Tudor.b — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 12:35:05 +0000

Well, I really like the mid 70`s science fiction movie look. But the art work looks like it was done using Microsoft Paint!

JeevesBond — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 15:16:33 +0000

Well I'm going to be absolutely truthful and say that this site - when measured against something like http://www.csszengarden.com - is terrible. That said, it may well be fit for purpose.

I wouldn't advise getting a template, many people can spot these and it will remove the personality from your site. Of which it has plenty, in fact it looks like something from the mid 90's with its black background and terrible logo (that green is so bad!).

Remove those screenshots as well, they're really not helping the look. You need a slicker design, and that doesn't mean you have to misrepresent the product, maybe put these images into a "screenshots" page. Also removing them will get rid of the scrollbar at 800x600 and give you the opportunity to unify the design a bit, get some consistency!

You're an engineer, so by default you're not going to be very adept at design Secondly, whether you want to listen to my rantings is entirely optional. If what you have is working then you don't necessarily need to change it, what's written above is just opinion.

demonhale — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 13:15:59 +0000

The best way to learn everything thats suggested is to take time and search the forums for your concerns, some suggestions like Ray suggested and other comments were answered or are posted before, so its best if you take time and read the forums... (thats what i did the first time)

RAY,B. — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 11:48:20 +0000

Hi Tony, I think your site is not too bad at all, I use a counter on my site and you can have it invisible if you like and it's free, the site to download it from is statcounter.com

Ray.

Busy — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 11:12:58 +0000

First impressions, it looks very geeky in a knowlegable kind of way.
Has a big horziontal scroll at 800x600 screen resolution (is the top right image) and all the text is italic, italics should be used for highting important words or sentence as a quote only.
Your links also don't look like links but in some ways it fits with the geeky look.
I'm not saying the site is bad, but is not good either.

There is no home link from the pages
At the bottom of the index you have a counter, how many hits since feb 13th this year, which gives the impression it's a new site, yet you have a copyright notice above your links saying is five years old.

For search engines you are doing some things right, your content is within a list and you're using header tags (h2) etc, you do have a error at the bottom of your page, you have the end body tag () then an image and line break tag before the end html tag (), everything should be before the

To be honest I don't think the design of the layout does justice to your work (the content).
Use the page width (at least 2/3rds of it) for the content, set the images as a muted background image.
The page links (url) are way to long, everything is in two folders off the main directory, getting people to remember that is hard, while the use of keywords can be to your advantage you should use mod_rewrite to allow the use of shorter url's. Having the site in a frame is a big no-no.
Your agreement of the terms for download should be after the actual terms, no one ever reads them but at least you can make them glance over on the way down to the agree/refuse links, ok you have them at the bottom too, remove the top ones

tony873004 — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 09:31:12 +0000

ranoo wrote:

...You should place a DOCTYPE declaration as the very first thing in your HTML document...

...You have to make something for SEO.practicaly your page doesn;t exist for search engine...

Why and why?

I'm not doubting you, I'm just curious. What are the pros of having a DOCTYPE like you suggest?

What is an SEO? Search engine optomization? What should I make? The site actually does pretty well with search engines. But it would be nice if it did better.

ranoo — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 15:19:05 +0000

i suggest you to change your layout.

try to buy a template from ebay or try to find a free one on the net.

You should place a DOCTYPE declaration as the very first thing in your HTML document. For example, for a typical XHTML 1.0 document:

Title

You have to make something for SEO.practicaly your page doesn;t exist for search engine.

good luck

dougadam — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 15:27:08 +0000

I would go with a gray background.

tony873004 — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 05:41:58 +0000

Hi. Thanks for your responses so far. Let me ask a few questions about your comments.

Two of you mentioned the graphics. These are graphics generated by the software that the website supports. So I have to stick with this type of graphics or I'd be misrepresenting the product. But I don't have to stick with the colors. The software can generate graphics in any color. Would a different color combination in the graphics be more pleasing to the eye? Or would it be nicer to do low-contrast versions and use them as backgrounds rather than stand-alone margin graphics?

Regarding the visitor counter, why is that tacky? I've heard other people say this about counters before but I'm not sure why. I've always liked counters. It's the quickest way to tell me how many hits I have, and an easy way to tell visitors that they're not the only ones who visit the site (even though everybody knows they don't have to be accurate). Is there a less-tacky way of accomplishing these tasks? Is there an easy way to do an invisible counter? All the scripts I've seen seem to want to hit the counter as a graphic. And is there one that doesn't register hits from my computer? I probably account for 10% of all my hits, especially when I update the site.

Regarding the text being too small, would I need to use CSS to change this? But if I use CSS, does that prevent users from choosing Largest Text in their view menu and changing the size of the text themselves? I've noticed on some websites that you can't adjust the text size yourself with the View menu.

Regarding buttons, graphics vs. text, why are text buttons better? Is it just that graphics take time to load, or is there another reason? Would changing this to text mean that I'd have to upload a font to my visitors' computers? I wanted to stay away from regular old Times New Roman or Ariel, but I'm not sure what fonts people have on their computers. I like having a semi-unique font.

Thank you for your help.

teammatt3 — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 00:06:43 +0000

For your clicking pleasure http://www.www.gravitysimulator.com

The regular text is too small. Make it at least 14px. You should probably make the navigation links text, there is no real need for those links to be graphics. You can produce that yellow hover with css.

Get rid of that visitor counter on the bottom left, those things are really tacky.

Besides those it's not that bad. It could be more professional looking but it is not a huge problem for you right now.