New website about Astronomy

[bugs]

Hi all,

I am new to Powweb and have just finished to design a new website:
http://www.astrofrog.com

Please let me know what you think about it and if you have any ideas on how to improve it.

It is an amateur website with the aim to help other astronome amateurs...
A blog in the journey of a new astronomer. Not really serious, but a bit. In fact mainly for the fun of it!
Cheers,
Sylvain.
PS: I did publish a similar post last week in a different powweb forum, but this time I would be interested in any critics you may have.
PPS: One major critics, I know, will be to use a spellchecker! :D

[jatticks]

www.astrofrog.com

[jatticks]

My first impression..
I really like it! The color scheme you chose works well and is easy on the eyes. I'm not an astronomer (yet) but I think if I was I would find this site quite entertaining. I really like sites like this as they are not trying to sell anything and make a pound/euro/buck. It's has some fun info, pics, and is full of your passion - Astronomy.

I did find the first page where you have to pick your frog a bit confusing. I would get rid of it and put a link to maplefrog.com somewhere in your main page. Astrofrog.com should point to astrofrog and not tempt you to go elsewhere. I picked Maplefrog first and would have missed your entire site if I didn't return back.
I think your main page could use some more info about astrofrog and what it has to offer. You have a small section in the upper left corner and everything else is mixed into you text.
I think that as your site develops you will need find a way to organize things a bit better. As I scrolled down and read you have a lot of topics going on. The search area is great and worked when I typed in "buying a telescope"
It will be interesting to see where you go with this site.
have fun, J.Atticks
www.lifesessions.com

[bugs]

Thanks for the comments and posting the right URL, I have now fixed it in the original post.

I take your point about the first page. However I was thinking of creating a "hub" for all the different sites I have and have one common central page (the first one) for each of the sites (one about photos, one about astronomy, one about security, etc). I thought the picture of the different picture of the frog would help the user know where to go...
I'll try to make it more obvious soon.

I'll try to put more info about what this site is about, maybe an "ABOUT" section in the left main menu. Glad you liked the site and thanks again for your comments!

Cheers,
bugs.

[Kitchensink108]

Negatives:
-I agree with the main page. Just get rid of that page entirely, I'd say. You link to Maplefrog within Astrofrog, and IMO that suffices, but it's your call.

-I'm not a fan of the banner. My first thought was "Just because this is an amateur astronomy page doesn't mean it needs an amateur banner." It just doesn't look like much time was put into it, or something. I don't really know how to describe it best.

-You may want to add in some more line breaks once in a while. Because you're not indenting, put a line break between each paragraph to break up to "wall of text" a bit.

-Some of your headers under the Beginner's Guide resemble links too much, especially with on mouseover. My suggestion is to change either of their colors slightly, to differentiate them at first glance, and remove the hover from the headers.

-I also agree with limiting the number of posts on the frontpage.

-w3.org - check your markup

Positives:
-The layout is simple yet effective.
-You're attempting to use valid markup.
-You're not using a table-based layout

I'm better at finding/explaining bad things than good things, so don't feel overwhelmed by the number of positives to negatives.

[bugs]

Hi Kitchensink108,

- I think I'll have to remove that first page then... anybody else finds it confusing?
- True, the banner was done rather quickly :) ... I'll work on it today.
- Agree with the line breaks.
- I have fixed the heading colors, now in black in both the beginners guide and Ze big questions section.

- The front page number of post is I think limited to 10... will double check that.
-For the mark-up... I have limited way to fix this because I am using wordpress blog and would need to look at their php code to change any non standard markup.

Thanks for the comments, doesn't matter if it is negative, at least I have some stuff to improve on ;)
Cheers,
Sylvain.

[Kitchensink108]

Don't worry about the code, then. I think the majority of the errors are using incorrect line breaks (<br> instead of <br />, since it's XHTML). There's currently a problem with the page, but I think you'll notice it.

[bugs]

I didn't notice the menus were all other the place until I read your post... I messed up something when adding the "about" section. Now fixed!

Thanks!
Bugs.

[bugs]

For info.
Just added some weather forecast and visitors stats modules.

Still working on that first page (need one, so will just make it some kind of "about" page) and that logo (will be similar, but the white arround the frog is a bit bad indeed!)

Cheers,
Bugs.

[NEWUSER]

Are you sharing these images with others?

[bugs]

Those icons are not mine but part of a public plugin for wordpress done by Jeff Minard.
http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/GetWeather

All you need is to go to the link above and download the icon set... very nice icons indeed! :)
Bugs.

[mlearn]

I agree with the other poeple that said the main page is too long. No only should you limit the number, but you should also consider putting only a breif description of the article with a link to the full article where people can go to read it. If I start reading the article and do not like it, I have to scroll down the page in order to find the next article... (I did this on my site: http://www.LearnFamily.com)

I see that you have no gotten rid of the two frogs... I am in the camp with the people that think this page should go and you should either have links on your main page or something else...

What is the point of the local weather on the right side? Since this is suppose to be an astronomy site, why not have something more along the lines of "what is in the night sky tonight" or something else that is more relevant to your site...

Just some thoughts... It is coming together. CMS's like the one you are using make it fairly easy for people to get content up, but people do not always think about how it is going to look and how to move around...

-Matt
http://www.LearnFamily.com

[bugs]

Good idea about limiting the size of each news. I will work on that this weekend.

I have removed the 2 frogs and now have a (VERY) simple first page explaining briefly what this site is about. Let me know what you think!

The local weather is in fact relevent... to me! :)
This will be useful for people in London to see what forecast is in London and therefore maybe help them planning their night observation.
What I would really like is to have an option for each user to enter their own post code, store this in a cookie, and next time they come back to my site the weather displayed is in fact for the location relevant to them!
I haven't written that plugin though... I have contacted the author. He thinks it is a good idea but can't include this in the next release... so I'll have a look at the code and see if I can include this option myself. But I will leave it as it is for the time being as I think it is still kind of relevant.

Thanks a lot for your comments! :)
Bugs.

[Kitchensink108]

I still say just remove the main page. Now instead of giving you the option to enter either site, it's just a splash page for @strofrog. The weather thing is an intriguing idea, though. It definitely seems probable.

[bugs]

Hi Again Kitchensink,

I am torn between keeping the splash page or not.
a) It is a good way for everyone to know what this site is about, if they want to come back they can always bookmark the main site (after the slpash page)
b) well... Because of the blog package I am using I need to have my main page in a subfolder (not completly true but if it is not in a subfolder I am loosing some options to edit post in an "easy" way). This means I would need to play around with the .htaccess

So... I think I will keep the splash page for a while. If other people complain then I will try to remove it. I get your point. I am just undecided on this :)

Thanks again for the comments.
Bugs.

[vrooje]

I really don't think the splash page is necessary.

One of your paragraphs is copied verbatim onto the top left side of your main page -- and I think that's the most important paragraph -- the one that describes what the page is for. On top of that your main page banner states that this is an amateur astronomy blog, so I really don't think anyone is going to be confused at what this site is about from looking at your main page.

I just really dislike splash pages -- they remind me of the internet-crazy 90's when people would create ridiculous and useless splash pages just because they could.

I think the .htaccess editing would be quite easy. There is only one line in my .htaccess file and this is what it reads:


DirectoryIndex view.php?page=index index.php index.php3 index.html index.htm


It uses the first page as the index unless it can't find it, then it moves on to the second and third etc... I don't know if subdirectories work with this, but I don't see why they wouldn't.

Cheers!
-Brooke