Need 3rd Party Critique

[TrunkHustle]

Hi I wanted to receive some input on the good the bad and the ugly of TrunkHustle.com.  Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks!

[nrg_alpha]

Here are my thoughts:

 

I find the site too narrow. I think sites made for 800 pixel wide screens are going the way of the dinos.

 

The background isn't complete..as when you examine the sides (not the sides of the content, but the upper header image), you have this red brick wall that fades off into red, but the background of the body of the site is grey. Then you have a tiling light grey horizontal looking background at the very top (passing underneath everything). I would get rid of that grey tiling top and make the entire body of the site the same red as the red that the brick walls on the side blend off into.

 

Speaking of side graphics, I noticed that your sliced images don't quite line up (the street signs), thus we can see the 'seam'. Perhaps using one image as a background that covers that entire area as a css background instead. Footer images also could apply to this. Read up css sprites (as well as other optimizations) in Yahoo's optimizations.

 

Your markup doesn't validate, nor does your css.

 

I'm seeing tons of tables all over the place for layout purposes. I would learn constructing the pages without tables and instead use css.

 

I find that the content in general lacks visual polish and organization. Panels like Search Artist, Login and Sign up look like second thought additions, instead of clean grid like layouts with perhaps a few nice little icons or something.

 

Overall, I can't say I'm a fan with all due respect. With a bit of cleaning up (code, layout and graphic wise), it would be much better.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[TheFilmGod]

I did what I call the "fast-semantics checking test." - Just highlight a list of links (top navigation) and if the pipes "|" get highlighted with the code, it is a strong indication that the html was poorly written. I recommend using an unordered list, and tag each <li> with a "border-right" property to emulate the pipe characters "|" 's. All professional websites follow this principle including abc.com and microsoft.com. Websites like facebook are still living in the 1990's.

[Axeia]

Site loads in extremely slow, consider taking a look at yahoo's best practices as minifying the javascript and using CSS sprites would help lots.

(also combining all those external javascripts into one would greatly help)

Tables shouldn't be used for the design, tables are for tabular data.

Images on the side (at the top) look slightly misaligned in at least Firefox 3.

http://www.smushit.com/ is telling me a 9.64% reduction on image size without any quality change is possible, it is however far more as I see a lot of image in its list that I don't see on your side.. probably hidden behind other content.

http://trunkhustle.com/block.php background image is another color than the image at the top, causing a block effect.

 

If you want to do well on google you'll need to change that table based layout that's void of <p><ul><h1><h2> just to name a few that should be used, but aren't.

[TrunkHustle]

Thank you very much for the input some things were apparent even to the layperson (myself) and other information was very insightful.  Very much appreciated.