Web Design Clinic - Living In Paradise

We all started somewhere, and one of the great things about the Web these days is that there are many different places you can go to get feedback on your efforts. Criccia says "This is my first site made from scratch with Notepad." and she would like some feedback on it. Remember that feedback doesn't have to be negative. And often people respond better if you temper what could be improved with a little note of what has been done well. Review my article on Web Criticism before you release the "attack dogs". :-)

My Advice for Criccia
It is clear that Criccia both loves her city and has spent a lot of time on this Web page celebrating it. The pictures are quite nice, and the light blue monochromatic color scheme fits in well with one of the articles she references "Brazil Wins World's Best Blue Sky Title". But ultimately this page looks like the page of a novice Web designer. That doesn't mean it's bad, but there are a number of things that could be done to make it better.

Looking at the HTML

• There are 2 title tags - one was apparently written by a meta tag generator, and the other was added in manually by Criccia. But Web browsers will ignore a second title tag, so this is a waste of bandwidth - and she doesn't benefit from the search engine optimization of having a good site title.
• The page doesn't validate. Criccia does have a DOCTYPE, and that is great because it will make the page display more accurately across different browsers. But since there are a lot of basic errors in the HTML, this will negatively impact the way the page looks. In fact, the page can't be validated because there is an invalid character (not part of the UTF-8 character set) in the code.
• The only CSS on the page are styles that are only supported in some browsers, and not in the CSS standard - styles to change the scrollbar colors. Opinions about whether or not to change scrollbar colors can be heated, but I personally don't like it when designers do this, as the browser window attributes are part of my local system, not part of their Web page.
• There are no headline tags used in the document. This is bad both from a search engine perspective and also for allowing customers to scan the page. When you add to that the fact that the title of the page "Living in Paradise" appears "below the fold" or below the first scroll window of the page, and it's a confusing experience for most readers.

Looking at the Design

• Ads are the first thing on the page. While this might seem like a good idea to raise extra money, this can be a detriment to a site trying to get good search engine optimization. The first content in the HTML is often given greater importance by search engine spiders. And even if the search engines ignore it, many readers will be turned off by a site that starts out with an ad.
• The page is wide. In the window I typically use, there is a horizontal scroll bar. When I look at the HTML, I can see that the width is not driven by the table itself, but rather a banner that is about midway on the page and is forced to 900 pixels wide. But regardless of what causes it, 900+ pixels is too wide for most people to enjoy reading.
• Everything is centered. This is a very common Web page alignment for beginners to choose, because it's easy. The problem is that centered pages are boring - and there's so much space between the elements on this page that it's even more boring. As you can see from my screen shot, there is nothing at all on the first page in the scroll beyond a photo and some ads - even the title is not on the first page.

A Quick Look at the Images
There are lots of other things I could say about this page, but I'd like to ask that other readers provide their feedback as well. But there is one other thing that needs mentioning - the images.

Frankly, many of the images appear to be "borrowed" from other Web sites. While Criccia seems to be reposting the images to her own site (so she's not stealing the bandwidth), there is no copyright or credit information for any of the images - and if she didn't get permission to post them, this is plagiarism and the owners of the images could object to her use of them, possibly even in court. Images that are posted to the Web are not automatically public domain, and copying them to your Web site without permission is not okay, even if you credit the photographer or link back to their Web page. Criccia should learn about copyright on the Web and if she has permission to use the photos, she should mention that somewhere on the page.

Your Turn to Critique
How do you like this page? What do you like? What would you recommend changing? Let Criccia know in the forum or comment on this blog post.

Do You Want Your Site Considered for the Web Design Clinic?
There are two ways you can have your site reviewed by the readers at Web Design @ About.com:

1. Post a request in the Site Review Requests folder in the Web Design forum. This is the best way to get feedback, as you'll get responses from other Web designers in the forum, and selected posts will be chosen for the Web Design Clinic.
2. Submit your site to the Web Design Design Gallery and check the "solicit critiques" checkbox on the form. Pages submitted there will be reviewed by the About.com Guide to Web Design, Jennifer Kyrnin, and may be chosen for the Web Design Clinic.