Please review my website [Creating-a-Site.com]

[Nazarite]

Hi everyone,

Creating-a-Site.com (http://www.creating-a-site.com)

I am looking for any feedback on my new website. I am open to all suggestions for making it better especially in terms of search engine optimization.

I was actually being ranked quite well on both MSN and Yahoo until just recently. Now on both engines, they are pulling up an older description/title of my site. (Probably 2 months old) and I cannot find any of the current info.

Anybody think of any reason why this is happening and how I can fix it?

Thanks,
C Parker (mailto:cparker@creating-a-site.com)

[ronburk]

Windows XP, IE 6.x, 1280x1024, normal fonts.

Displays in teeny font despite my having set IE's View|Text Size|Largest.

Seem to be some ugly empty boxes there. I'm guessing the site required some feature I don't have enabled, and did not degrade gracefully to handle that case.

There's a DOCTYPE declaration, but it's not quite right.

How to Get DOCTYPE Right. (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/doctype/)

Numerous HTML issues to worry about (particular on a website that implies some level of HTML expertise). "center" is not a valid value for the "valign" attribute (did you mean "middle"?). There's an "a" tag with no closing tag. Looks like one or more failures to get "tr" elements closed.

I recommend getting a valid DOCTYPE declaration in there, and then using free, automated tools (http://validator.w3.org/) to get the HTML at least roughly legal.

[MstrBob]

Okay, because I normally don't complement in the website reviews (bit hipocritical since my personal site is non-existant for now), let me say that your site is very well designed, from a visual standpoint. However, considering the topic of the website, allow me to be a bit hard on the coding.

Ronburk is of course very right about

Validating Your Mark-up (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.creating-a-site.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=%28detect+automatically%29&ss=1&verbose=1). Though you do have a DTD, it's improper and sort of defeats the purpose of the DTD. You are using HTML 4.01 Transitional, which I don't think you really need to be use. Using HTML 4.01 Strict would keep the page more valid and cleaner, and it wouldn't be that big of a step. Transitional is really sloppy mark-up, and I avoid using it.

Also, you are using tables for layout. Shouldn't the site use proper coding standards? Semantic markup should always be used. HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language) marks-up the information in the page. The tags have a certain meaning to them and describe the data within them. For instance, all text between <p></p> is a paragraph, right? But your tables are NOT presenting tabular data, they are being used incorrectly for layout. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is used to style your website. How your data is displayed is determined by CSS. Color, size, border, spacing, ect. are done with CSS.

The latest standard, XHTML 1.1 is very strict (thankfully). This is the new direction of web design - withing the coming years (hopefully) HTML 4.01 will begin to be phased out. Why? Because valid, semantic pages using CSS are faster, smaller, and more accessible.

And so on. Thats enough about your coding, and it's only because you already have the layout/design done real well, you just need the coding to back it up. As for the site itself, it's a bit lacking in content. Is it just starting? As it is, it's a good one-time tool, but there aren't many articles to look at. Hopefully, you'll have more soon, and you could even add something like allowing visitors to submit articles, or moving onto tutorials of HTML, CSS, Accessibility, and web standards. You know, the basics needed to make a good site.

Good Job! :)