Busy — Sun, 16 May 2004 22:10:31 +0000

You need to set your background color, it takes a lil to load on dialup and background is white until image loads then it goes to black. The pic of the hockey guy then looks like he is doing a Micheal Jackson impression as you cant see the stick. Maybe even turn him around so his back is to the outside of the page hitting inwards to draw your attention inwards instead of outwards

Some of your images don't have width and height tags, Always use them as in this case the page is very jumpy during loading for dialupers (my new word for today).

Agree with Megan on the coloring and text size

eahcmad — Sun, 16 May 2004 15:16:46 +0000

Thanks for the feedback folks... it has given me plenty to think about. My site used to have a white background - the site started in 1996 and has progressed to this state!

The colour scheme mainly reflects the Club colours, but I'll experiment with toning it down a bit

As for the header area. I agree with Megan's comments. Our Club logo, unfortunately, is exactly as you see it. This appears on our shirts, track suits, literature, etc. It was created about 60 years ago and has never undergone a redesign mainly because of the effort involved in undertaking such a task.

I'm thinking of dropping the adverts completely - they are next to useless as far as an income stream is concerned. This might give me back some acreage to help unify the top.

As for the boxiness - I did experiment greatly with trying to avoid this, but couldn't. Maybe I don't have the imagination

Thanks guys... much appreciated.

Megan — Thu, 13 May 2004 17:09:13 +0000

Welcome eahcmad! Thanks for reviewing some other sites first.

I'm going to have to disagree with the others, to an extent. I think this is a passable design but could use a lot of improvements.

The look and feel could be enhanced greatly but removing some of the heaviness from the colour scheme. That teal base for the entire page is very heavy looking. Making the main content area white would brighten things up a bit. Also make the exterior background a lighter colour, possibly grey (see how the use of grey in the TWF colour scheme gives things dimension in a very subtle way).

I also find the font size to be very small and difficult to read. There is a lot of text on here so it's important to make things as readable as possible.

The header area is okay but looks rather disjointed. I think this would look better if the navbar and graphic title were moved below the banner ad. The way it is the navbar is cut off from the rest of the site. That section is really nice though. I like the navbar design. The dropdowns do work in my browser (Opera 7.5b) although they are cutting off the main headings.

Continuing on the header area - get a better copy of the coat of arms graphic logo and move it to the left side. Or do somethiing different altogether with those graphics. Instead of the cutout hockey player, put a big picture in the content area. He seems lost in space out there. A bigger photo would really add interest to the layout. You could even do a photo rotation of some sort. I think the players would be interested in something like this. You could highlight your photo caption thing this way instead of using a tiny photo in the sidebar.

In general, I'm not a fan of the boxy layout. It looks choppy and ununified. However, if you must use one this isn't too bad.

andy206uk — Thu, 13 May 2004 08:16:17 +0000

Good job on the RSS feeds!

If your going to insist on using tiny fonts don't specify the size in pixels, then people with poor eyesight will be able to resize the text using their browser controls and won't have to sit there squinting.

icerider — Thu, 13 May 2004 00:02:06 +0000

Looks great, for the caption competition, the words are too close to the box.

teammatt3 — Wed, 12 May 2004 23:20:02 +0000

That is a great design, good colors, easy to navigate. Overall, excellent web site, well done.