New Site - Comments/Suggestions?

[Goaliexam]

Hi everyone. I just finished redesigning my team's new website, and was looking for comments/criticism/suggestions.

http://www.haverfordrobotics.com

Note: The color scheme was dictated by the school, it had to be maroon and that yellow, and having the yellow for the background was atrocious. I like the way it looks now, but just keep in mind that changing the color scheme much isn't really an option.

[JohnBoucher]

Cool Stuff Max,
I like to color choice and the graphics. I think they work well together. I really like the use of the 80/20 in the image. Nice touch.

The code validate nicely. It's great to see that.

Two things I have to mention...

#1 I'm looking at it at 800x600 and I get a little bottom scroll bar. Perhaps you can look at squeezing it in a little. Not a big deal.

#2 As much as I like the image "overlay_1_b" it uses up a a lot of real estate. The upper left is where everyone starts. Having such a large static image forces your content below the bottom of my screen (800x600). That makes me have to work at using your page. It might put some users off. Perhaps if you used the upper portion of the image to convey what page you were on, that would make the real estate useful.

Good job...

[lukevanoort]

I think it's pretty good, I'm glad to see you stay away from "shiny" stuff.(eg. flash, huge images, etc.) However, watch out with XML, older browsers have quite a time with it. It worked for me, but I use a recent release of Firefox.

[Jonathan Norris]

Very nice layout, but you need more graphics in the banner. I really like the robot on the banner but it could be complimented by some pictures of your team or something. Also the first page is a bit bland you need to add more to the opening page to get the user more interested in your site when they visit it.

my $0.02

[Greg Marra]

Originally Posted by lukevanoort

I think it's pretty good, I'm glad to see you stay away from "shiny" stuff.(eg. flash, huge images, etc.) However, watch out with XML, older browsers have quite a time with it. It worked for me, but I use a recent release of Firefox.

The page actually isn't XML, it's XHTML. The point of XHTML is that it should degrade almost perfectly to any old browser without anything significant breaking.

That being said, what the heck is a .hsr?

[Elgin Clock]

As you can see by this page: http://www.swindsor.k12.ct.us/Highsc...s/clubs/first/
They were also dictated by their school to use that same color scheme as shown on the school's site here: http://www.swindsor.k12.ct.us/Highsc...ivities/clubs/

Anyways.. enough with colors. Let's move to the site itself.

Personally, I go right to the multimedia pages to see visuals of the team and the robot.

I like your gallery, and actually want to know how you created that for my personal benefit.

The movies section is a good touch, but the file type is a little wrong for the average internet user. .AVI files wait till they are completely DL'ed to play. With high speed cable access here, even I get annoyed when I see a .AVI file. I would suggest the lower quality alternative (or even a mirror) for low speed users .WMV

The rest of the site looks like it is coming along nicely, yet I only have one more comment before I step off the soap box.

On the front page, your cart logo is rather large. Nothing is (currently?) on the top of the cart in the area above the team number. Maybe take one tier off the cart??

Oh, one last thing..
Add the FIRST logo somewhere to be eligible for the website award.

Originally Posted by Greg Marra

That being said, what the heck is a .hsr?

I was wondering that as well.. and a google search didn't prove very helpful, so I am guessing it stands for "High School Robotics"? or maybe this is what HSR stands for.

[hao1300]

Originally Posted by Elgin Clock

On the front page, your cart logo is rather large. Nothing is (currently?) on the top of the cart in the area above the team number. Maybe take one tier off the cart??

I agree with Elgin. You should make some changes to the logo's height.

One thing I want to add is that when I click search in your gallery (pictures), I see black text, which is very difficult to read under a dark background.

Also, I suggest to put a hyperlink on your logo so that people can get back to the home page easily.

HSR looks really deep. Can you explain to us what it is please!?

[Ian Curtis]

Pretty sweet. My only real suggestion is your extruded aluminum squarey thingy with your team number is rather large. It's not obnoxious, but it draws my eye away from the content. Also, you should probably incorporate the FIRST logo into your template instead of a large logo on your sponsors page which is in violation of the logo usage policy (it has to be on a white background). Other than that it looks great. Good luck.

[Goaliexam]

Thanks for the feedback everyone. To answer some questions:

.hsr is a made up extension, HSR standing for Haverford School Robotics. Basically, I have a .htaccess file set up to redirect all .hsr page requests to a PHP file which then shows the appropriate content page based on the URL. It's a prettier solution than having index.php?page=team/about.

The gallery script is called Snipe Gallery, and can be found at http://www.snipegallery.com/. I would highly recommend it, much simpler to use and more easily customizable (in my experience) than either Coppermine or Gallery. That black text on the search page I hadn't noticed, so I'll fix that now.

The biggest comment I see is the size of the robot logo. I'm going to play with shrinking it in size, though that leaves more whitespace in the white banner area. I may have to put some kind of almost transparent image behind the banner text so that it isn't just white. Thanks again for all your feedback.