Please look at site, tell me what you think

**damasterjo** · Jun 26th, 2006, 11:50 AM

www.questfor3d.com/lightwhere/index.html

please tell me what you think of this site. It uses ALOT of CSS for style and ONLY JavaScript for manipulation of content using the DOM so you dont have to wait for the page to reload again..

Please offer constructive critisim...

**Kasracer** · Jun 26th, 2006, 12:04 PM

The contrast between the text and the background isn't large enough. If you have a white background, try to use white (or an off-white) color for text and vice versa. The orange and the blue on black makes it harder to read.
The way it's currently laid out, you could easily create a design that allows for scalability. As it is now, if I shrink my web browser it'll throw the news on the bottom of the page.
Don't use JavaScript so I don't have to wait. Many phones and web browsers don't have JavaScript and this would make it difficult for them to navigate your page. If I want to link someone to your services, I couldn't do that as well.
Loading everything at once is not a good idea. If your site gets tons of traffic at some point but everyone only goes to 1-2 pages, you just made them download your whole site which increases load times and bandwidth usage.

Other than that, not bad. Maybe spice it up with some images?

**damasterjo** · Jun 26th, 2006, 01:16 PM

ok fixed the news bar thing, at least on my comps browsers, also it does not load it all at once, it includes a javascript file at first and only loads the index page text, then when a link is pressed it loads that page from the javascript function...

**agmorgan** · Jun 26th, 2006, 03:05 PM

Originally Posted by kasracer

The contrast between the text and the background isn't large enough. If you have a white background, try to use white (or an off-white) color for text and vice versa. The orange and the blue on black makes it harder to read.
The way it's currently laid out, you could easily create a design that allows for scalability. As it is now, if I shrink my web browser it'll throw the news on the bottom of the page.
Don't use JavaScript so I don't have to wait. Many phones and web browsers don't have JavaScript and this would make it difficult for them to navigate your page. If I want to link someone to your services, I couldn't do that as well.
Loading everything at once is not a good idea. If your site gets tons of traffic at some point but everyone only goes to 1-2 pages, you just made them download your whole site which increases load times and bandwidth usage.

Other than that, not bad. Maybe spice it up with some images?

white background with white text???

**mendhak** · Jun 26th, 2006, 03:14 PM

Your site header looks like a banner ad rather than a logo or header.

Orange - blue contrast point mentioned above

The css overline+underline thing is too amateurish, go for something simple and professional.

I hope that is just placeholder text you have in the Services section. Thing is, if you're going to sell your web technology services, make sure you get your site getting as good as your work will be. You can't judge a book by its cover, but you can judge a web designer by his website.

**penagate** · Jun 26th, 2006, 03:38 PM

Don't use XHTML Strict with text/html. Almost everyone does it and you shouldn't, because it's bad, mmkay. Either use HTML 4.01 Strict, or send XHTML Strict as application/xhtml+xml (which immediately cuts out IE ...)

I'll review your design later.

**penagate** · Jun 26th, 2006, 03:54 PM

OK, let's start with the c0d, ignoring my previous point for now.

It looks very clean. I have only a couple of comments. These two lines are unnecessary:

HTML Code:

<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us" />

Since both content type and charset should be sent by the web server in the HTTP headers. RFC language code is also specified in the lang attribute of the <html> tag.

Second comment, you are mixing JS with HTML:

HTML Code:

<body onload="makeIndex();">

Should put all the JS in the in the included JS file (kudos for that one). Use addEventListener/attachEvent to make an event handler (see my wrapper functions). Same goes for onclick.

Otherwise, it's good. Small niggle: Safari will choke on © (at least it did last time I checked), you could use © instead. Although that's a bug in Safari so it's not really something you should worry about.

Moving on to the design then.

At first impression it does look a bit first-high-school-IT-project kinda. I personally find a black background makes any text (even white) hard to read. It's alright sparingly, for small blocks that should stand out, but as the main background it is a bit off-putting. Generally white works best as the primary background colour.

It is good that you have a colour scheme, it is important to have a unified look to the site so that it does not look like various odds-and-ends slapped together. The header does stick out rather though. You want to try to make that blend in with the rest of the site design, or if not blend, at least complement. Right now it looks, like mend said, like a banner ad, with the way it only takes up a fixed amount of space. Also, the image quality looks very bad. I don't know if it's supposed to look retro, but retro doesn't generally tend to appeal when assessing a web designer's website

.

As for the JS switching pages - it does load them all at once, the content of all pages is in the JS file which gets downloaded every time.

I have no other points that haven't been made by kas or mend.

**agmorgan** · Jun 26th, 2006, 04:23 PM

You could use an obfuscator http://www.u.arizona.edu/~trw/spam/spam2.htm to display your email address instead of writing

lightwhere (at) yahoo (dot) com

Other types of doing it are on other areas of the same site
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~trw/spam/

**mendhak** · Jun 26th, 2006, 04:31 PM

I'd say the best way is to create a form that visitors can use to send the emails through, rather than relying upon the user having a mail client installed.

