Any Ideeas

louie

I made this website for my own bussines and it looks fine in my point of view, but always have the feeling there is something missing.
Does anyone has any suggestions of what's needed?
In Car Audio & Security

RicardoSmith

Basically theres no design, layout or proper use of fonts. You've basically stuck coloured text all over the place, without really thinking about what you are doing, or why you are doing it. One of the reasons I think you have done this is to avoid using graphics, as any graphics you have used are quite poor. You also do not seem to have put any thought into the "design" or style of the website and it comes across as quite sterile as a result.

The ultimate effect, it that it looks like a hobby site, rather than a business site. The other sites that this one links to, including the ones that link from the "web design" site all suffer from the same problems. I suggest you look at some business sites that are a lot more polished and have put some thought into their design and try to get some inspiration from them. Even get someone you know who does a bit of graphics to come up with some designs for you.

Hope thats useful and sounds like constructive criticism as it was intended.

Some links for yah to have a gander at....

http://www.eforecourt.com
http://www.vwvortex.com
http://www.demon-tweeks.co.uk

mneylon

I would agree with Ricardo. It looks very amateurish.
If you don't have a big budget you could get a simple template from a professional deisgner that would contain all the basic elements for your site.
Sorry if that sounds harsh, but you did ask

Seth Brundle

I checked it on http://validator.w3.org for code errors - (assumed DTD of HTML 4.1). Your HTML has a number of errors in it (hopefully following link works) http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.besecure2000.com%2F&doctype=HTML+4.01+Transitional&charset=iso-8859-1+%28Western+Europe%29 - these would need to be resolved before your site will work properly accross the board.

Your choice of colours is unsure - which colour is to emphasise something? (red, green, blue, yellow, bold text?)

The flash movie, whilst not a huge file size (suiting everyone on dial-up) contains a horrible pixelated picture in the middle.

There is too much white space[sic] towards the bottom before your keyword list (don't know if they will have much sway with the search engines anymore).

Similar to blacknight's advice, do a search on google for "free web templates" and you are bound to pick up a few nice looking templates for nowt - one of which may suit you. (bear in mind that most free ones will look horrible but there are a few nice ones oput there).

louie

What about now?
Are there any good improvements?

Kai

Theres that validation thing again, does anyone have any proof that it actually works the way its meant to ?? every site you try has errors. the one listed has 16 errors, where as boards.ie has 208 !!
Its probably gone up a lot due to them both being dynamic sites with ASP and PHP but still its a pointless test.

Louie ive only checked the site today so i missed what it was like before and i therefore dont know of the improvments that you made. As the site is now i dont like it. But on the plus side it is fixable, the main thing you need to do is take a look at some sites you like, try to see how they are done, use of colour, navigation, fonts, graphics etc. See what you like and start off small.
i really dont like that flash thing on the front i would loose that and just enter the site directly. the main site itself isnt too bad but it needs some improving to make it easier on the eye, the black and grey doesnt fit together and the red and blue font on top makes things worse. As i said though its not too bad and i have seen a lot worse it just need a little more work.

peterd

Originally posted by Frugu
Theres that validation thing again, does anyone have any proof that it actually works the way its meant to ?? every site you try has errors. the one listed has 16 errors, where as boards.ie has 208 !!
Its probably gone up a lot due to them both being dynamic sites with ASP and PHP but still its a pointless test.

Valid code is something that web developers should be aware of at the very least. Because most of the time IE will render pages "properly" even with html mistakes, it only encourages sloppy code, which in turn puts people off other browsers because they "don't show web pages right". Just to prove that it does work, here are three sites which validate :-)

www.wired.com
www.opera.com
www.sixapart.com (Like all MT blogs do)

Webmonkey

But is absolutly redicolous. IT manages to find a error on every line.

Example:

Line 172, column 64: there is no attribute "MARGINHEIGHT" (explain...).
...argin="0" topmargin="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0">>

What the hell. A lot of sites require no margins to make them full width sites.


Line 307, column 87: reference to entity "id" for which no system identifier could be generated
...>-</font> <a href="?function=pages&id=6">FAQs</a><br>

Whats wrong. Dynamic sites they require these sort of links. Ahhhh i'm not using the validator anymore because for the one reason it makes my properly looking sites like as if they were made by some fool or something. Just my opinion tho :rolleyes:

I dont' think its very accurate with advanced sites. Just really for 100% html sites.

Anywayz talk to ye later.

./Webmonkey

Webmonkey

http://www.wired.com/

Hey how come that has no errors and it has those dynamic links

./Webmonkey

mneylon

Originally posted by Webmonkey
http://www.wired.com/

Hey how come that has no errors and it has those dynamic links

./Webmonkey

Because they know how to code properly and have been around long enough to realise the value of high-quality code

Webmonkey

Could you explain more on how to manage to get no errors?

mneylon

Code your pages properly.
Don't use tags that are IE proprietary
The w3c validator explains all the errors that are generated.
You can also use tools like TopStyle to find and correct errors. WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver sometimes add tags that don't exist in the w3c specs. In other cases they 'forget' to add possible tags.

