My website

[NickL]

This is not spam I am not looking for people to give me anything other than feed back. If this is not ok mods please remove it.

I started this website yesterday, I am looking for some feed back to the site. And lord noes I is not thy goodist spellar. If some of you would not mind taking the time to view my site and tell me what I could do to better it. I would be most greatful. Thank you for your time, and good sailing to all of you. www.cavetek.com
Nick Leone

[sailingdog]

Well, since you asked, even though this isn't really the proper forum for such a request...

The tag for the site says "Home" which is kind of useless. The "Welcome to CaveTek" text should have some space on both sides, instead of sitting up on the left border of the box and should probably come down a bit to center a bit more in the box.

The header graphic is a bit too tall IMHO and the graphic boxes in the center of the header really don't add anything but visual clutter to the site. Also, the image in the header really doesn't say caves to me... it says desert, which is rather stupid, since you're in Florida, not New Mexico.

The Blue text in the main content area is way too big... unless you're catering to the extremely myopic... and the photo basically blows chunks.. it's underexposed, poorly composed and makes you look like thugs...

Also, you should probably obfuscate the text for the e-mail, unless you particularly like picking up lots of spam—which will occur as soon as a webcrawler hits the page and harvests the address.

The footer bar is wider than the rest of the site. The MS Office tag has no reason to be there...and looks like an afterthought, since it isn't integrated into the design.

The About Us page has the content section too wide... need to re-size the photos to make them fit appropriately or not use such a rigid design template.

The All Rights Reserved in the footer doesn't legally mean anything. To have a proper copyright statement, it requires three elements: the date, the name of the organization holding the copyright and the word Copyright or the copyright symbol ©. An accepted substitute for the © is (c).

If you're going to try and use a tabbed design, you should probably make the tabs highlight and be active, rather than just the text in them. An example can be seen here. Otherwise it is harder to navigate and doesn't really look as nice.


One last comment... I looked at the code for your website...and it is a table-based design, which is so 1990s... If you're going to bother to build a website today... you might as well step up and use a full CSS-based design... otherwise it's just pathetic.

[mjname]

Nick, This is really really really great for something you threw up in 24 hours.

Sailing Dogs advice is actually really good, even if it has a bite to it. I would make the banner smaller and I would use a dving pix in there.

I would change the email on the site to contact@cavetex.com and have it just point to a regular email address, and every few months when the spam gets to much change it to contact1, then contact2 and so on and so forth. When people contact you then when you reply they have the fresh permenent email address. I do this for some of my sites and it works pretty well. Using a contact form has advantages here but for a 5 page site it might be above your learning curve at the moment. However any email address you post on the web, will be harvested and you will be spammed.

About US page, definetly watch the pix size it throws the alignement off and going from page to page should be completely smooth.

I don't mind that the "home" button says home. I'm sort of left over from the early 90's. I presonally would like to call it. "/" but the public never gets that! Sailnet has a home button and I use it all the time.

Tables, I like tables as long as they aren't nested to deeply... they are pretty easy to work with, and at this point every browser can render them fairly fast. However for a 5 page site I would concentrate more on learning some good graphic techniques and getting away fromt the microsoft template before rushing out and spending hours on CSS layout and design. My aswer would be different if you had a 30 or 40 page site and used a database.

Search engines: make sure that your keywords are actually keywords, meanign they appear on the page a couple of times and your description is actually a description of the page and that you have used some of your keywords to describe each page. The keywords and descriptions should be different or varied for each page.

Good luck
Matthew

PS has Tiny spent so much time in the caves that sunlight now hurts his eyes?

[kananumpua]

sailing dog covered all what I was to suggest. Except pictures. Needs a few pictures from several of the dive sites.

Best of luck

[NickL]

Thanks for the input, I will work on it. I am what one would call new at this sort of thing. Thanks again.

[sailingdog]

Originally Posted by mjname

I would change the email on the site to contact@cavetex.com and have it just point to a regular email address, and every few months when the spam gets to much change it to contact1, then contact2 and so on and so forth. When people contact you then when you reply they have the fresh permenent email address. I do this for some of my sites and it works pretty well. Using a contact form has advantages here but for a 5 page site it might be above your learning curve at the moment. However any email address you post on the web, will be harvested and you will be spammed.

This is generally a bad idea as the e-mail address will keep changing, and then it is impossible to use it in printed brochures and business cards and the like. It is better if you have the e-mail address as a link and have the address itself made non-web-crawler readable.

About US page, definetly watch the pix size it throws the alignement off and going from page to page should be completely smooth.

I don't mind that the "home" button says home. I'm sort of left over from the early 90's. I presonally would like to call it. "/" but the public never gets that! Sailnet has a home button and I use it all the time.

A home button is always a good idea... even if it is just clicking on the header that brings you back to the site root.

Tables, I like tables as long as they aren't nested to deeply... they are pretty easy to work with, and at this point every browser can render them fairly fast. However for a 5 page site I would concentrate more on learning some good graphic techniques and getting away fromt the microsoft template before rushing out and spending hours on CSS layout and design. My aswer would be different if you had a 30 or 40 page site and used a database.

Tables are still a pretty bad idea nowadays. They really can cause problems with Search Engine Optimization, as the more code required to create a page, the lower your ranking will be. Also, if you have a proper CSS-based design, then making modifications to the entire site is far easier than if the site is table based. There are plenty of decent CSS-templates out there on the web that using a table-based design is rather dumb.

Search engines: make sure that your keywords are actually keywords, meanign they appear on the page a couple of times and your description is actually a description of the page and that you have used some of your keywords to describe each page. The keywords and descriptions should be different or varied for each page.

Yes, keywords and meta tags are important. But search engines also count the page title as very important. Also, the proper use of heading styles helps a lot too.

PS has Tiny spent so much time in the caves that sunlight now hurts his eyes?

That was definitely the impression from the photo.