Goalie35
September 16th, 2002, 04:45 PM
Hey what's up guys.
I'm doing an internship to create a web site for a company and I want to know what your opinions of it are and what should be ripped out. The design of the template is currently being worked on so there are some glitches with the header(some of the images aren't aligned and some images don't appear) and the content of the home page isn't fully loaded yet but what do you guys think of the template design itself. Be brutally honest. If you feel the whole template should be scrapped, feel free to say so. We just need to know what people think before we make even more changes. We just brought on some new designers(I do the programming, not the designing) so if we need to change a bunch of it, no problem. Here's the site:
http://208.20.14.9/index.asp
Thanks guys.
-Goalie35
Manish Malik
September 17th, 2002, 05:39 AM
1. Product-links could be taken off the menu and rather graphical hyperlinks (gifs demonstrating the product, on which user can click and visit the product page) could be put up on (preferably) left side of the main page.
2. Not many users would click on "News" menu to read news/headlines from the company. Rather 4 recent news items (clickable) could be displayed somewhere on the main page (simple backend script code to fetch the most recent items should be enough).
3. I find everything has been stuffed into the menu (the above two points actually talk abt this only). The main items could be moved onto the main page with the menu containing secondary items (something like "Contact Persons", "Our Network", "Words from our customers"),etc.
Waldo2k2
September 18th, 2002, 09:32 PM
In a word: inline frames
that's two words but you get the point
In the internet business world, time=money.
Users waiting for menus to load become bored, and will often leave a site just because of it. I suggest loading everything up into inline frames. Also, since you're already doing absolute positioning, you should move stuff around in your code. First, load the scripts in your head (hundreths of a second, no time consumption) second, LOAD THE BODY TEXT!
I can't stress that enough, if the user has something to read while everything else loads, they get the information they want faster (they didn't come to see the pretty pictures unfortunately) and they are less annoyed at slower download times (they are also less likely to notice the delays). After that load the menu and then finally that animation up top (which needs some work, it screams subliminal messaging as opposed to advertising the company name, lol) Another cool thing you can do to make everything slicker, is PRELOAD text. Basically, put all your javascript code into a seperate .js file. Link all your pages to that file, third, create variables in that file that contain text for pages. In your actual html page do
<body>
<script language=JavaScript>
document.write(TextVariable);
</script>
</body>
Now, since every page was linked to the .js file, the variables are loaded before any page body, and text is loaded for all other pages while loading up the main page. That should make the site work quite smoothly, if you have any further questions feel free to email Waldo2k2@netscape.net . good luck.