Thread: website

Hello I'm fairly new to doing web design but have just done a simple site and wondered if I could get feedback on it, anything that could be wrong with it or that could improve it, Refrigerated Vehicle Solutions

Thanks

I'd recommend you provide full contact details. At the moment all I can see is the telephone number and email address

Couple of things...

Issues that are important that you chnage right now...

1. [Invalid] Markup Validation of http://www.rvs.ie/index.html - W3C Markup Validator

145 errors - Good markup will allow search engines to be able to index your site better.

2. Do not use tables for page layout. It is shockingly bad web design ettiquette to use tables to lay out your page. Tables are for data tables. Nothing else.

3. I found it hard to believe that you have only used this much CSS:

Code:

body { background-color: #0E4C7D; } 
.style2 { font-family: "Myriad Pro"; color: #FFFFFF; font-size: 14px; } 
.style3 { color: #FFFFFF; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; } 
.style7 {font-size: 18px} 
.style8 { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #000000; } 
.style9 {font-size: 14px}

But then I took a look at your html... and nearly cried

Issues that you should clear up after the above...
4. Your header image is very bad quality. You need to either get the better quality version of it or start again. Also - because the company name phone number and email address are in the image itself, they won't get indexed. More importantly - What happens if you chnage phone number? or email address? You have to make the entire image again, instead of just changing a tiny bit of content.

5. This page for example(all all of the pages that link from Refrigerated Vehicle Solutions): Refrigerated Vehicle Solutions

There is nothing on it but the same text that's on all the others and a picture. That is a waste of a pages and pretty pointless. And every single page has the same title.... Example of the issues this would cause - If you do a search on google, you click on the title that is most descriptive. Yours kind of isn't.

6. Spinning text is really irritating. There are better ways to get attention without flashing and spinning text. And its even worse - you're doing it with flash!!

I'm sorry if this sounds over harsh but you really need to make it better. Back when I started, I'm sure my sites were worse so it will come with time and doing alot of research.

Hi Killeen,

I think the site is excellent for someone fairly new to web design.
Sure there is plenty of room for improvement but that goes for everyone's site.

Good luck with the site.

Ya I regret one of my many weaknesses in web design is the proper use of layout and css, I would highly recommend getting into that sooner rather than later (If anyone has a good example of a few cheat sheets for it etc I would appreciate it too)

One problem is see is the footer at the bottom is left aligned while the rest is centred!

Thanks to all of you for your comments and suggestions, I've renamed the pages and improved the logo, the fellow I'm doing the site for didn't want the address of the site included.

Managed to get the validation errors down to 22 on a test but it changed the look for the worse, I checked other sites for validation errors, the BBC had none, Amazon.com had 1731.

Is there a way for me to painlessly change tables to css?
To n3tFl0w, thanks for some great pointers but why is it bad to use flash in the way I have done, and what would be an alternative.

Thanks again for the feedback and taking time to reply.

Cheers

Originally Posted by Killeen

Is there a way for me to painlessly change tables to css?

most likely not - but it's not that bad unless you've done a very complex design ( btw your site was down when i was writing this so i couldnt see it ) - if you figure out how to to a tableless layout on a test page on your local machine and get all the main parts (ie header/navigation/footer and content ) to go where you want them then it's pretty easy to just slot in what you've currently got in tables into that frame

tips
dont try to make a page tableless on the fly - start with a blank page and get your main parts to display where and how you want and then copy your data into that
check with a few different browsers as you build - it might be perfect in FF and then look rubbish in IE
you need to work out a system to avoid IE bugs esp the box model bug - there are few ways to do this
get your doctype right first - ( pick one that suits you )
floats are the main thing that gets you what you want so figure out how they work and how to clear them
personally i would avoid allowing IE6 into quirks mode and also avoid comments and/or hidden elements because comments and floats together trigger a bug in IE6

it is a good bit of work to convert a site to tableless but it is worth it in many ways especially if you want to change anything later on.

remember tables are still used for tabular data ( but i am currently doing a site which has tabular data and i found it worked better with just css only.


hope this helps

I've removed all the tables as recommended on the index page, Refrigerated Vehicle Solutions wondering if I've done it right... before redoing the rest in a similar fashion.

Thanks

the page looks ok to me but i think you should have your javacsript and css in separate files - the code looks a bit mad - i'd hate to have to come back to it in 2 years and make changes !!

the code on your body tag is wrong leftmargin is neither html or css
what you want i'd say is body{margin:0px;} in a css file

you should really put alt tags on all images

it's hard to tell on a quick look about the tables - one of the reasons for going tabless is because it makes the code easy to read so you can do updates much easier - but with all the javascript and nondescript id numbers and flash it's not really the idea -

still the actuall page is better than a lot of stuff out there -

Thanks for that advice. I'll try and fix those things! Someone mentioned the moving text and the flash being a problem, does anyone have a suggestion to make it better? The fellow who wanted me to do the site wants moving text.

Thanks again.