Website for Review
http://www.barryswebdesign.co.uk

Additional Comments
Im not really looking for a site review. My site is pretty good if i do say so my self and my SEO speaks for its self.

What I would like to ask people to do is to stop posting sites that have 1 page on them and asking people for a review of a table with some text in it!!

Why do people do this .. its not a site review its a page review and an unfinished page review at that

If you look at my site it has all the features of a professionaly designed website

CSS XHTML design throughout

Table less design

Table less forms

Accessible navigation, and all text is on page and not in images or Flash or Java

Even the rotating images in the home page can be simplified by a screan reader by turning off CSS

All colors do not collide or are not mishmashed so blind or partially sited people still see the content which is re sizable gracefully


I would like it if people in this section of the forum at least took a few weeks to try to fix the errors on their pages before asking for a review and also can you all please try to look at your websites in different browsers and you will see what really is going on with your pages

I like to review websites but I dont like to see one page efforts and people saying things like "ooh your site is so cool and you have done well" when really your pages need some real work and falsly telling people that stuff is good wont help

please ask your self what you think of your site before asking for a review

If you really like it it may be worth a look but if you are skeptical then fix it first!!


ok thats my tuppence worth

Well then Barry, maybe you'd like to review my site at http://forums.site-reference.com/viewtopic.php?id=7484

Please note that I'm using WP as my platform because I couldn't get my head around Drupal or Joomla.

I have another project on the go at http://www.southimage.net/john-mcdouall-stuart/ where I have two WP platforms linked. I hope to eventually have seven databases all working together on the John McDouall Stuart site. It will work quite well in a practical sense but I'd like your thoughts on the SEO implications and maybe a more conventional way of going about it.

You see, what I'm wanting to do is have each of Stuart's journals separately searchable. There are a few copies of the journals already on the net. None is searchable and most have the journals of the six journeys on one long page.

Stuart made six journeys of exploration, the two longest ones taking around 12 months each. So I'll be publishing the work as around 2,000 pages over six databases. Plus an extra database for my own John McDouall Stuart adventures.

Of course, this post is getting rather off the Site Review Request topic.

Thanks,
Laurie.

Barry - a one pager still has many elements to it - elements far more important than css, tableless design etc - its called presentation and includes colours, layout, even if limited, and most importantly, the visible text that the site visitor uses to determine if the site has anything in it for them or not.

Reading your 'request' I had  a mental image of that famous Mr Bean episode when he had his head stuck up the turkey's butt. No I don't know why that came into my head except he could not see outside his own little world....

Point is it is the diversity that make the new what it is, and the membership here is as diverse as cringingly bad sites to amazing ones - all linked to people's experience.

Also,  watch the touting for business - re-read the forum rules if need be.

The purpose of the 'reviews' section is to get help, thoughts or general input from others. For a person to get the most from the review we have to be honest by mentioning the good and the bad followed by a suggestion. Mentioning only the bad will do nothing, for the forum, you or the person asking for the review. By posting our thoughts and comments I have seen some websites posted that were on the verge of being absolutely atrocious transform into good looking sites. Not all suggestions will be implemented, by receiving various comments and thoughts from others help them to get a better understanding of what people in a broad sense look for and like to see/have in a website.

Most people posting their site for a review are sincere in wanting others thoughts. Spreading the diversity and getting more input will add to the overall quality of a website. A single set of eyes is good but 2, 3, 4 or even more sets of eyes is great.

We all have different likes and dislikes so it is easy for us to get stuck in a rut. Remember that just because one person likes something there may be 10 others that dislike it.

You may want to reconsider and ask for a review of your website.

Im always ready to help people improve their website but surely they should critque them selves before asking more professional people who design websites for a living to give them a critical view of their designs.

I would say to every one that moving away from template based designs will help them greatly.

According to the W3C tables are for holding DATA and NOT i repeat NOT for design layouts and NOT for presenting page elements EXCEPT DATA

CSS and XHTML designs are how pages are supposed to be designed, that is according to the W3C, who are after all the authority on every thing when it comes to designing websites

Also I do post positive feedback to websites that I like (Admin i posted on your forum and gave you geed feedback here http://validwebdesigns.com/   ???? )

. I dont post feedback to posts i dont like .. surely this is the point of a public forum?

If any one needs real advice on how to layout website pages or even how to simply validate a website please feel free to ask me.

I have my website posted on many other forums and I do take criticism for my own designs there. As far as not being able to see outside my own "World" as quoted above by the admin, the reality of my work is i have to look at the real world from the point of view of the person who will be using my clients websites. I dont kiss people asses to get a good review, if my clients dont like my stuff they wont pay up. Surely this is keeping my head firmly in the real world and telling people what i think of a bad design will help them improve their services and design by telling them that if a professional website designer like me dosnt like what they have produced, that they can simply ask me for advice on how to improve their website.

If you dont want people to write bad reviews about peoples website then you should not have a reviews section in your website.

