Website critiques?

[imackey]

Hi All,

It has been about 8 months since our site launched (www.lahsrobotics.org).

With school starting soon, we wanted to update our site in any way, shape or form.

I wanted to ask you if you have any comments, suggestions, or concerns about our site.

www.lahsrobotics.org - SITE

Thanks,
LAHS Robotics Team 114
EagleStrike

[rachelholladay]

Originally Posted by imackey

Hi All,

It has been about 8 months since our site launched (www.lahsrobotics.org).

With school starting soon, we wanted to update our site in any way, shape or form.

I wanted to ask you if you have any comments, suggestions, or concerns about our site.

www.lahsrobotics.org - SITE

Thanks,
LAHS Robotics Team 114
EagleStrike

I went to go look at your site and it said, "This website is under construction". I guess I should try again later..?

[gracie.]

Hey guys! Your website help has been indispensable so far, so I thought I might pose another question if anyone is still around to help.

I have a navigation problem. Kind of a big one, it seems. On our menu bar, there are three items with dropdowns - Team 2399, News, and Sponsors. Whenever I give our page to a new user, they never realize that these items are clickable in addition to the pages in their dropdown menus. This is a problem I've been considering for a while, and a few of you pointed it out as well.
There have been a few solutions I have considered, but none of them have been quite as effective or clean as I would've hoped.

Any ideas?

thanks,
gracie
EDIT: Just to clarify, I mean that they don't notice the items themselves are clickable, only thinking the dropdown items are.

[rachelholladay]

I'm going to suggest what I do on my website and feel free to use it a food for thought.

So let's say I want to show information about my sponsors and finance and all that jazz. I have a tab on the nav bar that is labelled "Finance" and under that are the subtabs of Current Sponsors, Business Plan and Corporate Sponsorship. The user can click any of the subtabs so go to that page, but the actual box of 'Finance' is a null link. To clarify, a snippet of code is below.


<li><a href="#">Finance</a>
<ul><li><a href="sponsors.html">Current Sponsors</a></li>
<li><a href="business_plan.html">Business Plan</a></li>
<li><a href="corporate.html">Corporate Sponsorship</a></li>
</ul>
</li>

So in the case of your sponsor page my suggestion would be make two subtabs of something like 'Our sponsors' and 'become a sponsor'. That way the user would know that if there were no subtabs then use the main tab but if there are subtabs, use only those.

Just a thought.

[bardd]

Originally Posted by gracie.

Hey guys! Your website help has been indispensable so far, so I thought I might pose another question if anyone is still around to help.

I have a navigation problem. Kind of a big one, it seems. On our menu bar, there are three items with dropdowns - Team 2399, News, and Sponsors. Whenever I give our page to a new user, they never realize that these items are clickable in addition to the pages in their dropdown menus. This is a problem I've been considering for a while, and a few of you pointed it out as well.
There have been a few solutions I have considered, but none of them have been quite as effective or clean as I would've hoped.

Any ideas?

thanks,
gracie

I'm not sure whether you meant the problem is with the items or the dropdowns, so I'll answer for both.

For the dropdown, try to make the color change more significant. As is, it is barely noticable.

For the items, I believe making a half-a-second pause between moving the mouse to an item and the opening of the dropdown might get the desired effect (it doesn't have to be half a second, but something really short, maybe even noticable only at an unconscious level), but it's just an assumption.
This isn't based on anything besides my gut feeling.