Review of a new social networking website

[trymbill]

Hi guys!

I would love it if you'd take a minute to review my website, Connected-Women.com. It's a fairly new social networking site for women business owners and entrepreneurs.

Please let me know what you think. Any criticism is accepted :)

[donatello]

I like it.
I think it looks very neat.
Glad to see that you went through the trouble to put it in Icelandic! ;) :D

Good luck with the site!

Tell me a bit more... what did you build it in? Drupal?

[svidgen]

I'm not a woman; however ...

It's a nice and smooth looking design. The primary payload (html+graphics) is fairly small, which is good, of course. The only thing I really have a problem with is heavy reliance on JavaScript. But bear in mind, I didn't investigate far enough into the site to really get a feel for what you're using it for. Just make sure it's nothing vital!

The page loads pretty quickly. But, for the few remaining folks still on dialup or slower "broadband" connections, you may want to consider placing those JavaScript includes at the bottom of the body, as recommended by YSlow and High Performance Web Sites by Souders (Oreilly Press). The cost is that the scripts are not available immediately when the page is rendered. The benefit is that users spend less time waiting for the site to render.

Such an optimization is probably not a critical decision though ... it's just a general user experience guideline. And maybe you need/want those scripts available immediately upon rendering of the site anyway ...

There is one [critical] problem though ....
Your site does not support IE<7! IE's < 7 still hold 15% to 25% of the market, depending on whose stats you believe. You may encourage, but should never force, your users to download the latest browser(s) to view your site! 22.5% of thepointless.com (http://thepointless.com/)'s visitors use IE6--which is actually quite frustrating, since I haven't taken the time to IE6-fix my design!

... Some businesses actually have strict rules on what browsers to use--some in particular force their users to use IE6! (why? ... they're afraid of change, mostly).

Some stats ...
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2

[kwyjibo]

I agree with others that the site layout is fine, it does look nice. But...my gripe is that it is not standards compliant code.

I'm a big advocate of strict DTDs. Of course, strict DTDs are MY preference, it doesn't mean it has to be everyone's preference. But nevertheless, while the DTD of the page is HTML 4.01 Transitional, it does not even pass the validation for that.

If you want the page to last well into the future, which I imagine you do, it would be better to 'future-proof' the code by cleaning it up. It may look ok in most browsers, but if you ever plan on having people be able to access it through mobile devices, or something like that, you will have problems.

Keep all tags lowercase, close your td tags and empty elements, add alt attributes to images to make them more accessible, and switch to a strict DTD, if you so choose.

As I said, the site looks nice. Please take this as constructive criticism! Good job, and it's a great site idea. Unfortunately, I am also not a woman, so I can't really test the full site functionality. Still, nice job.

In response to the reply that said companies are too scared to change from IE6...unfortunately the problem is much deeper than that. Microsoft didn't update IE6 for so many years, and all these companies tied their whole livelihoods into IE6. In order to change it will take a major effort, not to mention the expense. Considering today's economy, it is still going to take a few years to finally break free from IE6.

[trymbill]

Thanks for the response guys!

@donatello It's in Icelandic because the site is located in Iceland and has the Icelandic name "Tengjumst.is" which means "Let's connect" :-)

The site is not built with any framework or CMS. It's built from the first letter to the last by me (with the exception of some 3rd party javascript and PHP classes.

@ kwyjibo & svidgen I totally agree with you. I'm going to try and get the site W3C compliant, haven't done that in a while. Also, my decision to not support IE6 is just because I don't have time nor money to spend making the code IE6 compliant. It's just to much of a problem and pain so I decided to spend my time on creating new features for the site instead of trying to make it work on a faulty browser.

Thanks for the response guys, I appreciate it!

[svidgen]

... It's just to much of a problem and pain so I decided to spend my time on creating new features for the site instead of trying to make it work on a faulty browser.

hehe ... As long as you're aware of the % of the market using that "faulty browser" and you're not concerned with losing their business, rock on.


... By the time I have time to fix the design for thepointless.com (http://thepointless.com/), IE6 will probably have so few users that I won't even care.

[trymbill]

hehe ... As long as you're aware of the % of the market using that "faulty browser" and you're not concerned with losing their business, rock on.

The % of IE6 users has dropped and the % of IE7 users has increased. I think it's a big risk taking for me, but I believe that it's just a matter of short time risk. 2 major updates (IE7 and now IE8) has to be a wake up call for users to update their browsers. It's really silly how Microsoft don't place these updates into their "recommended" updates. Silly, just silly.