Barry,

My apologies if you took my comment personally. My comment about not looking outside our own world and being stuck in a rut was not aimed at you directly. It was meant as a generality. When building a new website we start with what we want it to look like. Now the issue comes in at this point we have closed ourselves to other options and/or have overlooked something. Read the same thing over and over and someone else will come along and point out a grammar mistake, misspelled word or even a better way of saying something. This is what I meant by the more eyes the better.

I'm glad you liked my site and I did say thanks in my response post.

I have mentioned this before but I will mention it again for those that may be new to the forum reading this.
As professionals at building websites we can do a good service to helping others that are new to this side of the WWW. These new people can be just as great at doing reviews because they are new. They still have the casual visitor point of view.

Myself, I have become a habitual person at noting invalid code, grammar and spelling. Matte has an eye for the wording of content for presentation and Laurie has an eye for the imagery work. There are others that will come in to this section that have other things that they look at. In general there is some overlapping of these particulars that each of us has. Tough for any one person to see it all and have the time to post everything.

You being a professional designer and having the eye for design can be a great benefit to pointing design issues out. Making statements that can easily be interpreted as self promoting for business will usually get you just the opposite. There have been comments made on the forum that people are hesitant to ask questions because they are afraid they will be hit with people wanting to do things for a fee. This is one of the reason that doing self promotion posts are against the forum rules and these posts are heavily monitored. I am continuously, (I'm sure there are others) getting pm's and e-mail from people looking for some one-on-one personal help. Sometimes I charge a fee, I may do some kind of barter and sometimes I do it for free. Just depends on the type/amount of work/help they need and how genuine they are in wanting to learn.

Now since you have taken the time to respond with the type of comments thus far tells me that you are genuinely concerned that people learn how to build websites properly, I tip my hat to you. I hope that you don't get discouraged and that you stick around. I believe your knowledge could be very beneficial to the forum members and even those that read but do not join. Possibly resulting in benefiting you as well.

Writing bad reviews is OK. Writing bad reviews without giving suggestions is not always the best thing. Writing good reviews and not bringing up anything bad that is found is also not a good thing. Thus the honesty and diversity of having others review our websites can only be a good thing.

I have been a member of this forum for ages (as you will see from my profile almost 2 years) but I was put off by a member who was trying to sell their services to a "nooby" website owner and I was telling the person who owned the site how to do things for free..  such as free keyword tests, free website validation, free website promotion ,, etc..

BUT

this guy just kept pushing at the site owner to hire him and I got pissed at the person totally contradicting every piece of free advice i was giving to the site owner saying that he was the best thing in this forum and i dint have a clue what i was talking about..

After showing them both my SEO results and search engine positions the guy who shall remain nameless still dissed my advice and kept pushing his own crap about how effective PPC was and SEM using PPC and every other acronym you can possibly think of .. obviously trying to make him self look slick but in fact he knew very little about anything... In fact i remember he wrote a massive article about SEM and i found an almost identical article on another site written by some one else.

Eventually i had had enough and left the forum ...


(They where promoting them selves as "professional" website designers and SEO experts .. after looking round the guys services and site i would say they where just chancers simply because there site looked very poor and it looked really bad in a cross browser test. Also the only SEO they offered was pay per click marketing which i would say is pretty crappy)



I dont know how i managed to get back here .. im actually quite glad im back though as i do know that i can give a great deal of help to web noons and they will benefit from it



PS i would tell you who the person is but  that would be pointless .. but i bet they know who they are!!

..man, if my hand weren't broken this friggen thread would be a treat... all I can say is... bwaaa ha ha ha ha ha ..... *sigh*



.... and the fine peeps have 'thanked you' how many times? This all sounds a tad friggen pretentious...

Im always ready to help people improve their website but surely they should critque them selves before asking more professional people who design websites for a living to give them a critical view of their designs.

They ASK  and then we GIVE...thats what makes the world go around.

According to the W3C tables are for holding DATA and NOT i repeat NOT for design layouts and NOT for presenting page elements EXCEPT DATA

CSS and XHTML designs are how pages are supposed to be designed, that is according to the W3C, who are after all the authority on every thing when it comes to designing websites

Nah, Mate. A bit of grandstanding, perhaps?

Who's W3C, anyway?

We all know that Bill gates' organization doesn't give a toss about W3C. Microsoft is just a bit bigger than W3C.

Google is also a pretty big organization and thumbs it's nose at W3C. See the following from the Google homepage:

Result: 12 errors / 454 warnings

line 1 column 1 - Warning: missing <!DOCTYPE> declaration
line 4 column 1072 - Warning: <nobr> is not approved by W3C

Well, WordPress is quite well known throughout the www, also, and uses tables extensively for text content.

Nah. It's only the little people that knuckle under to the W3C. It's not a fair thing to belittle people who use tables to present text content.

If it works reasonably well across the common browsers, then that's all that matters really, huh? Who's this W3C fella, anyway?

Regards,
Laurie.

Hey Barry! A great thought just came to me.

How about you make a separate post on the forum, giving up to ten points on good website design. Then we can have a proper discussion without it being mixed up with a site review.

When that exhausts itself in a few days, you could do another one dealing with aspects of good SEO.

