New Website...be gentle :S

[FN-GM]

Scared me for a second then...thought there was an undercover tech at our school!! Will be replacing the pic with a better one when I get it. I'm realising that this is going to be the annoying thing about looking after the website - unless I take full responsibity for the content as well (creating/sourcing it as well as uploading it) then the website is never going to be as good as it could be...

 

Sorry typo

[p858snake]

* Background colour should be something other than white, it just looks strange tbh with the colours you have choosen for your site.

* header area is a huge screen waste space wise

* yellow text on blue (in the sidebar) is a bit hard to read

* Hit Counters are so 1990's tbh

* Controlling how browsers open links (target="_blank") is a pain and very un-nice when people aren't expecting it

* Headings linking to external sites (useful websites page) isn't a usability pain, especially since they aren't given any formatting to say they aren't normal text

* Search boxes (including buttons) should be Center-Center aligned

* Framing external webpages (eg: Kids news page) is a pain and generally disliked by most sites due to security issues.

* Your page source seems to reveal alot of empty divs (and every unneeded byte sent to a user is a wasted one... and slows down page rendering)

[Duane_Dibbley]

* Background colour should be something other than white, it just looks strange tbh with the colours you have choosen for your site.

* header area is a huge screen waste space wise

* yellow text on blue (in the sidebar) is a bit hard to read

* Hit Counters are so 1990's tbh

* Controlling how browsers open links (target="_blank") is a pain and very un-nice when people aren't expecting it

* Headings linking to external sites (useful websites page) isn't a usability pain, especially since they aren't given any formatting to say they aren't normal text

* Search boxes (including buttons) should be Center-Center aligned

* Framing external webpages (eg: Kids news page) is a pain and generally disliked by most sites due to security issues.

* Your page source seems to reveal alot of empty divs (and every unneeded byte sent to a user is a wasted one... and slows down page rendering)

 

Thanks thats some useful detailed feedback

 

-The empty divs are a function of the template generator, presumably it creates them whether they are used in the template or not. If I have time I will go through and clean them up.

-Framing the newsround site I wasn't sure about, and tbh I only really did it to provide some colourful content for the site, as the teachers have generally been a it rubbish in providing any :S (I know thats a poor reason)

-Colour scheme not my decision, although I think I will try and tone it down a touch over the holidays

-I agree the header is a bit wasteful, was planning on having a picture of the school or some of the students in there, again think i will probably change it over the hols

-Hit counters are AWESOME, as they tell me how much everybody loves me, and I need that kind of validation in my life

[Arcath]

Hit counters are AWESOME, as they tell me how much everybody loves me, and I need that kind of validation in my life

 

showing the hit counts to the end user is a waste when i see "1000 visits" on a site it means nothing to me. And without a time scale its useless to you.

 

get something like google analytics on the go so that you can see more details than simply a +1 on a count. Its a great way to see whos visiting, what they are using to visit and where they are visiting from. You still get the increasing number, but with alot more detail.

[Duane_Dibbley]

showing the hit counts to the end user is a waste when i see "1000 visits" on a site it means nothing to me. And without a time scale its useless to you.

 

get something like google analytics on the go so that you can see more details than simply a +1 on a count. Its a great way to see whos visiting, what they are using to visit and where they are visiting from. You still get the increasing number, but with alot more detail.

 

I know its a bit pointless, but the kids seem to like it. I set up a google analytics account last night which seems to be working nicely, although will have to wait a few weeks for any really useful data. Thanks for the tip though, i'd forgotten about analytics

[dreamside]

hmm .. The blue and Yellow .. isn't something i should hurray about .. but when i think about it is it kinda clean