Hi again everyone, we would just like to thank everyone for the advice given here, regardless of if you liked the site or not. We have made a few changes, including making the interface smaller and will continue to update the site(the race section is now online). We would however like to point out that the site we have online if far from finnished. A lot of the things suggested we already knew about and where going to fix anyway. Though we knew of these faults we decided to put the site online anyway and see what people thought. Anyway thanks once again for everyones help and please visit the site often for updates cause we feel that the plug we are develoing will be something to talk about.
thanks
stuart lynn(web site creator (url="http://"http://evnfullstop.tripod.com)")http://evnfullstop.tripod.com)(/url)
Quote
Originally posted by WickedDyno:
**Uaaghhh!
I'm sorry, I don't mean to offend you; please don't take this the wrong way, but your site design is horrible.
Your splash page is pointless -- the image doesn't even load before the refresh takes effect -- and splash pages are bad ideas anyway. All they do is waste time, and they tend to make search engines ignore your pages.
Your blue text is utterly unreadable on a black background.
Get a hosting provider that doesn't do pop-ups.
Your navigation is absolutely horrid! Who told you that was a good idea? You're using Mystery Meat Navigation, one of the worse ideas in web design, ever. There's no clear indication what any of those red dots are. There's no indication that they're even links. And if the user happens to mouse over them by sheer accident, the indication of what the link is, gets displayed nearly half a screen away! If I had a small screen, I might be scrolled down so that the TV thing was off the screen entirely. How would I know what those things were in that case? Here's a site on why Mystery Meat Navigation is bad: http://www.webpagest...navigation.html Your page doesn't work with javascript disabled. It doesn't work on iCab.
I don't mean this to be a flame in any way; this is my honest opinion as someone who has written a fair number of websites. This is my constructive criticism: the only thing good about your site is that it's about a plug-in for EV. Your site sucks. It's bad in nearly every way a website can be bad. The only ways it could be worse involve porn, gratuitous use of the <blink> tag, or Java applets of animated cartoon animals running around.
This is NOT a flame. I don't think you're a bad web designer, or a bad plug-in designer, or a bad person. You just made a mistake. You saw this ooh-shiny thing out there, and used it without thinking about how people going to your site would interact with it. I've made mistakes like that before too. Please don't feel like I'm attacking you personally.
Here are my suggestions: Lose the javascript entirely or just have it for basic rollovers. Here's a method you might consider, that doesn't use javascript at all: http://www.boogiejack.com/howx021.html Use text for the links, or if you really must, images of text. Lose the TV thing entirely. Use text for links, or simple graphics buttons, or both together.
And most importantly, put some information about the actual plug-in on the first page! The Title of the page should be "EV FullStop: a EV Nova Plugin", not "Welcome". The name of the plug should be in a big header on the top of your page so that everyone who goes to that page knows immediately what plug-in the page is for. Put at least one or two ships on the front page so that people get an immediate taste.
Right now, your page is not about an EV plugin. It's about big, pointless, annoying navigation. It gets in your way, it's distracting, disturbing, disheartening and disgusting. Nix it ASAP.
**
That said, a few things could use improvement though: