plzzzz review:-> www.online-artists.8m.com

[sachitha]

This is my first largest site that i built after building my personal site.( www.geocities.com/sachitha_coolgal)

itz a site about creative things.
is a site created to enhance hidden talents online. i've created provision to publish various artwork online for free. ( such as paintings, creative writing, photography etc...)
plzzzzzzz review my site!!---> ( www.online-artists.8m.com )

Thanx in advance!!

[andyshep]

hi sachitha.

theres a few things i dont like about this site..

the use of large background images(photos) i find it hard to read the text on the pages in some places...

you should use smaller images (thumbnails) and link to the images if u want lasrge pics on there.then the user has a choice to open them.

i got a lot of javascript errors while navigating the site (im using MSIE 6).

some of the banners that i came across were to be quite frank - nasty
such as the gemini.jpeg.

The navigation needs looking at i got lost a few times..

got 2 or 3 404 errors..

keep up the work..

p.s. your taste in music sucks :p

andy

[LJK]

Hi -
A few suggestions:

1. Declare a !DOCTYPE.
2. Improve the legibility of your text -
with or without the slow-loading background image(s), it was nearly impossible to see.
3. Learn some CSS basics & drop the tables.
4. Try to unify the site: navigation in the same location on each page - use only one [maybe two] color schemes - something similar in layout from page to page, etc.

good luck to you,
El

[sachitha]

Yes i guess itz kind of professional to keep things uniform throughout the site. But i insist on having the home page as a unique one,...i just want to have an image on the background.

BTW, it is not my homepage that i want to get reviewed .
only the site mentioned below:->
www.online-artists.8m.com12

Thanks for the helpful tips so far.
wanna hear more!!!!!!

[LJK]

Hi -
Not sure about others here, but that IS the site that I'd referred to, earlier.

Really think the index page is chaotic and hard to read - the 'cleanest' and best section design on the whole thing is the photos page. [Please consider this one as a new template.]

To help the home page - - don't repeat your background image and get some kind of color scheme together for your text. [It's like a jigsaw puzzle, at the moment...]

I'm viewing in Mozilla and found most of the headers were trailing off of the screen. Not only are you missing the !DOCTYPE declaration, at least one page didn't have the closing html tag.

Needs work - have fun,
El

[steelersfan88]

I am the administrator of the site's forums, and am in the process of talking over your site with the rest of the gang. Do not be surprised if the site is edited a tad shortly.

Dr. Script

[HotShot]

Here is a list of things that could be done to improve your site:
[list=1] Specify ALT attributes for your images e.g.( <img src="yourimage.gif" height="1" width="1" alt="Monalisa"> )

Trash the opening page with only the website title and the picture. It provides the user and search engines no benifit without content on it.

The javascript rollovers should be replaced with CSS text rollovers to decrease page sizes

Stick with an unified navigational system

Create a !DOCTYPE and fix all the coding errors (to see all of these go to: W3C HTML Validation (http://validator.w3.org/))

Optimize your HTML using Advanced HTML Optimizer (http://www.pcbit.com/htmlopt/) or any other HTML optimizer. This will speed up page loading time and increase visitor happiness :)
[/list=1]

[steelersfan88]

Originally posted by HotShot
Optimize your HTML using Advanced HTML Optimizer (http://www.pcbit.com/htmlopt/) or any other HTML optimizer. This will speed up page loading time and increase visitor happiness :) I agree with everything except that 1. I looked over the site you gave me, and it did everything I wouldn't want to do with my code.

One should code well to begin with, and extra whitespace (CR, LF, and space characters) do not make loading time much longer, and comments are ignored (except for some in IE that can be used as If thens).

Dr. Script

[HotShot]

The following is from the book Speed Up Your Site by Andrew B. King
The average web page has between 20 and 35 percent extra whitespace, according to Insider Software (http://www.insidersoftware.com/ (http://www.insidersoftware.com)) and WebTrimmer (http://www.glostart.com/webtrimmer/). Browsers don't care how pretty your markup is; they're just looking between the tags...Those extra spaces, tabs and returns make your markup easier to read but slower to display.

And the optimizer has the option leave CR and LF characters untouched if you would like it to. Comments slow file sizes and should be kept to a minimum as well. Users can't see them, but they still have to download the whole HTML file.

[steelersfan88]

Optimizing a page just makes it much, much longer to edit the page. How is one supposed to know where a form ends if the form elements are indented below it?

The extra whitespace is rarely for the use of anything but simplicity in editing. Comments are used so when someone (either the original coder or another person) sees the code, one can determine what everything does. This was a big problem with the Y2K scare, since code was not commented, and it was difficult to find programmer's who understood the language well enough to make changes.

