projectpete — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 16:01:55 +0000

For me there are too many plain text links and nothing separating the text links from the actual text. maybe put a line or dotted line between the left nav bar and the main text. also try to differentiate the two different rows of links on the menu bar links with the black background. maybe with borders or different colour backgrounds behind the text

Blue — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 10:24:16 +0000

The thing that jumped out at me is the font. As stated above the serif font is hard to read. I always prefer sans serif fonts but that's just a preference.

The overall format is well balanced with a clear and legible nav bar. I think the logo is a bit small, it's hard to read the phone number and subtext. Maybe enlarge the whole logo by 10%. The photo is a bit small but its a friendly welcoming photo so making it bigger would be a good thing. As stated above the links up in the blue area should be a colour other than blue.

It's an information site and I think the home page is a good format for this purpose. It's well balanced and you can summarise the page at a glance. Just needs to be a bit of fine tuning, and make the other pages the same format as the home page - a.) because its the best format, and b.) because consistency is paramount.

Blue

Roo — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 03:14:47 +0000

Oh my...this code is a mess!

The doctype is html 3: That's ancient, outdated and obsolete, yet there is inline styles in use, as well as font tags.

Code errors are causing display issues..mainly the text is displaying as default Times and is unreadable in some places, and difficult to read in others.

There is a table in use on the front page, but no padding or margins are in use, so text is squashed up against the sides.

Tables in use on some pages, but not on others.

I'm assuming it's because this was generated by a WYSIWYG that is pretty much no good: >>>meta name="generator" content="AceHTML 5 Freeware"

Before offering fixes....how much of an understanding do you have when it comes to writing/troubleshooting code by hand in a plain old text editor?

uglued — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 21:15:36 +0000

Group Benefits, Inc. has got some very useful information. i am finance major and this semester am taking risk management class where we did talk about group benefits.. so the contents seem familiar

i did find the erros realting to viewing it in FireFox and IE , top and bottom banner/navigation parts... if you are not a tech guy like me, u might want to search for free website templates on google and find a ready made template that suits your needs and hopefully it might be all browser compatible...

also i think u are using the font face - Batang which i didnt like personally, might as well leave the default fonts that most browsers will support and users are comfortable with ?

there ' | ' and text are not aligned properly .. u might want something like align="absmiddle" / that will float the text and | in center ..

the contents demand a very crisp and professional look which teh site seems to be lacking ... hope you find this review helpful.

regards,
Sohil.

Megan — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 14:58:48 +0000

I don't think it's that bad but I agree it could use some work. The fonts are the main problem for me. The serif in the body area is really clashing with the sans serif used for the navigation areas. I would keep those both the same - I've seen serif and sans work when combined like this before but it's really hard to get that to look right. I'd leave it all sans for simplicity's sake. I also think sans would work a lot better for this design.

About Firefox - it's a big up and coming browser. You might see your stats change at any time. The site does work in Opera (although I don't imagine you've had many visitors using it either).

I think the problem with the left side links is that they're almost the same as the top navbar (but not quite). It's a little confusing as to where I should be looking for the things I need. I'm not sure where I should be looking for what I need. What you could do with the left side is divide it up using headers to show what's what. So have one section on forms (and label it as such), and so on from there. I've been reading Steve Krug's [i]Designing Web Usability[/b] which I've found to be really helpful in home page design. It's quite outdated but still has a lot of really useful information - you might want to check it out.

The links in the header area really need to go. Who is going to want to make this page their home page????? Maybe people who work for the company but that's it. So what use is it to the users? None. Who is going to want to email this to their friends? No one. Everyone knows how to add something to favourites so you don't need that either.

Another problem I have with this site is that the design changes from page to page. Things seem to jump around and there is no consistency. I would consider getting a template - either a low cost stock template you can customize yourself or something custom designed. This just looks way too unprofessional. For an insurance company you really need to build trust in your clients and a very amateur website like this is not going to help.

robfenn — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 13:23:11 +0000

It looks like you've forgotten to upload a style sheet. It couldn't be any more poorly presented to be honest

vasam — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 10:19:09 +0000

- the header doesn't look good in Firefox (top navigation links)
- the footer looks strange in both IE and Fire fox. I think right side should be trancated on the same measure as header's right side.
- I would suggest you work on left navigation menu and make it looks more like menu.
- On some pages header is fluent and has justify align and on other is left align

I think this site needs some design and clearing up work .

demonhale — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 02:49:28 +0000

and if you dont fix them now, and the browsers start to be compliant, then all these problems will show up, since FF and Opera are the only browsers that is compliant...

I don't have many people use the site that have firefox.

DeepDrkBrwnEyes — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 01:39:37 +0000

DeepDrkBrwnEyes wrote: http://www.grpbenefits.net

I have recently added links along the left side of the index page to help people navigate the site. I made this site mainly to help my clients find information such as their provider directory and for employers to have easy access to forms. The links on my site are NOT affiliate links.

When I check my stats I have only had 56 people on the site that use Firefox as their browser in the last year but I have had over 5,000 visit with other browsers.

mikehannon — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 18:55:39 +0000

Looking at your html, your meta tags are extremely long. all of your other pages look fine, so i don't know why tags on this page are so long...
Also... looking in firefox i see the same problem with your top navigation. Again i had a look at your code and the problem could be in your "style" tags. for example
"margin-bottom:7;" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="744">"
In style sheets the unit must always be specified such as a percentage or pixel. here you have omited the "px" at the end of 7 to state that it is 7 pixels. Internet Explorer tends to ignores this rule but firefox is very strict with it. I dont know if this will solve the problem but it might.
And also, not so importantly, you might want to consider changing the font. I hear Times New Roman is no longer "fashoinable". More "readable" fonts commonly used are Arial or Verdana.