587's New website

[lukevanoort]

Well, I have been slowly working on a new website for team 587, and now that it is at a usable stage, I need some critiques. Currently, I am planning to do a run-through of all the pages in a few weeks (after I've gotten complete member lists, pictures of the 2004 robot, and that sort of thing) and correct bugs, add more content, switch images to pull from the Gallery2 gallery instead of an 'images' folder, add a mod_rewrite script, double-check spelling/grammar, add a custom 404 page, and just generally add a little spit n' polish. In the interest of efficiency, I am trying to find all my problems so I only have to do one of these full-site revisions once and this is where I need your help.

I need a bit of help checking through it, most critically for compatibility checks; I've checked the site in Firefox and IE6 under XP, but I don't have easy access to any machines running Vista, OSX, or Linux (although my laptop dual boots with Linux, I haven't gotten around to getting the wireless to work). To keep anyone who helps from wasting their time on errors I already know about, here are the ones I am aware of: the bug with the top banner being too tall in IE, the background bleeding out of the <fieldset> tags, also in IE, and, much to my embarrassment, I forgot alt properties on the temporary placeholder images in the team member list.

Beyond that, any general content/layout critiques would be much appreciated. (Please keep in mind that it currently a bit of a rough draft, so the content is a bit scant)

The URL is http://www.team587.org.

Thanks!

[Akash Rastogi]

I love hedgehogs
In the category for Team, I think it would look more professional if you have Who we are.
What we Do. ...etc. instead of just one word categories.

just my $0.02

[synth3tk]

Pretty nice site, I like how it loaded super fast on a 28.8k connection. With that out the way... [Microsoft Vista, IE7, dial-up]

The main thing I noticed is with the menus. I tried to explain it, but pictures speak for themselves. I'll upload in a sec...

[HighLife]

I went through with a few of the linux browsers including Epiphany and Galeon (Sorry I don't have Konqueror at the moment). The only thing I saw were problems with the menus.

Here's what I mean:

It's probably the same thing blakcheez was seeing.
Also, have you tested the site with opera?

[lukevanoort]

Thanks guys!

Originally Posted by XxMORTteam11xX

I love hedgehogs
In the category for Team, I think it would look more professional if you have Who we are.
What we Do. ...etc. instead of just one word categories.

just my $0.02

I agree. Unfortunately, with the longer menu items, I'm having some problems getting all the list items to scale to right width in IE, but I should be able to fix it with a bit more messing around with the CSS.

Originally Posted by blakcheez

Pretty nice site, I like how it loaded super fast on a 28.8k connection. With that out the way... [Microsoft Vista, IE7, dial-up]
The main thing I noticed is with the menus. I tried to explain it, but pictures speak for themselves. I'll upload in a sec...

I generally try to keep my page filesizes pretty small; I spent many, many years stuck with dial-up, so I know how frustrating extraneous images and excessive load time can be.

Originally Posted by HighLife

I went through with a few of the linux browsers including Epiphany and Galeon (Sorry I don't have Konqueror at the moment). The only thing I saw were problems with the menus.

Here's what I mean:

It's probably the same thing blakcheez was seeing.
Also, have you tested the site with opera?

Yeah, I tested with Opera. I'm pretty sure this menu problem is a differing interpretation of font size. I have a fix, but it doesn't work with IE... time for more messing around with the CSS. I really, really hate IE. EDIT: I think I've got this problem fixed.

[RyanCesiel]

I would recommend not using the Times New Roman font, it just makes it look a little less exciting. Tahoma/Verdana @ 13px might be good for you're site. If you'd like to stick with a similar look, try Lucida Grande.

I would set a standard font for the navigation menu instead of Sans-Serif. The menu could be screwed up depending on what you have Sans-Serif set to with in your browser.

[synth3tk]

Yeah Highlife, that's what I was seeing. I just checked it out, and it's better from IE7 now. I just reinstalled the latest version of Firefox (stupid Vista crash) and it works. Kudos!

[lukevanoort]

Originally Posted by RyanCesiel

I would recommend not using the Times New Roman font, it just makes it look a little less exciting. Tahoma/Verdana @ 13px might be good for you're site. If you'd like to stick with a similar look, try Lucida Grande.

I would set a standard font for the navigation menu instead of Sans-Serif. The menu could be screwed up depending on what you have Sans-Serif set to with in your browser.

Thanks for the advice. After a little research into what the most commonly installed fonts are, I switched to Arial for the menus and Verdana for the content stuff. The fonts are a bit bigger now, but they are all sized relative to the user's default font (except where inline styles override the external styles, but those will be changed later) so people with weak eyes can scale them up for visibility and, conversely, us young folk can scale them done to get more data in less space.