Website Review and Suggestions

**imnewhere** · 03-17-2009, 05:32 PM

Well, here's my first website ever. I'm redesigning a friends site and I'm still working on it as we speak but I wanted some advice on what I have so far. Let me know what to do/fix/correct/not do. Whatever! I can't get better if I don't know what to do so go ahead and let me have it!

Current site csisecurityusa.com
What I have so far csi.agilityhoster.com

**wildbackpacker** · 03-17-2009, 09:49 PM

A few quick things:

-Load time. On the home page, your navigation bar pictures take awhile to load even on my fast internet. All the pictures in fact on your site load way to slow. Optimize them so they aren't as big of a file.
-I'm not a fan of the 'intro' page. It is just an extra click the user has to make, and when you have a large banner on your regular home page anyways, there really is no point a banner on an intro page.
-Title tags. Your home page title is "Home". You can change this to something like CSI Security Inc. Homepage" from the <head> section in the HTML
-Center pages. Be sure to have all the content on the page centered.

Good luck with the site! Hope I helped!

**imnewhere** · 03-17-2009, 10:01 PM

Ok, great thank you. Should I save my pictures as gifs instead of jpg? Will that cut down some loading time? What can I do to my nav bar? Make the buttons smaller?? And YES! How do I center everything? That's something I've been searching for. I'd like it all to be centered no matter what size screen. That's possible right? And I will change the title tags asap! Thanks a million.

**imnewhere** · 03-17-2009, 10:02 PM

I liked the intro page.....it's a bad idea?!

**wildbackpacker** · 03-17-2009, 10:24 PM

To cut down on picture loading time, you can use many programs or photoshop, but I like to use http://www.netmechanic.com/products/...eeSample.shtml. It is a great, free tool that will change your pictures to a different format and change the quality to make them smaller in file size. Once you optimize the picture, find a version of it that looks good still. You can rollover the image to compare it to the original, and on the side it will show you the specs of the picture. From what I understand, graphics (like your nav bar) should be in .gif format and photos (like on your homepage) should be in .jpg.

To easily center your whole page, place a div tag around all of your content. Place this: <div align="center"> right after your <body> tag and place a </div> right before the </body>.

For a site like yours, I don't think an intro page is appropriate. Haha sorry! Maybe others feel a different way on this though..

**imnewhere** · 03-17-2009, 10:46 PM

LOL @ the intro page! No biggie.

I will give it some serious reconsidering. Thanks for all the info. I'm taking your advice and I will resize/re-format my images and center my page.

**wildbackpacker** · 03-17-2009, 11:06 PM

No problem! Just let me know if you have any other problems or questions! Good luck.

**imnewhere** · 03-18-2009, 12:17 PM

Hi Odha,

I have been optimizing my pictures in Photoshop but I have one quick question. I optimized my nav bar *but* do I *also* need to optimize the "rollover" image?

**imnewhere** · 03-18-2009, 12:36 PM

Also took out the intro page. Things seem to load a ton faster since optimizing pictures. That's such an important step I learned. I thank you! I also centerd the pages and added title tags.

**imnewhere** · 03-18-2009, 12:44 PM

I'll be honest, I feel like my site looks like a child did it. Does the layout/look and feel seem to be ok to you? I've asked friends and family but they just say "Oh yea looks great"! Which doesn't help.....

**wildbackpacker** · 03-22-2009, 04:47 PM

Yes, you have to optimize the rollover images as well since it has to load a different image. The images look pretty good now though! http://www.netmechanic.com/products/...eeSample.shtml is a great resource to check loading time of your site and other problems with it.

I looked at your HTML to figure out why it wasn't centered, and I realized it was totally messed up. First of all, instead of having a bunch of CSS on each page, you should have it link to an external .css file.

Code:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://www.outdoorhighadventure.com/style.css">

Also, you can link to an external javascript file so you don't have to have that image preload script on each page, which cuts down on the loading time.

Code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.outdoorhighadventure.com/slide.js"></script>

Then this is where you really messed up in the HTML. You started the <body> without ending the <head>. Then you go in and have <title>CSI Security Inc. Homepage</title></head> which should be inside the head and not the body. So you need to move those lines up before you first open the body tag. Then eliminate the double <body> tag. Then have the <div align=center> after the body tag (be sure you end it right before you close the body tag, </body>) and that hopefully will center everything, instead of just the bottom content which it looks like it is now.

After fixing all those problems, make sure you optimize ALL the images on your site because on the other pages they are still loading slow. Then make sure each page is centered. That should help the 'childish' look a bit. Honestly, the nav bar is a big thing that I think makes it look bad.

**colbyt** · 03-22-2009, 05:32 PM

Photoshop is expensive. pixresizer is free and works on a windows machine.

Saving your images the same size and at about 40-60% should cut your load times way down. CNN and the big boys often compress an image by 90% and it still looks okay.

Looks like you dropped the intro page before I got there.

It is a nice looking site. I defer to the other who took the time to study the html portion.