Website Feedback 2013

Technical Website Design/Showcase
1

Hi All,

We (LAHS Robotics Team 114 EagleStrike) recently created a new site and wanted to get as much feedback as possible.

Please visit our site at: www.lahsrobotics.org.

We appreciate all feedback and comments. You can reply directly to this post or contact us here.

Thanks,
LAHS Robotics Team 114

2

Ok, looks to be fairly well designed, but there is one major problem: it’s slow. I’m saying this with a high-end i5 and 20mbps internet.

  • Think about dropping the snow. It’s making my pc lag a bit, and I’d hate to think of browsing it with a netbook.
  • Compress the images. The site logo is over a meg and downsamples rather badly on my screen. Resize that and the other large images (I’d try to go for 200K max, unless you need it high res, less for the logo). If you could fix one thing, fix this.
  • There are some references to a pdfppt script that doesn’t exist, which is driving up the load time and spitting out errors into the console.
  • Also, one last critique: I love the little side arrow, but the facebook/youtube/twitter buttons at the top? They don’t exactly fit the style of the site. Maybe consider removing them and permanently expanding the arrow on the right, or just match the look that the rest of the site has.

Other than those pet peeves (none of which were too high priority), I find it to be a great site; great looks and well-implemented. Maybe a touch more pictures would help, but I have a feeling you’ll add plenty by the time build season is over.

Disclaimer: all IMHO, I do not design web sites for a living (but I probably could)

3

I’m on similar specs & internet connection and the site is also quite slow.

I see that you’re using DOM elements to make the snow. I would check if the browser hitting the page is modern and then render the snow with canvas/WebGL instead (from the looks of the jsnow.js code this wouldn’t be very tricky to port and would be far more performant). On older browsers, cut it entirely.

Yeah the site logo resolution is 3217x1851 displayed at a 180px width, this is bad for performance and battery life on mobile devices. The rest of the assets seem a pretty decent size though according to Chrome developer tools.

It appears you were trying to use WebGL and three.js with something already but I don’t see any canvas tags on the page. The Task Manager in Chrome is reporting that your site is running at 20FPS but I’m not entirely sure what is animating (generally FPS is recorded in Chrome’s Task Manager from calling requestAnimationFrame or the like, not sure what you’re using).

Very appealing site though :3

4

I only looked at the site on my iphone, so this post will be pretty brief.

The banner image (with the team picture) is too large for my screen, and it shifts over and enables me to scroll right on the mobile theme. Maybe you should change the size on a mobile browser? Or use a different image?

Also, what is the significance of Entei’s Realm? I see what it is, but I don’t think it needs to be on your site. Just my opinion.

5

I think it looks pretty nice! I’d be curious to know what software you used to design it…

I just noticed a couple problems with it:

  1. Your logo (and other photos) are reaaallllly big, so they take a while to load. You should probably resize your images before you put them on the site.
  2. Your header is really tall, so I can’t see much of the content without scrolling down. I personally would like to see more content at first glance.

Looks good though! The design is simple and effective.

6

Very well made website! It looks absolutely stunning, so good work =D I do echo the thoughts of everyone, in that its a little slow to load on my normally fast internet. But I think that has already been addressed =D

Not sure if it is possible to fix, but I was left feeling a lack of knowing your team personally. Maybe throw a team photo in there somewhere? Or even delegate the blog and make it personal? I’m not sure, and it may not even fit what you want your website to do, but that’s just my thoughts =)

7

Hi All,

Thank you for all of your comments! We have resized the logo, so hopefully it should load a lot faster.

We also transferred hosts, so we are hoping that you notice an increase in speed while surfing our site.

We are still in the process of making changes and incorporating your comments.

Thanks,
LAHS Robotics Team 114

8

I would like to point out that the Google logo you use looks like it has some weird white edges.

A better version might be available here?
http://deployment.googleapps.com/Home/user-resources/google-icons-and-logos

9

Banner area is fairly large - it takes up almost half of my screen

Not much color variance to the site - not sure if I like that or not. It does make it very easy to read, though.

Your blog link on the navbar is old - it still points to the 2012 blog!

Very nice website. Keep it up!

10

It seems a bit redundant to have a scroll-over menu for Facebook and Twitter on the right side of screen, and to have icons for FB, Twitter, and Youtube on the header bar.
The font used for the menu is also too thin in my opinion, although, that’s probably me just being nit-picky.
Also, the “Search” in the search bar is too dark to distinguish from the search-bar itself.

Overall, I really like the website, it looks great, good luck this season!