Re: Critique of a commercial site

by simone(at)genesisnetwork.net (Demitrius)

 Date:  Mon, 5 Jan 1998 00:25:45 -0800
 To:  "Phillip M. Strickland" <pstrickland(at)coastalnet.com>,
<hwg-critique(at)hwg.org>
  todo: View Thread, Original
Hi Phillip,

Site critiqued:  http://www.pswd.com
Viewed with a P133, 32.2, 640 x 480, MSIE 4.0

>Could you take a look at it and critique not only the HTML, but the design,
>feel and information.  I am especially concerned with the load time, as I
am
>with a new hosting service.

Load times were excellent. Very quick.

First impression is one of a clean, crisp design. A little lacking in the
graphics area, but clean and easy to read nonetheless.

Your title banners look heavily dithered. Were they supposed to look like
that? IMO, they would look better if they were saved with a optimized color
palette. I see you use FrontPage 98 - so do I - and it comes with Image
Composer. IC makes saving GIF's with an optimized color palette easy. Visit:
http://members.aol.com/mrdemitri/mic/savgif01.htm   for a tip on how to do
this.

Good use of background table cell colors and borders in the navigation. They
almost look like a graphic, but download much faster than one. Nice effect.

FP98 does not assign a DOCTYPE to the html. You may want to use:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
on the very first line of your code. You may want to ask Craig
(guide(at)ao.net) about that. He's a code authority, IMO.

I see you used <font face="book antiqua, times new roman, times"> but then
only <font face="Arial">  Have you seen your site on a Mac? You won't be
pleased. Use <font face="Arial,Helvetica"> for your pages to display closer
to what you intended for Mac viewers.

Regarding your Contact page. IMO you'll get more responses from a forms
based page as opposed to a mail link only. Why? I don't know why. I just
know that when e-mail links only are employed, responses are just a fraction
of what they would be if forms had been used instead. FP98 makes forms
creation real easy. Try it!

IMO, I would rethink your fees. Visit:
http://www.netb2b.com/cgi-bin/cgi_wpi_archive
for a report about this. I find it to be very accurate and use this page in
every one of my presentations as well as David Siegel's "Secrets of
Successful Web Sites".
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1568303823/4116-6029172-561355

That my $0.02  Good luck!

Regards,
Demitrius >I<
------------------------------------------------A. Demitrius Lopez
       W  E  B  S  I  T  E     D  E  V  E  L  O  P  E  R
MrDemitri(at)aol.com   http://members.aol.com/mrdemitri/
------------------------------------>I<------------------------------------

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