Webmonkey

Well?

Lycos.com - Professional Site - Hundreds of Errors

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lycos.com&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=%28detect+automatically%29

Webmonkey

Originally posted by blacknight
Code your pages properly.
Don't use tags that are IE proprietary
The w3c validator explains all the errors that are generated.
You can also use tools like TopStyle to find and correct errors. WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver sometimes add tags that don't exist in the w3c specs. In other cases they 'forget' to add possible tags.

Thanks

Seth Brundle

who said it was professional?
Most of those errors are basic mistakes that should not have happened - no ALT attribute sin images, lack of quote marks, MSIE specific markup.

pepsiman

Originally posted by Webmonkey
Could you explain more on how to manage to get no errors?

Line 172, column 64: there is no attribute "MARGINHEIGHT" (explain...).

Use CSS. margin: 5px or any of the other margin properties (margin-left, margin-right etc.). marginheight, marginwidth, topmargin, leftmargin, rightmargin and bottommargin are proprietary attributes and not part of HTML (first two: Netscape and Opera, last four: Internet Explorer).

Line 307, column 87: reference to entity "id" for which no system identifier could be generated

The ampersand needs to be escaped when used in URL's and attribute values. You escape it like this: &amp;. So, ...html?value1=a&value2=b&value3=c should be ...html?value1=a&amp;value2=b&amp;value3=c. The same goes for double quotation marks; escape it in URL's and attribute values: &quot;.

/T

Webmonkey

Thanks guys

RicardoSmith

Originally posted by louie
What about now?
Are there any good improvements?

Just looked at it now and its a bit better. Could still do with a lot more work in terms of the design and graphics. But the layout is much better. You're going in the right direction at least.

The layout still jumps and changes around on the different pages. I'd suggest sticking to the same layout on all the pages including the home page. I also think about moving the more usual menu items from the side bar to a horizontal menu bar under the title and banner graphics. So you'd have the horizontal bar for one type of content and then the vertical sidebar for a different type of content.

I do a bit more work on the grey graphics you've used, they still not that good, and I've a feeling you can do a lot better. If I get a chance I'll mock some ideas for you...

louie

Just as I am writting here I am uploading a new top design, plus some modifications to the left & right files.
I just got yesterday the photoshop7 and I am doing some working to improve the graphics.

My girlfrien is usualy doing the graphics but she's only after having a baby girl so she's a bit busy???

mneylon

Just a couple of other things...
The site is extremely slow to connect and load....

And what the hell is the story with http://www.eire-webdesign.com/ ?
The page never seems to finish loading

EDIT: I just checked the source of that link. OMG there is ZERO content, just a load of bad HTML and a reload

nahdoic

Originally posted by blacknight
And what the hell is the story with http://www.eire-webdesign.com/ ?
The page never seems to finish loading

i think

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=index.asp">

might have something to do with it

mneylon

Originally posted by nahdoic
i think

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=index.asp">

might have something to do with it

I noticed that afterwards... a rather odd choice for a page without any content

RicardoSmith

Acutally I thought they were slow too, but as I'm on a dire dialup connection everything is slow so its hard to tell if its the site or my connection.

mneylon

I'm on souped up ADSL, so it's not me or you. Every other site on the net seems fine except for that.
It's either the site or the host...

louie

The company I am hosting the websites with, are upgrading there connections with Eircom.
That's what I was told, so that could be a reason for being so slow.

Webmonkey

Its not slow its just refreshing every second. Nice way of boosting ur hits

spod

Originally posted by Frugu
Theres that validation thing again, does anyone have any proof that it actually works the way its meant to ?? every site you try has errors. the one listed has 16 errors, where as boards.ie has 208 !!
Its probably gone up a lot due to them both being dynamic sites with ASP and PHP but still its a pointless test.

The W3C validator uses the SGML specification for whichever version of html you specify the document is (<doctype ..> being an *essential* tag) with a fully validating SGML parser.

It's always 100%.

mneylon

Originally posted by Webmonkey
Its not slow its just refreshing every second. Nice way of boosting ur hits

I'd call it a waste of bandwidth

Webmonkey

oh yeah not forgetting that!

louie

I don't need to bust my hits.
The website it's actually down.
It's something to do on the serverside.
The code is to redirect from index.html --> index.asp after 0sec..
It's a way to redirect users from HTML pages. I can't use <%response.Redirect%>

louie

As I said the server was down last night for the eire-webdesign website. Now it's all back to normal.
Thanks guys for all the help.