Extra spacing and line breaks make it simple for adding and delting document elements, since one can chronilogically find something from top to bottom, which is better than left to right (which would in turn wrap and be both left/right and up/down).

I would find it easier to edit a code that looms nice rather than a code that takes much longer to load.<script type="text/javascript">

var tm = new Date().getMilliseconds();

window.onload = function() {

tm -= new Date().getMilliseconds();
tm *= -1;
alert("Page loaded in "+ tm +" milliseconds.");
}

</script>

<form name="myForm">
Name: <input type="text" id="name"><BR>
<button type="submit">Submit!</button>
</form>I got an alert of 31 milliseconds. I got the same result on the following code (line breaks added manually):<script type="text/javascript">var tm = new Date().getMilliseconds();window.onload=function(){
tm-=new Date().getMilliseconds();tm*=-1;alert("Page loaded in "+ tm +" milliseconds.");}</script>
<form name="myForm">Name: <input type="text" id="name"><BR><button type="submit">Submit!</button></form>(of course, all on one line). Both alerts were the same. I did the following:<script type="text/javascript">



var tm = new Date().getMilliseconds();




window.onload = function() {



tm -= new Date().getMilliseconds();
tm *= -1;
alert("Page loaded in "+ tm +" milliseconds.");




}




</script>




<form name="myForm">



Name: <input type="text" id="name"><BR>




<button type="submit">Submit!</button>



</form>in order to get 32 milliseconds, a difference of 1 ms.

[HotShot]

I took two identical HTML files and added extra spacing to one, like you did to your script in the previous post.
The file sizes (HTML only) looked like this:
Original- 23,710 bytes
Extra Spacing- 24,207 bytes

Speed tests (Run at http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/)

Original:
28.8K- 20.19 seconds (Whole page, including images, CSS etc...)
56K- 10.48 seconds

Extra Spacing:
28.8K- 21.35 seconds
56K- 11.18 seconds

*Note: All other aspects of the page (CSS, images, text etc...) were kept the same. Only the spacing in the HTML was changed.

This is almost a second saved for the visitor with the 28.8K and over half a second for the visitor with the 56K. This savings is solely from cutting extra spacing. There are countless other optimizing techniques that can be preformed to speed up your site including javascript and CSS techniques. All these combined make pages load quite faster and save bandwidth.

The comments can be all moved to a seperate text file to save the user loading time. The page loads slower for them and they get no benefit from the comments. With some sites so heavily loaded with comments it can really slow the loading time.

Here are the two files if you would like to check my work:

http://www.saratogalakesideacresassociation.org/meetingminutes.htm -Original
http://www.saratogalakesideacresassociation.org/aaaa.htm -Extra Spacing

[Paul Jr]

No offense, but removing tabs, comments, and whitespace from a file to save bandwidth is about the most absurd thing I've heard in my life.

Most companies probably don't care for saving .75Kb in bandwidth, or reducing loading times for dialup users by less than a second.

And moving comments to a separate file is a pretty stupid thing to do. Comments are used to explain a bit of code — why it's there, what it does — moving comments to another file, completely separated from the code they are explaining, defeats the whole purpose of commenting... And I haven't yet seen a site so heavily commented that it affects loading time. Commenting THAT much is absurd.

The whole thing sounds like some spiel playing to gullable folk.

[steelersfan88]

I'm glad they aren't trying to make money of this. We've seen some pretty absurd web designs that cost money, that are more a trouble than a design to begin with.

I wouldn't care to save a second if the loading time is 20 seconds already. I would also cut down on the size of the page (aka, sectionize the page) that you provided.

I hope the next idea is not naming all vairbales a,b,c,...,y,z,aa,ab,ac,...,ay,az,ba,bb,... That would be absolutely absurd to. And functions as well. Functions named a() and b() and ab() are crazy too.

I like my own loading tests better than online ones. Its simple to do, and provide instant results onload :) I think I probably stole that idea from an old friend ...

Dr. Script

[David Harrison]

I very rarely comment my XHTML, but I always comment my JavaScript and CSS. I don't give a damn about the extra half second, when I come back to the code I want to be able to understand it instantly, not start thinking "now why did I do this?"

I always layout my XHTML neatly with many-a line break, that way it's easy to modify when I want to modify it.

Removing comments is probably the most stupid thing I've heard in my entire life, why do you think the comments are there in the first place? You think I put them there thinking "hehehe, this'll clog up the user's connection."

