Please feel free to comment

[Ceeege]

Hi there.

 

I’m looking for some assistance on my website. I’m pretty happy with the site as I’ve written it but I would like to be able to get one piece of information from a repeat user. I’d love to be able to get the visitor to enter his or her name when revisiting the site after an arbitrary amount of time (say 24 hours). It’s a dual requirement, firstly as I think it’s nice to welcome people back and secondly because I’m nosy and I write away named visitors to a SQL Database to see when they visited!

 

For willing visitors, it isn’t a problem as they click on the “Don’t be a Mystery Guest” hotlink and this takes them to a “Remember me” page. Once they’ve entered their name and either clicked ok or press enter it writes a cookie file and the job is done, retrieving the name data from the cookie on their return.

 

I guess I’d like something like you see on the bigger corporate sites nowadays saying such as do you have 10 minutes to give us feedback, but for my site just saying something like “I notice you’ve come back and visited us again – enter your name for a personal welcome” then have an edit box for the name field. I don’t really want to go down the conventional pop-up window route as many of these are automatically blocked by users nowadays and would also not prefer to go down the reroute to another page as I don’t want users to be put off and leave the site.

 

I’m fairly savvy with programming having written the site as it is in php and incorporated a few java scripts along the way so I don’t mind if a solution is fairly technical. I’d just like to get these users to add their names in!!!

 

If anyone has any further comments or tips on how I could enhance the site then please let me know.

 

http://www.ceeege.com/Birds/Birds_BirdMenu.php

[ober]

Typically I'd tear you apart on this site but I'm going to guess that it's all about the shots of the bird and as long as the rest of the site works, who cares, right?

 

I will give you some feedback, however:

 

1) Gradient city - you use way too many.  You would be better off coloring the various lists at the bottom in different colors.

2) The counters and "page last updated" typically don't interest anyone but the person developing and maintaining the website.  I'd remove them.

3) The "news" entries could use a bigger font.  There is a lot to read and you should make it easy on the eyes.  Also, white text on a black background is NOT easy to read for most.

4) Some pics have the camera/date taken, others do not.  To be consistent, I'd have it all or none (unless you don't have the information on some).

5) Use a picture as the background of the main header... it will look much sharper than that awful color thingy you have there now.

6) Be consistent with the color scheme.  You have some orange color at the top, purple at the bottom... yellow/black/blue/... there's no consistency in colors.

 

Hopefully this might give you some ideas on where to improve.

[Ceeege]

Thanks for the feedback ober.

 

It is my first attempt at a website and it it primarily for displaying pictures so as long as it's not too bad and functional I don't mind that much!

 

The list at the bottom is for all the different species. I didn't want to have hyperlinks for each one so went down the route I have. If anyone can suggest anything that might be better then please comment.

 

I've upped font size in the css for the "news" by 1 and I agree I does look better. Still undecided on whether to change the text colour though.

 

I see what you're saying with the picture taken comments. It's only on the sub menu structures so it's not too much work to change those pages.

 

I've changed the main banner to be more inline with the site. Hopefully the clash isn't too bad now but there is a valid reason for that in that I'm colour blind so my idea of matching colours is a bit warped! I will change the bottom bar and its buttons in time and ask for some assistance with choosing the correct colours!

 

Thanks for the feedback - much appreciated.

[ayok]

Too much gradient colors and contrast. The gradient buttons on the left are all right, i think. But the rest, in my opinion, shouldn't use gradient color.

 

And the footer, is definitely ugly (sorry). I thought it's not the part of the layout.. (with those weird buttons). Purple doesn't match with the rest of the page.

 

If you can, please change that ugly counters on the footer. Replace with simple ones. or just get rid of it. You can find the statistic from your hosting (i guess) or go to google statistic (something like that).

 

The pictures are great! But I almost missed all of it because of those colors on the layout.