Website Review

[kz1290]

So Team 1290 has a new website this year, it is much nicer than the old one which was according to the old programmer "destroyed". The most I could get out of him was that it was some sort of php script that was pulling from a wordpress and that the login process was involved.

Our new website has been coded entirely from scratch and being a fairly new webcoder I'm looking for suggestions. What could be done better? What could be done more efficiently? Also, we are going to be seriously pursuing the Charimans award this year, and any suggestions on anything that the website should include in that respect would also be appreciated.

The website link is here.

[bvisness]

Honestly, the website looks very sloppy to me. Not that it's a bad design, just that it needs to be tightened up a lot.

First of all, the layout is pretty screwy with certain elements, as you can see in this picture:



But besides that, there's no padding on the video (it bumps up against the left side of the content section) and the links on the right side unnecessarily crowd the main content. Also, you should make things line up at the top of the page so it looks more organized.

Content-wise, the website looks good. Just pay attention to detail in the design and your site will be much, much more appealing to judges and visitors.

[kz1290]

Could you explain what you said about the things at the top not being aligned? Also with the video it shows up with padding in my browser. What browser were you using, I think it might be a browser thing.

[bvisness]

I'm using Google Chrome, and if your website doesn't display correctly in Chrome then you definitely have a problem on your hands. Try putting some padding on the div.wrapper instead of on each individual <p> tag.

See the attached screenshot for what I meant by the top things not being aligned. You can see that each block is inset from the left by a different amount. Why? It would look a lot cleaner if at least the top two were left-aligned by the same amount.

Also, I checked my browser's javascript console and I found that the page can't load JQuery from your team's site (the file seems to be missing.) I'm not sure to what extent you were using JQuery, but it won't work at all until that reference is fixed.

Honestly, though, just pay attention to detail. And try following this site through: http://learnlayout.com/. It'll help you get a sense for what layout options you have, as well as what looks good to a reader.

[wesleyac]

Use padding more (for example in between the top bar and the content, beside the video, etc.).

The "Contact Us" link goes off the edge of the nav bar (I have a 15" screen).

The background looping looks sloppy.

Content is good, but the site could use some work.

[M. Lillis]

One thing to look at; make sure that all external links open in a new tab. It's a really simple process. After the link in any <a> tag, put target="_blank">...</a>

This should clean up any external links on the site, but you should also consider changing the layout of the Photos page to match the rest of the website. If recreating the photo page is too difficult, you can upload the photos to Picasa Web and just embed a photo slideshow on your photo page.

There is more, but other people covered it; hope this helps.