I do all kinds of things to save on page size. I use external style sheets so that they can be downloaded and cached, I don't use bulky markup (eg. tables or billions of unneccesary div tags), I optimse all of my images for fast download and I use as few images as possible to create the desired effect. Therefore I don't think that the user will mind downloading a little whitespace.

[HotShot]

OK. I completely believe in the optimization techniques you do lavalamp (external CSS and javascript, few images, no bulky markup etc...). I probably did over exaggerate on the white space and comment stuff. I recently read Speed Up Your Site by Andrew B. King and it talks a lot about almost every single optimization technique ever invented. I got carried away with it all. But I personally can still edit and understand my code easily when it is all packed together.

My mistake,
HotShot

[David Harrison]

Originally posted by HotShot
But I personally can still edit and understand my code easily when it is all packed together.I used to cram all of the rules for a selector onto one line and I used to think it was great, I could read and understand it just fine, but then one day I needed to modify another persons code who did the same thing. Oops, disaster.

[HotShot]

I see. I will space out my code now since it doesn't save much loading time or file size and because of your disaster story. Thanks!

[steelersfan88]

I like your signature change, the word amost. though I still do not agree. I think using <font> tags for example are shorter, although CSS is more accepted.

David ... why must you all change your icons? Chuck just changed his, and now you! :)

[David Harrison]

Originally posted by steelersfan88
David ... why must you all change your icons? Chuck just changed his, and now you! :)You mean my avatar? Because it was old and stale. I'd had it for a good 3 months and I just drew (http://www.mbcomics.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=29&highlight=) this one yesterday. ;)Originally posted by steelersfan88
I think using <font> tags for example are shorter, although CSS is more accepted.Which is shorter?<font color="red" face="verdana" size="4"></font>
<font color="blue" face="verdana" size="4"></font>
<font color="red" face="verdana" size="4"></font>
<font color="blue" face="verdana" size="4"></font>
<font color="red" face="verdana" size="4"></font>
<font color="blue" face="verdana" size="4"></font>
<font color="red" face="verdana" size="4"></font>
<font color="blue" face="verdana" size="4"></font>
<font color="red" face="verdana" size="4"></font>
<font color="blue" face="verdana" size="4"></font>or:<style type="text/css"><!--

p{
font:120% "verdana", sans-serif;
}
.red{
color:#f00;
}
.blue{
color:#00f;
}

--></style>

<p class="red"></p>
<p class="blue"></p>
<p class="red"></p>
<p class="blue"></p>
<p class="red"></p>
<p class="blue"></p>
<p class="red"></p>
<p class="blue"></p>
<p class="red"></p>
<p class="blue"></p>I think you'll find it's the CSS way (355 bytes versus 512 bytes).

[steelersfan88]

And if you want all one color, and default font and size ...

A whole page would be done quicker, but not a small section that needs only one font tag.

Well, its easier to id people by their avatars. Now Charles is a bike and you are this design.

[Paul Jr]

Originally posted by steelersfan88
David ... why must you all change your icons? Chuck just changed his, and now you! :)
I know what you mean. I've had this avatar for a while, and I have kept it because it is Teh Awesomeness. :D


But seriously, there is no way <font> tags are shorter than using CSS. There is always some cleaner, better CSS solution to all problems (uhh, don't quote me on that).

[David Harrison]

Originally posted by steelersfan88
And if you want all one color, and default font and size ...Nope, exactly the same:<font color="#red"></font>
<p style="color:red;"></p>Originally posted by steelersfan88
Well, its easier to id people by their avatars. Now Charles is a bike and you are this design.When I saw his is when I decided to change mine, especially since I had an avatar ready-made. :)

[HotShot]

I changed my signature again hope there no problems now :D
CSS is the way to go, the <font> tag is not supported in XHTML so CSS provides a better transition from HTML to XHTML

[steelersfan88]

Well David, sicne one shouldn't use the font tag anyway, it would be fine to not include the #, therefore making it shorter by one character.

Paul ... I've learned to only listen, and never repeat anything from these forums :)

[David Harrison]

Originally posted by steelersfan88
Well David, sicne one shouldn't use the font tag anyway, it would be fine to not include the #, therefore making it shorter by one character.That shouldn't have been there anyway, it was a typo. But luckily you've defined a class for just colours in your external CSS document so you can do this:<p class="red"></p>Wasn't that lucky? You've just saved yourself 6 bytes. ;)

[steelersfan88]

And also have linked to your style sheet, costing you a few more ...

I just get a kick out of doing this. I don't really think that any of this has any real value. I'm on your side of the real argument, but think it'd be easier with font tags, that is all.

Dr. Script