Re: http://www.hmex.ao.net/medcenter/index.html

G'day

Site reviewed http://www.hmex.ao.net/medcenter/index.html

Front page only (as per your message).

800x600 - 16bit (and also 640x480 / 1024x768)
IE 4.72 on Win95
56K Modem at 46k
--------------------------------------------------------------
I downloaded the site in the background so I don't know how long it took to
load

Note: I asked my 9 year old daughter to give me some idea of what she
thought of the site (she wanted to know what I was doing so I gave her a
go).  Her comments are shown [inside square brackets}.  She has not seen my
comments at all.

1. First impressions: nice clean look but the logo is rather large in
relation to the window in which I am viewing.

[It's OK but most of the colours are red, blue and white.  The picture at
the top looks a bit boring.]

2. As with most of the sites I have reviewed today, it seems to have been
designed to fit in a 640x480 window with no consideration for those of us
who are using maximised screens at 800x600 or larger.  Looking at the source
confirms this (TABLE WIDTH=600).  My pet peeve again...  At least there's no
horizontal scroll bar at 640x480 (but WebTV?)

[There is lots of white on the right side.   The people who made this site
could improve this by placing a picture or two.]

3. The blue strip on the left is a little too bright for my liking.   I
would tone it down a bit.  It looks like #0000CC.

[The blue border looks a bit strange against the words] and
[The blue border looks OK because it looks like sand] (i.e. it's textured
:-)

4. The mouseovers are subtle yet noticeable.  It might be possible to reduce
the filesize though.  I had a good look at one (the WHO button) and found
that it only uses 12 colours yet is saved as a 256 colour GIF.  I noticed
too that you repeated the background in it.  If you made it transparent you
might get away with just a 4 or 8 colour GIF and reduce their file size by
at least half.

[The words in the border (MENU) that light up when you move the mouse have a
nice effect and it's very easy to see whuch word you're on]

5. Clicking on WHO does nothing but to reload the same page.  I assume you
put that HREF in there to make the mouseovers work.   Consider pointing it
to "#" rather than the full URL for the page.   There are other ways to do
this too (using DIV or SPAN for instance, in which case no HREF is needed at
all) but this won't work in all browsers.

6. The text links at the bottom - I hadn't picked this up but here's what my
daughter said:

[Where it says what we do and why we do it, it looks like it says: what we
do!  I why we do it!  Also it looks rather funny with the exclamation marks
behind the words.]

I agree with her on the use of exclamation marks in these links.

7. I had a look at the source.  Noticed you use a nested table inside the
"menu" column, including some empty cells.  I can't see a need for this
level of complexity.  If you're just trying to space the buttons out, why
not use HSPACE and VSPACE arguments for the images?  But perhaps I'm
overlooking something.

Hope this helps
--
Bert Doorn, Member of the HTML Writers Guild
Author of Beginners' Website Design Tips
at http://www.iinet.net.au/~bdoorn/

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