http://www.chriswiggins.net/comp3001/

Hi all,

The website URL below, is an academic assignment for university. I would grately appreciate any feedback on any element of the design or functionality.

http://www.chriswiggins.net/comp3001/

Cheers guys

"Any comments on this please..." is an unacceptable thread title. It has been changed to "http://www.chriswiggins.net/comp3001/". Thank you.

sorry guys, didn't read the stick. i know I should have. Do apologise

Hi Chris, I'll give my comments in 2 parts, structure (markup), and layout (appearance). First I will say it is a nice initial layout-just needs some adjustment.

Structure:
Most importantly, you need a proper doctype. A page without one is thrown into quirks mode in most browsers and you'll never be sure how it's going to be rendered. I advise going with a strict one (html 4.01 or xhtml 1.0) unless you require a tag that's not allowed, then use the loose dtd.

Javascript menus are neat, but not that accessible. But you do have the primary page links hard-coded, so a point for you.

Your source is a bit hard to read...the lines seem to start in the middle of the page.

Another point for you-at first it looked like you were using tables for layout, but it appears it's only the sidebar. You don't even need one there-you can list those in a <ul> and use css to style (it wouldn't even need that much).

Layout:
If you make a fixed-width site, it's usually common to either left-align or center. The way your site appears in 1024x768 is odd-a little spacing on the left and a LOT on the right. To center the 'page' add 'text-align:center;' to your body style and text-align:left; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;' to your .main style.

The background color is a nice impact but the page has nothing to make it stand out. A few ideas: take the background of .main down a few notches (try #EFFBFF) to provide a subtle contrast of the menu/content that stay full white (or fefefe, my fave color )

The borders are a good start, but they also emphasize the variance in space between the blocks. They don't need to be uniform but they should look intentional. Try making the gap below the 'shopping cart' block the same as the gap between sidebar & content.



Hope this review helps.
NotGoddess

Some excellent advice from NotGoddess, you should take it onboard.

In addition, there appears to be a lot of whitespace at the bottom of some of your pages; including the homepage.

You should sort that out.

Good to see that you are using a feedback form and that you've included form validation
I would recommend using server-side validation as opposed to client side (javascript) as a lot of people have javascript turned off. Server-side validation is not much more difficult.

Your thumbnails are not actual thumbnails I suspect (many are 50+ KB) You are probably displaying the original images, only smaller. As you are using dynamic content, try using GD or ImageMagik to create thumbnails (lots of tuts online <google it>). This will enable your pages to load quickly (particularly for dial-up users).

Hope these comments help,
Good luck,
Duncan

Thanks for the suggestions,


its too late for some of them (had to hand it in today) but I managed to address some of the issues raised.

Thanks again

Chris

the navigation on the left hand column are nice, but you want the users to read the text as well, black color text is great, but it blends in too much with the pics, so you might wasnt to modify it like, giving it a shawdow, blur background...etc.