what is theoritically the absolute truth". Remember that humans have made the rules in the first place: thus the theoretical view might not be fully correct and opinions vary between people you ask. Thus I rely on the "what works" logic, yet following the theoretical side as much as is practically possible. And I mainly use XHTML 1.0 Strict. Why? Because I like strict mode a whole lot more than transitional and XHTML forces to make better formatted code than HTML 4. It works well enough in IE6 although most of the limitations are set by it. Yet Firefox and Opera have their limitations and bugs as well, there just is less of them.

The funny thing in that is that by discouraging the use of XHTML strict you're holding back the web: XHTML is the way of today and the future so it would be better to encourage people to use it, tell what the problems are and how to get along with it. Learning XHTML now is better than learning it when everyone else is already using it. IE6 won't fall out of the picture in many years to come, so one just has to learn how to support it.


But all this should be made a separate thread... John must be pulling his hair out of his head

[penagate]

Your view misses one important point: whatever you make to the web, you should support as much people as possible. IE6 is still too popular to be ignored when making a website

And that's where we disagree, I would like to see IE either support current standards or die and I dont think authoring vanilla HTML or CSS 1 is helpful to that cause (I wrote my website in XHTML 1.1). But yes you do have a good point in that it cuts off a lot of traffic. That's where the dilemma lies. I chose to go the pure standards route and if that means alienating IE users then so be it. (How did we get into this discussion anyway? )

[Merri]

But do you take care of the people who use text browsers, speech syntherizers or small environment screens (ie. mobile phones)? Have you paid attention to printing? Leaving IE out is like this: forgetting and ignoring certain users by the browser they use. I pay attention to all users these days, which means I need to pay attention to all browsers. Don't you see that the standards exist purely for this reason? Standards are there to prevent the thing you do from happening!

(We got here because you claim IE6 has poor CSS support - and as such it isn't poor, it works mostly as it should and you can make a site design work with what it offers )

[penagate]

But do you take care of the people who use text browsers, speech syntherizers or small environment screens (ie. mobile phones)? Have you paid attention to printing?

Not yet, it's still in design. But I will.

Leaving IE out is like this: forgetting and ignoring certain users by the browser they use.

I don't ignore them, they get a message that tells them exactly why they can't see my site and suggests some modern browsers which they can use instead. I don't want to leave them out but at the same time I don't want to have to hack my pages to bits to make them work in an outdated browser. I don't see why this should be a part of web development at all, it's a waste of time. What browser you use is your choice.

Don't you see that the standards exist purely for this reason? Standards are there to prevent the thing you do from happening!

Standards exist to make people's lives easier by providing a common platform to work with. IE's inconsistent support makes web development more difficult, which is the exact opposite to what should happen.

(We got here because you claim IE6 has poor CSS support - and as such it isn't poor, it works mostly as it should and you can make a site design work with what it offers )

Web Browser CSS Support

IE comes out very poorly.

and yes I have tried making site designs in Internet Explorer. It is VERY difficult and tedious to make it work.

[Merri]

The main point is: you just can't tell other people not to support IE6 when making websites.

[john tindell]

Cheers for all the feed back will start to try and make the chagnes that you have all suggested. Thanks

[damasterjo]

penagate and merri, next time take that outside. Wow!

[Pino]

I agree with merri here, I understand IE is a pain the design for, but ALOT of people still use it. Its like saying i'll sell lemondae in my stand to all people who are wearing a blue t-shirt.

Pino

[Merri]

I've just made my first fully IE4 + IE5.01 compatible design since 2003. And it wasn't even all that hard and even IE4 supported enough CSS, understanding most of the important styles

Can't show it yet, still working on it... I'll be getting better graphics for it and another person has to make a template of it to the system it will be used in.


Edit: Finally the site works. Anyways: this just as an example that IE6 isn't that bad.

[NoteMe]

I kind of have to agree with Penagate here. If you are a privat person that can afford to lose some visitors, there is nothing better you can do then tell the dumb users how dumb they are. If MS lose to many users, they will have to do something about it, like they did back in the Netscape days. Thats how industry keep pushing each other. But then we are back to my point, most businesses can't afford to lose users, so thats why they chose to have a more boring home page, where more people can view their page. But that doesn't mean that it is 100% necessary for you as a hobby web developer to use your power to tell the rest of the users they are doing something dumb....

[john tindell]

kool cheers for all the feedback, looking around about how else to create a layout without tables. Looked into layers with CSS now i know the basics of how to do it, but does anyone know of any links that can help me move on. The w3schools.com site seems more like an intro and not how is the best way to create an layout?

Thanks

[NoteMe]

You can learn a lot by looking at the examples at http://www.csszengarden.com/. There is also a book out from the authour of the HTML at zen garden, that is pretty nice.



- ØØ -

[Merri]

My general tips:

• Make a container div that will contain all the other data and set position : relative; on it. This helps with some cross-browser layer positioning problems.
• Separate different main things into their own div: content, menu, footer. However, keeping the amount of divs to a minimum is good way to go, otherwise you'll end up with divinism.
• Use the HTML markup to what it is meant to be used for, thus use p, ul, ol, dl, headers and so on properly. Never use double <br>, you can handle styling via CSS. Using proper HTML makes sure you don't end up to divinism and tons of useless classes.
• By using the proper markup, the styling becomes much easier.
• I've found out it to be the most convenient to reset settings in the beginning of the CSS file, ie. I set all div, p, ul, etc. margin, border and padding to zero. This makes working with different browsers much easier when you start customizing the styles.
• Use class attributes only if you need to: if you have a general div for something (the content/menu/footer division I spoke about above), it might be easier to just tell #menu p instead of making a new class for a paragraph under the menu div.

This is already a lot of info... I can reason everything if anyone has questions about these tips.