A modest review request.

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bglddavies

Hey guys,

I'm the one and only web developer for the company I currently work for and as such I find it difficult to evaluate the quality of any of the websites I build.
Could you please have a look at:

http://speidel.co.uk

And tell me what you think? It would make my day.

Cheers lads/ladies.

Byron.

killinspre

Impressive upon entry tho it took me a second to understand what the three links to the left accomplished. Not your fault it was in my peripheral vision tho and took a bit more my eyes to catch the changes.
I am concerned on the loadtime of the four images once I clicked on ENTER SITE. But also could be out of your control due to your server or mine.
Overall, very well designed and visually pleasing.

deathshadow

I'm trying to figure out what it is I'm even looking at... there's like an incomplete/half loaded image that took a minute plus to time-out... some incomprehensibly tiny text and lines that show up on hovers for Christmas only knows what... Oh, is this a SPLASH PAGE? Here's a tip, LOSE THAT! Splash pages went the way of the dodo a decade ago for a reason; you want people landing on the site to land on CONTENT -- you don't have that.

There seems to be something horribly wrong with this site -- it's like all the images only half-load. I'm drilling through page after page and not finding anything resembling content...

What browser DOES this work in? No go in FF, Real Opera or Chrome here. Images not loading, some weird hover animations that make text flicker and impossible to read in the millisecond it's visible... Do I dare peek under the hood?

Well, I see we need a stick to scrape the bootcrap off. Do yourself a huge favor, and axe that buggy broken bloated inaccessible nonsense. You need a 100k framework to make a page's CSS, you shouldn't be styling a website.

Nonsensical heading orders, endless DIV for nothing, run-on inline-level that should have semantic block-level's around them...

Very much what I expect when I see a HTML 5 doctype, and no that's not a good thing.

Since it doesn't even work here, I'd toss it and start over. There's nothing worth even trying to save from that.

bglddavies

Can you send me a screen cap of it not working, the flickering or the images not loading please? It works on FF, chrome, safari and opera here on Windows 8. It is also working on IOS devices and Android so that's pretty weird. Are you using a Mac or Linux box?

deathshadow

I put screencaps of it broken here:
http://www.cutcodedown.com/for_others/bglddavies/

Windows 7, in this case Opera 12.17. Originally I was going to blame it on my using REAL Opera (instead of the pathetic crippleware that is ChrOpera), but FF, Modern Opera and Chrome are broken here too. Laughably the only browser it seems to do anything meaningful in is IE... and even then I'm NOT impressed.

Though again, this is the type of design AND code that I'd suggest throwing away completely as NOT being user friendly in concept or execution. It reeks of "WCAG, what's that?" -- generally it feels like you got WAY too fancy for your own good, focusing more on goofy animations and hover effects than you did on delivering content of value to users.

jedaisoul

I'm not sure that I agree with DS's comments in this case. The home page was slow loading, but that was due to the number of images that were not optimised. Which is a simple fault to fix. The "complete systems" page was full of content.

Strider64

I agree with DS, lose the splash screen. You want users to land on content, if anything the splash screen could be one of the pages that gives detailed information on the tanks? An the content is too far down in the website in my opinion, bring it up a level or two and make it easier to navigate by being more descriptive (instead of an up arrow). I would also get rid of the hidden descriptions that only show up when you hover over an image. Maybe make them ordered list? The font is to be blatantly honest is boring and lose the dropshadow effect (or make shadow effect less noticeable and static?), for it pulls the reader off the intended info. I would also suggest put the company logo on top and put some space around it, for company's like to be noticed from the get go. I do like that you keep the color theme consistent throughout the website and the overall website is clean and professional looking, it would make me want to buy a tank from Speidel.