Please Review Web Site

Hello to all. If you would take a look at

http://www.sky-higharc.org

and let me know what you think.

TIA - Bill KI4DFI

[YvetteKuhns]

The home page is an intro page with too much animation which makes it difficult to read. There is audio that is appropriate, but should be optional. I clicked to enter as instructed, though I don't like intro pages, because it adds one more click to get to where I am going. Besides, if someone finds the website through a search engine, they will probably enter through a higher ranked webpage and never see that page.

There is a selection of midi music that is copyrighted. The mouseover says to hit Escape to turn off the music, but all it did was wipe out what I typed in the forum! So I turned down my speakers.

I clicked a link from the menu on the left and it opened in a new window. Links on the same website should open in the same window, but links to other websites should open a new window. There are many font sizes and colors which is less attractive and distracting to read.

This site has so much Javascript, but hopefully not for important functions since many users disable Javascript. The link description boxes could appear simply by using a title attribute for the A tag. It is funny that the no-right-click script is used to protect copyrights while music is included without permission.

On a positive note, this website does have its information well organized. Those interested in amateur radio in Florida would enjoy this club information. There is information and even a free classified section for buying and selling radio equipment. With a few changes, this site should be nice.

Thanks Yvette for your input.

Bill - KI4DFI

Hi Bill, I don't know much about the technical side of web design but I'll give you my opinions on the appearance side. Like Yvette said, you've got a lot of content there of interest to your specific club. The colours for the site are strong and exciting. One possible suggestion might be to reduce the number of colours, but increase the variations of tones...example, decide on blue and then use light blue, medium blue, dark blue...instead of blue, yellow, red, orange etc. The powweb resources page has a colour selection tool (#2) that will give you gradiations of light to dark of the same colour...I find it very useful. But the combo you've got now is vibrant so if that is your personal preference it works too.

I'm on 800x600 resolution and your page was stretched on my screen...not much, less than an inch, but still would be nice if it didn't do that on the lower resolution. I think that's fixed by used a % for screen width instead of a fixed pixel width.

One thing that I think would polish the appearance of your navigator bar on the left would be to get rid the underline for the links (using css I think). I know it's something I always look for on a webpage myself....people know those are links so I think removing the underlining looks more professional...create a hover effect instead so that when the link is hovered it changes colour or is THEN underlined etc. etc. Also you have plain thick borders around your navigational link boxes. A thin border might look better and can be achieved using a style="border: 1px solid black;" command (not sure of the exact command, you can google it).

Like Yvette pointed out, your site links open in new windows, which is unusual...although the window effect is cool, the way it pushes out from the left! On my browser it only pushed out about 3/4 of the screen, thus reducing the screen size even more and leaving me with about 2 inches of scroll bar space to see the full page.

I know your site is for an auditory club (radio) but a few real visual images would add some appeal I think. Do you have a club building or meeting place that you have a photograph of? Or an actual photo of a radio tower instead of the graphical one you're using? I just think a real photograph on the page would add more visual appeal.

When I click on "refresh" or "back" I get a popup window thanking me for visiting the site...but I wasn't leaving yet! lol! So I'm not sure where you wanted that to go.

You have a cool mousever hover effect for most of your links that produces a little box with a description of what the link is for. Very useful in some cases....not so useful in others...one of the links says "click here for a map of our meeting place" and the hover says "see where we meet" so an explanation isn't really needed. But in other places it's very useful, so I would just reduce the number of obvious ones and leave the ones that need an explanation. You do the mouseover with some javascript (I think?) but I wonder if the same thing couldn't be done with a simple 'title' addition to your url. You'd only get the yellow box instead of all the different colours you're using, but it should work on most browers and is less complicated.

You've got a very useful site there and have put in a lot of content for your group...a very solid basis to work with and build on. Keep on, and have fun!

regarding colors and color theory -- this is a great website I go to often:

http://www.webwhirlers.com/colors/wizard.asp

Ooooh, that is a cool tool! Definitely bookmarking that one.