Gatsbygroup — Wed, 20 Feb 2002 05:43:44 +0000

DirecTV-

It looks like your on the right track. I think there are a few minor changes you could make to your site without straying away from its consistency.

Yes, framesets are neat.. but consistent navigation can still be maintained without them. Framesets are too problematic and even though cool (when they work), aren't worth the hassle.

The flashing red text is very distracting. It is difficult which of the four satellite dishes to concentrate on.

The upper nav has too much information in it I think. Like what does 4 peaks home entertainment have to do w/anything?

Other then that I think the site looks clean. Good luck!

Busy — Tue, 19 Feb 2002 22:25:14 +0000

As far as the date? Is there a reason why you would get rid of it?
Let me know....
we all have clocks on our pc's so its not needed - just because you can, doesnt mean you should ...

another bad thing with frames, and you mentioned you have thousands of pages, what if i wanted to email someone the link to, say page 567? sure i could open that frame in new window (i usually do) then send that but if the person i sent it to wanted to see more of your site they couldnt as there wouldnt be any navigation.
thought about using a database?

DirecTV Site

DirecTV — Tue, 19 Feb 2002 22:22:09 +0000

Megan,
I sat down with the owner and spoke with him about what you had said.

Even if I charged $49.00 for the dish, the chargback would still stand.

The only way to get past the chargeback is to charge full price for the reciever $295.00...the chargback is to stop people from Stealing the access cards which happens alot with DirecTV. Maybe I could clear it up more...but again, thanks for your input on that subject.

Chris.

Re: Lots O' Replies

Megan — Tue, 19 Feb 2002 17:37:29 +0000

Quote: Originally posted by DirecTV
As far as the DTV site, why does it look like a scam? Because it is almost free?

1. Because it's almost free. When you see something like that you have to wonder what the catch is.
2. When I read the terms it seems like you're looking for a lot of excuses to charge people a lot more money ($225 to be exact) - seems fishy to me.
3. Because the site does not have a professional and credible look to it - it reminds me of an infomercial and I think we all know that most of those are scams.

I'm not necessarily saying that this is a scam - just that it looks like one.

disaster-master — Tue, 19 Feb 2002 17:27:37 +0000

IMO the black would stand out more and cut down on the monotony of the green.

As for the graphics looking grainy...look at a close up of the Directv image. It looks like you optimized the stew out of it. LOL I am not an expert on graphics but you should be seeing more blue and not as many pink, red, yellow, gray and 50 dozen shades of green and blue. Maybe one of the graphic experts here can elaborate on this.
removed image
I know it is tough finding that fine line between looking good and loading fast. One thing you could do is make your logo a little better quailty and loose some of those blinking text graphics. Compromise....yea that's it!

Lots O' Replies

DirecTV — Tue, 19 Feb 2002 16:45:38 +0000

T didn't think there would be so many replies so quick...
but thanks...

As for the frames, I just personally like them. I know that it's harder for search engines, but I have actually done good with them.

Webmistress...
As far as the repeating at the top of the screen, how in the heck can some of you guys read the screen at such a high resolution? Anyway, that is an easy fix...

The Outdoorman Logo does looked smudged, I will have to fix that, thanks...

Also, I will change the center to left for the text on DirecTVdishes...

Busy...
The reason I did frames on the Outdoorsman Site is that there are a over 1,000 pages....you wouldn't think it by looking at it, but they are there, and the frame set helped me keep a solid navigation.
As far as the date? Is there a reason why you would get rid of it?
Let me know....

D-Master....
Thanks for the input...
I know what you are talking about on the cramming in for Outdoorsman... I could open the top and left frame which will free a ton of space...

As far as grainy images? I use photoshop 5.5 and am curious as to what resolutions are the best. I'm trying to keep image sizes low, but when I do, i loose quality? Please help me on this one.

Mairving....
I actually work with Dreamweaver on everything... I use pagemill to build the frame because it is the easiest program to do so... Front Page to work with ASP Based stuff... But 90% is Dreamweaver....
I alway's hate those pagemill tags, but I think it's funny, because some people may think that I have done roll-overs and more with page-mill..so I leave it

Hello Megan,
I will fix the logo on the Outdoorsman Site... You are the second to notice it...

As far as the DTV site, why does it look like a scam? Because it is almost free? I can charge for the dishes and make even more money... The reason we can give them away for near free, is because DirecTV kicks back money for the customers. But I will take your comments about the centering and fix it.

d-master...
my fingers are now cramped...
Would the black text stand out more? Or is it just too greeeen?

Thanks for your comments... I'm going to check other sites out from here as well.
Chris.

disaster-master — Tue, 19 Feb 2002 15:28:31 +0000

One other thing that no one has mentioned is the green text for the main content on the Outdoorsman site. I'd use black text here so that everything won't be so greeeeeen. You could leave your header text green but I would change the other.

just another penny worth of opinion.

disaster-master — Tue, 19 Feb 2002 15:27:55 +0000

One other thing that no one has mentioned is the green text for the main content. I'd use black text here so that everything won't be so greeeeeen. You could leave your header text green but I would change the other.

just another penny worth of opinion.

Megan — Tue, 19 Feb 2002 15:15:39 +0000

Direct TV Dishes
There is way too much going on here. Way too many different font sizes and colours, too many bits of text all over the place competing for the viewer's attention. It needs to be streamlined a lot. Also avoid centering things in general - it looks very unprofessional.

Honestly, this looks like a scam to me - one of those cases where if it looks too good to be true it must be. If you streamline your design and make it look more professional you may be able to increase your credibility substantially.

Outdoorsman Online
This is much better. Much more of a coherent design style, easier to prioritize information, and better looking overall. You've still got a little bit of extra clutter here and there, particularly on the bottom of the right sidebar and towards the bottom of the page. I would also like to see the logo get just a little bit bigger - it's kind of getting lost up there in the middle.

mairving — Tue, 19 Feb 2002 15:03:44 +0000

Ouch, the first site directv looks a little rough. I would get rid of the frames for sure. They actually make the site look worse since the text that I am reading fades into the navs. The site is also just too plain and too boring which makes the things that move more obnoxious. The code is not extremely bad for Pagemill which tends to bloat code. I would use stylesheets to control your fonts better and to remove the font tags and the IE only font face. I did like the way that if I typed the products.html into the browser to view the source, I was redirected to the frames page. I had to look at the source the hard way.

So you went from Pagemill to Frontpage on the Outdoorsman site. Not sure which one is worse. Again the frames are totally unneccessary. They actually decrease your ranking in search engines. Again you have the page repeat at the top which needs to be fixed. As on the other site, the code is full of font tags and stuff like align=middle instead of the proper align=center

On both sites, I would lose the frames and create a stylesheet to do all of your text formatting.