RJ D'Angelo — Wed, 19 Apr 2000 11:03:00 +0000

Your use of frames is good, but it could be replaced with a table.

I've never liked frames, I think they are a pain. True, you made without a scrollbar, but the same task can be achieved using tables.

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-RJ D'Angelo (Formerly "dangelo")
D'Angelo Web Design
The Sopranos Fan Site
Declaration of the Internet

Megan — Tue, 18 Apr 2000 14:28:00 +0000

Okay, I had a really long reply written in here but I turned my back for a second and it suddenly disappeared. I guess I'll try to reconstruct it (slow day at work).

First of all, there's too much text on your splash page. It would be nice if you could get rid of that stuff about needing shockwave and only display it for people who don't have the plug-in. Also get rid of the link to the budget report (who wants to read that anyway?), and put your logo on there, so people know where they are right away.

Main page needs to be streamlined too. There's a lot of text on there that is way too small to read. Your content here is set up in what looks like roughly organized boxes. The memberships/awards/accreditations stuff should stretch all the way across the page (or maybe make a separate page for that). The copyright statement should work the same way. The flash animation on here is really distracting me. It's hard to read the text on there because there's so much going on. I would make that plain text beside that logo/picture thing on the right.

All of your second level links are breaking out of the frames. Rather annoying. You should really have a row of text links at the bottom of every page in case this happens, or in case people don't feel like downloading the flash player.

The free advice page has the same problem with the distracting animation. Maybe it's just becuase I'm not fully awake yet. What's "The View"? Will your visitors know what that is?

Meet the Team - okay, five almost identical logos here, and one that's very, very different. So, find a different way to present the navigation for the four divisions. More text that's small and blurry. I like the way you've got the logo and bar across the top of this one. It would be nice if you could do that all the way across the site - starting in the left frame. It might be hard to get that to line-up though, but it would be a good way to integrate the two frames.

Investing in the NOrth West - again, text small and blurry, map is too small to read too - maybe you could link that to a bigger version.

News and Events - introducing more colours here that aren't working IMO. Change that yellow! The blue is okay - actually I think you should use that instead of the purple you've got on your mouseovers. Get rid of those two empty table cells at the bottom of the right column.

Quick Summary: I think the biggest problem here is that so much of the text is very hard to read. Otherwise, the site is easy to navigate, has a good colour scheme, and presents a ton of information (which is good!).

Okay, that's it!

Justin S — Tue, 18 Apr 2000 13:37:00 +0000

1) Flash page is good, but you need to make it automatically forward to the main site, instead of making the user click on the link which is hard to see.

2) Uh, yeah, I would get rid of that counter also. Use a genuine CGI script of something. It's nice and ugly.

3) That date up in the left hand corner of the main part doesn't look too good. I don't see why you need to date, so I would take it away.

Overall I think it looks great!

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jackchen — Tue, 18 Apr 2000 11:28:00 +0000

The picture on the splash page is jagged.

The main page looks quite plain, but the Flash animation saves the day.

And woah! Remove the counter! It only shows your unprofessionalism!

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