No personal attacks, mind you. Just information and discussion of the information and opinions.

In anticipation,
Laurie.

a good reason to make any website comply with the W3C guidelines is to give the people who visit your website access to all of your information, why would you stop people from getting to your info anyway?.


I dont know if you are discriminating against disabled people when you say you dont care about the W3C and you say "who is this W3C guy" ..

If you must really know it was the founder of the W3C who actually founded the internet as we know it today.

I know you all already know this so i am being sarcastic with this post..

I would have a look at a couple of the sites even in this page to see how your sites render in different browsers ..

If you dont check to see what other people see you are being ignorant towards the people who you expect to either hire your services and towards the people who view your website.

any ways I am always willing to help people with their website dilemmas such as badly rendered pages or cross browser issues or even accessibility issues such as showing text inside images and using no alt tags to tell the people who cant see what the images represents...

Simple effective FREE advice

Ah, Barry!

I've got a couple of W3C pages bookmarked at the top of the screen. Refer to them whenever I need to. Just had to check it out, Mate. Couldn't help myself. Thought you may wish to see what I found.

Have a look at these two W3C pages, Mate: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/default.asp and http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_examples.asp

Table based web pages. Not a div on the page. CSS driven.

Nah! Can't be right about tables are only for data, not for displaying other elements, Mate.

Is the use of tables really an accessibility issue? Is it really an issue of correct display across various browsers? And what does it matter, anyway, if a site displays a little differently from one browser to the next, so long as it makes sense and looks OK?

Just to clear up one little misunderstanding. It's Microsoft and Google who disregard the W3C standards when it suits them.

As for the W3C sites that I linked to above, I checked them both in Firefox's HTML Tidy and the W3C Validator and found some things that may interest you.

1)  Neither validator said that tables didn't comply.

2)  FF Tidy identified a warning that W3C validated. Looks to me that W3C is right, which leaves FF also not agreeing with W3C.

I wouldn't bet the farm on W3C, Mate. The World Wide Web Consortium is not an authority style body. It's an advisory group  made up of industry interests.

Be aware that it sometimes happens that we let our own personality cloud our understanding of the roll of others.

Best wishes,
Laurie.

Well maybe i am taking Barrys comments the wrong way but i find his comments and attitude rather offensive.

Thank heavens the fine people involved with site reference haven't got the same attitude .. wouldn't be many members left if they did.

The majority of the people that ask for reviews are posting a first website be it a page or whatever. They are looking for answers to questions they don't even know they need to ask. (some of them)

The help these good people give, the sugjestion's etc they make are welcome by most  and it helps those that want to learn and succeed.

We are all not "professional website builders"... we all have to start somewhere be it one page or more, and like me don't know what we have or haven't done right.

If you look at my website you will see that i haven't followed up on a lot of the sugjestion's made... This is because  i have decided to learn a bit more  and hopefully ask for another review in the future.

I just hope you haven't scared off anyone that needs help.

Jan.

Thank you Jan,  I thought that I was the only one that  found him to be irritable  and igotistical.  Not very helpful.

These pages are nothing to do with the W3C .. they are independant

Ah well! It's where us ordinary people go for our valid code.

The pages seem to work OK, eh, despite being table based.

So, where do you get valid code from, when building a website?

Regards,
Laurie.

I agree with Barry. Tables are meant to be used for data and not presentation only. However there are times that a table is the best way to display something. Two important rules when using tables.

1. Remember tables have to load before anything else is loaded.
2. Use CSS to style the tables. This keeps the page clean, making it more accessible and load faster.

Data can be a broad term so the best thing to follow is your own instincts about the reality of "what is data".

but of course what did we use before css??? - tables!!!!

So I'd suggest they are merely an old fashioned way of doing it, not a wrong way.

In the use of the term accessibility.

Lets take Jan as an example (sorry Jan!) She wants to build a website and  have her business access the exposure that the internet can provide.

If using tables, if using Front Page with all it's supposed coding errors allows her to do that then that is what this beast called the internet is all about. Accessibility for all

To be rigidly applying a coding advisory service standards, or denouncing one way of doing things over another merely reduces the accessibility to self publish.

Sure the pages may not look perfect, but it depends on the purpose of the page...

And as Laurie points out some of the biggest brand names on the net still use tables for layout ( I guess because CSS is STILL interpreted differently by different browsers, hence the need for hacks....)

laurie_m wrote:

So, where do you get valid code from, when building a website?

Regards,
Laurie.

There are many ways to get valid code .. for starteres try writing your own code and you will soon see where the mistakes are when using tools to generate code come from ..

It is not difficult to write valid HTML or XHMTL code .. and it wont take long to learn how to write it .. all you have to do is look at the source code of your pages after you validate it using the W3C validator and remove the mistakes. this will not only help you learn some HTML but it will also help you appreciate why there are standards and in the long run help you become better at making your own website.


Where you get the valid code from putting in some extra effort when making your website, there isnt some magic website that people go to to "get" validated code (if there is BTW please tell me so i can check it out )