www.wondermakers.com

This site is a company website, meant to give information and contact info about WonderMakers Environmental Services, an environmental consulting and manufacturing company. I would appreciate any comments about the layout and content of the site, and its compatibility with non IE browsers. Don't bother trying to validate/check the code (There seems to be a variety of errors from the w3 validator, and I can't do anything about it, I'm not the author). All comments are appreciated

www.wondermakers.com

Its obvious the site's author is using Dreamweaver templates to accomplish the site's look...

That said, the site itself isn't *bad*... its definitely not earth-shatteringly amazing, but it gets the job of providing basic information about the company's products & services done.

I will say that it would be nice if the framework of the site remained consistent in size from one page to the next - the LH menu moves slightly from page to page, and while this isn't a big deal, it does look a little sloppy.

The site search uses a pop-up window which launches google - IANAL, but I was *pretty sure* that you had to either place a google logo/link or some other type of recognition on your site in order to use google as your site's search engine. Not 100% on that, but might be worth looking into to be on the safe side.

The disclaimer at the bottom of the LH menu : "This website is best viewed in IE 6.0 or Netscape 7.0. Macromedia Flash Player 6.0 is required for navigation." is unnecessary and distracting. This is 2003, not 1997 - the last thing I need is some website telling me which browser to use. For the record, it works fine in Mozilla Firebird.

I would clean up some of those .htm file names - they're currently using characters that would b0rk some older browsers (like spaces in the file names, for instance).

Thanks doc. This site was made (I think) by a secretary using DreamWeaver, so its not surprising that the presentation isn't perfect. I'll pass your recommendations along to the people who can make changes.

edit: From reading the Google permissions and such, it does look like an icon is required, maybe even written permission. Glad you mentioned that.

Not bad at all for a secretary...

Its really difficult to be too critical with this kind of site... its one thing to have a site created by someone with a strong programming and/or design background, and quite another to be critical of someone who has no programming/design skills/training, and still managed to put together a decent looking/functional site just by figuring out how to use Dreamweaver.

Let your friend know that they did an amazing job

couple of neg points -

no alt tags - tsk tsk - fundamental accesbility

that said, text scales properly and the layout works well through my text reader.

As a first effort goes its v impressive (even if it does employ my arch nemisis - the flash Nav bar)

:-)

The use of Frames is not a very good strategy when it comes to technical web designing.

Second, I hate seeing a marquee in a webpage.

So basically, I stop here and I'm sure you know what I meant. Good luck in the future.

Never, never make the primary navigation of your site in flash. If someone is using a browser without flash support they can't access the site. Also search engines will not be able to index the site.

Well, a user can always download a flash plugin for half a minute if the person is using a broadbrand connection.

besides, i think "3/4" of our population nowadays have a flash plugin installed in their computer.

The search engine indexing is still a concern, regardless of whether most people have flash. Thanks andreas, didn't know that.

That is okay if you are using a PC. What about if you are using a handheld device like a PDA or mobile phone? As more and more devices are connected to the internet we have got to make sure that our sites are valid and don't use technologies that are not available on certian systems. The days of people only using PC's to access internet content have come to an end.

Really? I wasn't aware Macromedia had a Flash plug-in for lynx! Thats awesome!

Well you can actually make the X11 server output its display as text characters (http://www.meow.org.uk/stan/xserver/) and then use Flash under Mozilla. This would result in Flash being outputted as text so it can be used in a console.

Now if there was someway of hacking that to work inside lynx you could then make a text based flash plugin!

Well, WHO are your target users anyway? I think this is one of the most important factors in web designing.

Target audience and proper site site requirements. That's the key.