**visualAd** · Jun 26th, 2006, 07:09 PM

Neat code

That style of text for the main content doesn't do it for me. I can't quite figure out what is wrong with it, but its not right. I'd also say you need to bring the main content into focus more. At the momment the left and right content, being higher than the main content make it look less significant.

If you are going to serve xhtml with a application/xhtml+xml content-type, make sure you send Internet Explorer text/html as surprise surprise is doesn't recognise it otherwise. An XHTML document can still be complient with the DTD, even if you serve it with a text/html content type.

**damasterjo** · Jun 26th, 2006, 11:11 PM

ok honestly i dont know what xhtml is or why those meta tags are there you said didnt need to be there. I started with a small page with those there. I dont know what xhtml is or dhtml is, i think i know what they stand for. I dont really know how to put xml to good use either....

I am still kinda new to all of this, I feel I am catching on quick, and yes I agree with all the style sugestions and agree completely, I would like this site to be xtremely versitale. For this will be my business site, I want to have like some boxes in the corner you click and bassed on the one you click the style changes, to show our abilitys and what there sites can look like.

I would like you to be able to choose to use the DOM with javascript or not, for cellphone capabilitys and also so you can link to pages...

So this is a work in progress, once I get some of this code even more ironed out I will work on more styles and ways to navigate. I do feel too if I am starting a business in this field I dont want to short change myself, I want to learn the best way, the fastest way for the user. I want to be AWESOME at it. I already enjoy it, so it is just a matter of learning. I am looking foward to becomeing as proficent in this stuff as i am in directx7

Thanks for all your comments and compliments, especially the "It looks very clean" and "neat code", I too think the code does look "neat" not cause i wrote it or anything, but I like the difference from my DOM effects than normal nav pages and reloads...

Ok any more comments or help on what xhtml and all that stuff is is good, look in my sig, that is what i am familar with and really nothing else. I have a book that talks about XML, but not xhtml???

**DeadEyes** · Jun 27th, 2006, 03:20 AM

The first thing that struck me is the banner, it doesn't blend in to the page, it more kind of stands out.
Secondly with the banner, what does it say? after a while deciphering it I'm pretty sure it does not say 'LightWhere Technologies'.
I understand your at the design stage, but the small bit of content needs to be proof read.
A personal thing for me is link consistency, others may hold a different view.
On the menu it's orange and not underlined, just like the headers and some of the text(I don't want to move the cursor around to determine if something is a link). On the bottom its dark blue and not underlined again confused with ordinary text.

**CornedBee** · Jun 27th, 2006, 06:19 PM

XHTML is simply HTML with the syntactic constraints of XML. The XHTML specification contains an appendix that specifies what tricks one can pull to make syntactically valid XHTML be correctly parsed by most current HTML parsers, so that one can send it as text/html. However, this technique is often frowned upon: why write XHTML and then pretend it's slightly incorrect HTML, when you could just as well use real HTML?
Also, among the browsers that can handle both HTML and real XHTML (sent with an application/xhtml+xml MIME type), there are significant differences in how scripts are handled, and even some differences in style handling. There are more such differences when you go to a pure XML MIME type such as application/xml.

HTML:

Code:

<p class=foo>This is a paragraph.
Here's an image, too: <img src="bla.jpg" alt="an image">
<p>This is another paragraph. Since p elements cannot nest, the HTML
spec says that each p start tag automatically closes the open p element.
In other words, an end tag is not necessary.
<input type="checkbox" name="xyz" checked>

Cleaned-up HTML (my favourite):

Code:

<p class="foo">Note the attribute value being in quotes.
In HTML, attribute values don't need quotes when they consist
exclusively of letters or numbers (but not a mixture). However,
just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
Here's another image: <img src="bla.jpg" alt="an image"></p>
<p>Same thing for the closing tags. It's a good idea to always
close tags, instead of remembering which you must close and which
get closed automatically.</p>

Strict XHTML:

Code:

<p class="foo">The quotes are now mandatory.
<img src="bla.jpg" alt="an image"/> Note the slash in this tag.
XML doesn't allow elements that must be empty to simply consist
of an opening-style tag. You must write the complete element form
without content or use the empty element tag short form. This would
also be possible: <img src="bla.jpg" alt="an image"></img>.<p>
<p>Tags must always be closed in XML.</p>

XHTML, Appendix C:

Code:

<p class="foo">That's the XHTML with special care taken for
HTML-compatibility. Not much to say here, except a few rules to
observe:
<img src="bla.jpg" alt="an image" /> Note the space before the slash.
Many HTML parsers would otherwise miss the end of the tag. Warning:
as it is, to a truly conforming HTML parser (i.e. an SGML parser), the
tag would end at the slash and the > would be content. That's just one
of the reasons why AppC-XHTML is bad.</p>
<p>Don't use the open+close-tag form for empty HTML tags.
Don't use an XML prologue. In fact, don't use this at all.</p>

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