RCMCA.com site check

[Steph]

Hi,
I'm new to PowWeb and I'd love to get some feedback on my site. It's a site for our community association and I'm doing this on my spare time so please be gentle.
http://www.rcmca.com

[muijefr]

I like your map background but it interferes with the size/strength text your using. Either use a sold background of bold up your text and I don't think yellow is the answer. A site is always a work in progress. Welcome to PowWeb.

[NMS]

- remove the visitor number thing from up there and wherever you put it (usually at the bottom) state the date from when you have that number

- the map takes tim to download completly and most people will just click a link even before it has uploaded and will never see it at all

- remove the extrta space at the bottom of the page

- you might want to improve slightly the coluor scheme

- remove all your emails from the frontpage since these will be used to send advertising material.....make it more difficult to find the email if you still want to use it.

As for the rest I think it is ok....

[Raven]

Overall, it is a nice looking site; but, I would agree with most of the above. The counter at the top of the page would look much nicer in plain text. Plus, I noticed that it wasn't counting unique hits. Everytime I clicked back to the main page, I was a different visitor number.

I don't agree with making the email addresses more difficult to find as it is a community website and contacts should be as easy to find as possible. This type of site will draw a lot of people who aren't regular web surfers and they don't know how to find diddly on a web site.

You should adjust your links. For example, I clicked on the "Become a Member" link and a new browser window opened, but it included the navigation menu from the main page; thus, it was redundant to have the additional browser window. But when I clicked on the August 31st newsletter, it opened in the same browser window with no links to go anywhere else. In this case, it would have made more sense to have a new window with a close window button. You would be amazed at how many people don't know well enough to hit the back button on their browser (my mother is one of them :rolleyes: ). And your "Yard Sales 2001" link is broken.

Hope this helps!

[Steph]

Thanks guys! It's really the sign of a great community when people take so much time being constuctive about one's effort.
I will fix the broken links, design quirks and move the counter to a less visible area (or remove it altogether). Any suggestion for a good honest counter that measure unique visits? Can I tap the info in my web stats?
I think I can further reduce the size of the map so it loads faster.
As far as the general background is concerned I agree that yellow is not great but at least it's generic enough and makes the text stand out. Would light grey be better?
I don't know how to deal with the extra space at the bottom of the page. It doesn't show up in browser preview. I suspect there is a spacer image missing somewhere but since I can't preview the problem it's difficult to troubleshoot.
Also, on some long pages, the upper left corner image gets duplicated and I know I need to fix this too by providing a longer left nav bar image.

[Raven]

Try this one!

CounterActive (http://www.hologramdesigns.com/devil/scripts/perl/001/)

It counts both unique and total visitors and can show users online also. It is the same one I am using on my site. You can show whichever stats you want, or show all of them.

This is why you are getting the space at the bottom:

<tr>
<td height="1"><img height="1" width="180" src="/Active_Assets/Misc./spacer.gif"></td>
<td><img height="1" width="50" src="/Active_Assets/Misc./spacer.gif"></td>
<td></td>
<td><img height="1" width="50" src="/Active_Assets/Misc./spacer.gif"></td>
<td><img height="1" width="1" src="/Active_Assets/Misc./spacer.gif"></td>
</tr>

I got this from the source code of your index page. If you remove it, the extra space will go away.

[muijefr]

When I speak of a background color other than yellow I think your current map is a real good spring board for a coordinated color scheme. The map has lite green / #eff5ed, lite beige / #fdf5e8, gray / #cccccc, and white / #ffffff. You mentioned using a gray background and as much as I hate to say gray, gray / #c5cac3 might be the answer with #0d2b01, a dark dark green, text. It's worth a try. A gray / #c5cac3 background will coordinate the gray and green in the map, #c5cac3 is a gray to green color, and put your message/text very much in the foreground where it belongs but tone down it's visual in your face.