A Beginner's Site Critique

[lmarshall]

I am a beginner web designer. I did an internship last summer where I designed my uncle's company web site after I had only one basic college course. Please take a look at it and tell me what you think. It's all HTML.

www.marshallengines.com

Thanks,

lmarshall

[splufdaddy]

Not bad for your first site. I offer two suggestions...

1. When going with this type of design - not very tall, and not very long - I'd recommend centering it. You can do that easily by putting the whole page in a table, and centering the table.

2. Alot of the site has text that is written in an image. This text is impossible to read by search engines, and users can't select it if they want to copy and paste it.

I'd recommend learning about the use of tables in weblayouts. You'd be amazed at how many tables are in a single page (I was). A site with some good HTML, CSS and other tutorials is W3Schools.

Also, another neat trick is to visit webpages, and when you see a trick you'd like to learn, use IE's Save feature (just the regular file, save...) and you can save an entire webpage, including all the image files. Then open the page up in a WYSIWYG HTML editor, and you can try to figure out what they did. Don't copy them, but learn from them. I dunno, that's something I did...hope that helps!

[lmarshall]

Wow.. I didn't know you could do that with web pages in IE!

1. I was trying to figure out how to center the website... for some odd eason I didn't think of that! Thanks!
2. I never thought of the user wanting to select, copy, and and pasting the text or the thought that search engines couldn't read it!!

Thanks for you input! It will help greatly in developing my other web sites !

[splufdaddy]

No problem...save a few websites in IE, you'll quickly learn the power of tables. I can't even explain it, I was more than surprised. There are alot of things about HTML that are really easy to do, you just need to discover them!

[smoseley]

I understand that this is your first website, so please don't take offense at the following comments. The criticism is intended for your benefit:

1. The entire site is composed of graphics (over 100k per page). Makes it an IMPOSSIBLE download for dialup clients.
2. The colors are way too bold. Bright Red, Bright Blue, and Bright Yellow in combination (whith White and Black) make the page painful to read. Instead of ALL primary colors, try picking just one, and then work with complementary colors to that one (i.e. a bold blue with other shades of blue or some greens).
3. Do not put the text in as graphics. Instead, use HTML to create the text. That way, it will be readable by search engines, and they will know what your site is about. The "Remanufactured Engine History" page is a good example.
4. You need MORE content period. Most pages only have a few words on them, if any.
5. Your navigation is very confusing. Why is it on the bottom? Try placing it along the top or the left side.
6. Make your actual links out of text instead of image maps wherever you can (sub-navigation for instance). Text links help you get indexed by search engines better.
7. Your sub-navigation is utterly confusing. Sometimes it's in the middle of the page, with cute little star buttons. Sometimes it's on the right, on a blue banner in yellow text (ick). You need consistency in the way your sub-navigation is presented. You also need to make it look like navigation !! Here, it looks like randomly placed blurbs.
8. You have no consistency in fonts that you use within the site. Sometimes it's a very bold black sans-serif (arial black?), sometimes a very slender bold face (arial narrow?), and sometimes other fonts and colors. Most of the text is difficult to read. Start with simple plain black text on white BG, and work from there. Always keep text STYLES consistent (meaning all content text should look the same, all titles should look the same, all navigation items should look the same, all captions should look the same, etc.)
9. Most of the page is left empty (white space). Maybe use a background color. In the very least, center the page.
10. I don't think you used one table in that site. You should try slicing up the framework into smaller images and organize them into a table. That way, you can more easily organize your text and navigation.
11. The graphics that make up the design have a lot of problems. Primarily, the colors. Also, there's no clear concept in the design. There are lots of conflicting elements in it:
    
    • You have the black border around the edges with crisp lines.
    • Then on the inside of that border, you have some free-flowing but jaggedy lines going on.
    • The red section on the left looks totally detatched, and even overlaps the black. On subsequent pages, it is extremely jagged, as though it was created in MS Paint.
    • The bottom navigation has this blue paint splatter element that doesn't fit the rest at all.
    • Then you have miscellaneous graphical elements like photos, banners, background images, and logos strewn throughout the page.
    
    These are all very confusing too look at, and become painful to attempt to discern. I suggest starting with a simple concept with clean lines, as simple as dividing up your page into sections (banner, navigation, content). Decide what goes into those sections, then fill them appropriately.
    

I know it seems like a lot, but the site actually isn't as bad as I might make it out to be. You obviously have some talent with graphics. Your biggest problems are 1) consistency, 2) color usage, and 3) organization. If you tackle those, you could probably make a really nice site out of this!