School Website Review

[tsimons]

Hi Guys,

 

Just a post to see what you think of our schools website?

 

James Hornsby High School | Together We Excel

 

Custom CMS System by one of my Technicians

 

All been coded, designed and hosted by myself

[gibbo_ap]

very cool nice design. how long did it take?

[Arcath]

very nice, only one thing i will say

 

is that comic sans i see in the main content?

[gibbo_ap]

i noticed the evil comic sans too

[pete]

Yeah, s'good.

 

Few comments:

 

1) I see (Firefox 3.57, Linux) a faint white squared outline on the header image right of the shield.

 

2) The "Our successes" page is a bit dry - maybe teaser photos / briefs for people to click on?

 

3) Comic Sans - what were you thinking? Bad web designer, no cookie for you. You seem to intersperse $sensible_font and comic sans through the site without any obvious reason - legacy css?

 

4) I'm glad other school's SMT are also enthusiastic! supporters! of! the! exclamation! mark! and it's not just ours

 

5) If you can, I'd try to align the bottom edge of the Virtual Tour image with the video window. It jars a bit, having them close but out of alignment.

 

6) I like your swoopy header/side image, but your "welcome to the James..." text is right at the bottom of the viewable window on a 1440x1050 laptop screen

 

7) Bump your copyright to 2010

[dayzd]

On the whole, it's very pleasant and attractive (aside from the inconsisten comic sans use).

 

One thing I would say is your header area is very large and very heavy. On a 1024x768 display there's always scrolling to be done to read your content, which slows down your users.

 

Good work, though!

[gibbo_ap]

Yeah, s'good.

 

Few comments:

 

1) I see (Firefox 3.57, Linux) a faint white squared outline on the header image right of the shield.

 

3) Comic Sans - what were you thinking? Bad web designer, no cookie for you. You seem to intersperse $sensible_font and comic sans through the site without any obvious reason - legacy css?

 

5) If you can, I'd try to align the bottom edge of the Virtual Tour image with the video window. It jars a bit, having them close but out of alignment.

 

7) Bump your copyright to 2010

 

totally agree with these points and i also think that the title image whilst being nice is very busy.

 

tho if im being honest im nit picking a gr8 design! love the colourised awards and the locations of them. our head insists we have every award we have ever been given which leads to a cluttered design. although this is nice and simple.

 

i need to re do ours and design for 1024x768 and not 800x600 lol

[webman]

It doesn't validate.

[pwds]

If possible incorporate expiry dates on notices within your MySQL database if you are using that and PHP for the note on the front page about yesterday's closure.

 

School Info, JHHS life, Trips and Events, Squad Photos, Fixtures, Primary School Partners, Sports Club Directory and Contact Us won't work without scripting enabled (or for accessible browsers), consider at least having a site map for failover if scripting is disabled or cannot be used by the user.

 

Personal opinion but wherever possible avoid uploading Microsoft Word documents for people to see information- either make it a PDF so it can be read cross platform and FOC or- better yet- incorporate the word content into a web page. (Lettings)

 

Consider shrinking the banner at the top of the page to about half the height if SMT will let you, at present event on 1440 x 900 pixels I've lost about a quarter of the browser window to stuff that looks good but doesn't actually tell me anything.

[gavins38]

Just had a quick look at your site and I'm very impressed. Only one thing to report; I'm using IE7 on a WinXP machine and when I load some of the pages (Our Successes, for example) on the left hand side where all of your award logos are there's a blank white square between the picture and the first logo. This seems to change size depending on which page your are on.

 

Otherwise, a very impressive site. Well done!

[tsimons]

Comic Sans, I agree my friends, but what the head wants.. the head gets.. lol..

[Guest leeneilson]

The problem with building your own cms sometimes can be potential security issues.

 

I spotted one straight away. If you go to this page you will see the issue.

 

James Hornsby High School | Together We Excel

 

The folder variable in the address is the actual physical folder in the file system,

and the page is the name of the php file to load.

 

So the address above calls the main index page again recursively

[AyatollahPies]

I like Comic Sans.

[Guest leeneilson]

I like Comic Sans.

 

It has it's moments

[Flakes]

Comic Sans, I agree my friends, but what the head wants.. the head gets.. lol..

 

i had this problem hence why our school site colour scheme is red and blue(Ponteland High School), even though those colours do not go together at all...

 

i have no problems viewing your site in Firefox 3.5.5, although my HTML tidy add-on is telling me there is 38 warnings...nothing to serious, just bits of code that may be out of date in a few years, also doesnt like the &folder in your links.

 

one thing about the warnings you may want to change things like

</pre><table height="10px"></

to

</pre><table style="height: 10px;"> </

simply to future proof the site, many of the old statements such as height/width/border have been replaced by CSS and are on the chopping block ready to be removed from the HTML language (then again i still use a few myself, figure by the time they remove them the site will be up for redesign anyway).