Mindshock Media v1.0

Hey guys, just finished uploading my company website. Whole site took me a while to code and design due to the intensive php/mysql backend coding for client portal. I would appreciate if you can can give me some feedback good or bad on the site, thanks.

URL

Very difficult to read, particularly when it displays like this:

Firefox browser

plus the writing is half way accross the page when browsed in mozilla. but, hehe the buttons light up !

It is obvious that there are some very talented graphic designers on your staff. The colors are soothing and confidence inspiring and the layout is clean and straight forward.

The same cannot be said of the front-end coders. Bluntly, the code is a tag soup mess that is not valid under any html standard. For example, meta tags may not be in the body, and script and style tags require type declarations. Tags such as font, and attributes such as align have been deprecated since HTML4 (1999). For more detail, see the attachments errors.txt and mindshockmedia.html.txt.

The page does not meet accessibility standards. Anyone using a non-graphical browser or assistive technology is lost. mindshock.gif is a cap from Lynx. That is what a screen reader or a Braille pad would 'see'.

Jabba_29 mentioned the layout problem when viewed in Moz. I found the same. Between the tag soup and overly nested elements, I couldn't spot the cause. I did find that if image links were broken, and only placekeepers were shown, the alignment was fine. Turning off the image loading did not fix it. See screencap mindshock2.gif

In sum, the graphics people get an A+ for appearance and a C for overusing images, slowing the download (I always critique from a dial-up users point of view). The coders get F. There were just too many errors, many fatal.

cheers,

gary

Hey guys, just redesigned my website because i decided to use a different approach. Hope you guys like it. I want feedback so please give it.


Website:
Mindshock Media - Stimulate the Creative Mind
URL

Quite an improvement. The flash objects are not overly large, so download times are not overlong.

The design is, again, very attractive. There are still some problem areas. This is still not valid HTML. For example, the embed element has never been a part of the HTML specifications. Use object. HTML4 has been a standard for five years now. It's time to use it correctly.

Your link "buttons" are well crafted, attractive images. They all lack informative alternative text. Not only are images required to have alt text by the specs, but you are also disserving your clients who choose to or must use non-graphical browsers (see attachment). Remember that in a multimedia world, text is still the primary informative medium.

Entry pages with no content* are as bad as splash pages, they waste your visitor's time. Potential customers are not given any reason to go farther into the site. Further, there is nothing for the search engines to index.

It's still a beautiful page. It just needs some content to be useful, and some consideration for equivalent access.

cheers,

gary

* Text as image is not text nor is it accessible content. In addition to alternative text, you could use the longdescription attribute to improve access.