Website Review and Suggestions

**naitsirhc26** · 03-31-2007, 03:46 PM

Hello,

I am new to this forum, but I would love to hear your thoughts on my site. First of all, pretend like you are a musher. Today, there really aren't very many dog sledding sites on the web. Right now mine is actually one of the largest, and people do compliment on the design, etc...(i know the design isn't up to todays standards, but I like it. If my viewers like it as well, I am going to stick with it. It has been working though for me, as I have only had this site up for half a year, and it is like the 2-3 largest dog sledding site on the net)

Please pay specific attention to where your eyes are drawn to. I know there is a lot going on, but the site is quite large (for a mushing site).

So put yourself in a musher's boots, and pretend like you are musher who is getting super excited because of the site you just found. What are your first impressions, etc..

URL: http://www.sleddoggin.com

Cheerful Trails,

Christian

**Griffin** · 03-31-2007, 03:50 PM

Nice design. Easy to navigate, functional. I like the favicon too.

**topboy** · 03-31-2007, 04:53 PM

i agree with the above comment, your website though does have a fair amount of HTML warnings that you should clear up..

**naitsirhc26** · 03-31-2007, 05:57 PM

Thank you for the input. I will definately validate my HTML and clean it all up. I know that is partly to the fact that I use Dreamweaver as well. It sometimes adds extra code that is sometimes partly cut, pasted, etc..

I am glad you like the favicon.

**cloudybutnice** · 04-01-2007, 07:01 AM

I like the design too. Clean, clear and simple to use. Interesting subject matter too.

**Sneakyheathen** · 04-01-2007, 07:26 AM

*puts self into musher mode.* We just discussed Call of the Wild too...this one should be fun.

Initial Opinion
There's a lot going on on this site and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be looking at. That dog-artist ad on the header is really distracting. After taking a moment to step back and assess the page, it looks like there might be a lot of good information here.

Design-wise
You've got the colors right. Anything dealing with sports should be active colors, like greens and blues, etc. Since it's dog sledding, the blues really work nicely together. The logo is nice, but that advertisement for dog artists is really killer. It's rather distracting. You already have your partners on the side bar, that should be enough. After clicking about I found that a lot of the sub-scripts (coppermine, the shop) do not have links back to the main page. You've also skimped on the designs for them. You'll want your site to look pretty much the same all around. Same color scheme and basic outlining, to create a sense of connectivity. Each section should link to the main parts of the site, etc. Other than that, it's an nice, professional layout. Just connect everything and stop the distracting ads.

Content-Wise

There's a lot of content, but I think that's what you're going for. It's organized in the right pages and it's written very professionally. There's a lot of good stuff here, and so I don't really have anything to add in this respect. Perhaps move the "what's new" to the top of the page or make the article page layouts a tad more attractive. Get the words away from the container edge.

Services

You're not really offering any service other than information, so, nothing to review in this respect.

Overall
There's a lot of good information and the design is decent. You're going to want to tone it down a notch or so, just make it a little less busy looking. It's mostly the margins on the articles and the flashing advertisements. Very nice job, good luck with your site.

I'm finding lots of good sites on WT...nice job guys.

**naitsirhc26** · 04-01-2007, 02:19 PM

Thank you very much for that awesome review. So far, I have only had the time to make the message forum like the rest of the site: http://www.sleddoggin.com/forum, and slowly working on http://www.sleddoggin.com/store/

I will definately give some padding to the text. I was just thinking about that yesterday. I am glad you noticed that.

And I like your opinions on just generally toning everything down a bit. What are your thoughts for making the articles more attractive? Just get the text away from the sides?

Thanks again!

**Sneakyheathen** · 04-01-2007, 02:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by naitsirhc26

Thank you very much for that awesome review. So far, I have only had the time to make the message forum like the rest of the site: http://www.sleddoggin.com/forum, and slowly working on http://www.sleddoggin.com/store/

I will definately give some padding to the text. I was just thinking about that yesterday. I am glad you noticed that.

And I like your opinions on just generally toning everything down a bit. What are your thoughts for making the articles more attractive? Just get the text away from the sides?

Thanks again!

Maybe take some of the more extraneous information off, like the "submit to us" not all guests need that. It's good to have a text link for submissions but you might not need it on the main page. As for the article attractiveness, just think about different elements. Bold important terms, italicize things you emphasize, use <h1> tags for headers and maybe bold subtitles for sections. Using a justified alignment might make them look nicer, but that's just me. I'm a straights kind of person.

**naitsirhc26** · 04-01-2007, 02:59 PM

Thanks sneaky. I will look into that as well.

**ADAM Web Design** · 04-01-2007, 03:04 PM

I like the design overall. It's neat, clean and I can figure out what's going on. That's all I ask out of any design.

A few minor notes follow.

Add the following to your CSS: img {border: none} . This will get rid of the blue border around your hyperlinks.
If you have a meta tag for Robots, you don't need a separate tag for Googlebot unless you're giving Googlebot different instructions (which you aren't).

Other than that, I think it looks cool. I'm down with it.

**naitsirhc26** · 04-01-2007, 03:12 PM

Thank you for those two fixes. The site looks a million times better without those extra borders.

Also, I took off the meta tag for googlebot. Makes sense what you said. Are there any other tags for bots that I should put in?

Any other tips are always welcome!

**naitsirhc26** · 04-02-2007, 12:39 AM

Okay, I am having one problem with the code you gave me:

img {border: none}

I love that if gets rid of the borders for the linked images, but I want their to still be borders on the article images,etc...is there any modification to that code to allow it to make now borders for hyperlinked images, but allow borders on non-hyperlinked images?

**dent** · 04-02-2007, 01:10 AM

The site looks good, and at first my attention is drawn to the ad to the right of the logo, and I ask myself what does sledgedrivers buy...
and I look at the adds and it looks good.
But when I start to eye the text I realize it would look a lot more interesting if the long list of textlinks to the left were small flash or buttons or maybe simply some nice .gif txt...
Or maybe in some sort of frame.

The site is fresh and makes you long for snow and adventure

Good luck my friend!

**naitsirhc26** · 04-02-2007, 02:03 AM

Thank you for the comments!

**FindMyPages** · 04-02-2007, 02:33 AM

I really like your logo. Very cool.

**enicola** · 04-02-2007, 12:39 PM

Fantastic Logo! I would change your font type and color, maybe tahoma would look better in a medium/dark grey.

**reviewsandsuch** · 04-02-2007, 01:11 PM

I don't know if I like the fact that it is TOO simple. I know most people are saying that they like it being simple, but I would like to see more of something..

But I really do like the site, its very complete

**naitsirhc26** · 04-02-2007, 10:52 PM

This is all definately really great to hear. A couple months ago the site looked horrible (that's not to mention the site has only been up for 6 months), and I posted for a review on another forum. I was just flushed down the drain by those members. They said it was horrible.

I guess I have achieved the challenge, and because of those comments, I have definately improved as a web designer. It makes me feel good that you all enjoy the site. It does have some bugs, but I like to hear that the general design of the site is liked.

I am taking all of your comments to heart, and tweaking the web design.

Thank you sincerely,

Christian

**sdfcochese** · 04-03-2007, 12:58 AM

Wow! Your site looks great! What are you using for a CMS? Are you running Joomla or Wordpress or is it custom? BTW I like the paw print dividers but what if you were to add an article rating system that used the paws as stars. IE this article is rated 5 paws by our users. I know I'm lame but I think that would be really cool.

**naitsirhc26** · 04-03-2007, 01:04 AM

No, that isn't lame at all. I like that idea a lot. I am actually not using a CMS, its all just static content. There are pros and cons to both.