Sweet Tea Anyone?

[unistake]

Hi all,

 

I have recently made this website for a member of my family.

 

Would love to know what you think of it.

 

http://www.sweet-tea.co.uk/

 

Thanks

[intellix]

Nice and tidy

Perhaps could do with a bit of pizaz... not sure what. Perhaps the fancy font is overused?

Can't say that I like the lightbox script currently in use... There are so many nice lightboxes and I think the one you are using is a little bit ugly with the Loading...

[unistake]

ok good points thanks.

 

Yeah I am not too keen on the lightbox but it was a simple one to put on for now!

[Evil Glint]

Aww .... It looks way better than my site.

 

I like both the layout, and the color scheme. The fancy text in the left menu is a nice touch too.

[unistake]

Thanks, just added some new photos.

[Adam]

In general I really like the website; the font, layout, colour scheme, etc. It suits the subject of the website well, and has that kind of 'class' about it. When you navigate away from the homepage however, the font ruins it for me - just doesn't seem to fit in. That's really the only negative I can find about the design, except for the footer's broken (see the attachment).

 

Quick suggestion I could make with the mark-up would be to move the Google Analytics script block to the end of the body. That'll make the website load quicker and improve SEO slightly. You could also remove a lot of class names from elements by making better use of CSS selectors, which will reduce some of the bloat in the mark-up and improve your content : mark-up ratio. Those are fairly nit-picking suggestions though.

 

Adam

[Adam]

Forgot the attachment..

 

[attachment deleted by admin]

[unistake]

Hi Adam,

 

Thanks for that - There have been some problems with it today - I think people viewing it maybe with IE6 or lower might have problems with the layout but I can not see them. I am testing with Chrome and IE8.

 

Is there a way I can see what they see with a different (older browser)

 

thanks

[unistake]

Also,

 

could you suggest any font types for the rest of the site - away from the index page?

 

I think they are out of place also!

 

Cheers

[Adam]

I was viewing the footer in FF3.6, which had the issue. The white block has gone, but the text input still looks a little wrong touching the bottom of the window. Browsershots is probably your best bet for testing cross-browser, it also has the options for different operating systems. IE8 has a compatibility view (tools > compatibility view) for you test in IE7, going from memory though I don't believe IE6 is an option. There's a few programs you can download too, "MultiIE" I think one's called, but I can say how accurate they are.

 

As for the font, I had a quick play around in Firebug and found the following styles looked nicer:

 

color: #333;
font-family: 'Palatino Linotype';
font-size: 16px;

 

Also added a 10px top margin to the title, to space it a little better.. Attached a screen-shot of the final result.

 

[attachment deleted by admin]

[unistake]

Ok thanks Adam,

 

I have just put on some new font in the last few minutes but I think you've done a better job! I'll add that one

 

On the subject of SEO before, if you get lots of quality inbound links to web pages such as the /about.php page - would this increase the page rank of the index.php also?

 

[Adam]

Relevant, quality pages yeah. Google interprets a 'back-link' as a vote for your site (which is why people try to spam links to their sites on forums and such). Preferably you want the linking site to have a high page rank, whilst relevant to your site's content. The higher the rank and relevance of the linking site, the more influence/weight the back-link has on your ranking. There's other factors that affect it too, so you're best reading around a few articles to fully understand the process, and of course Google's constantly changing their ranking system.

[unistake]

ok thanks for the info!

 

Ive just been checking browsershots.org and some of the browser interpretations are diabolical! Its worse than the first website I ever made lol - lets hope most use IE/Chrome/FF !!

[Adam]

Sometimes you have to consider the audience and way up whether it's worth the hassle to fix it. Not to stereotype the audience of this site, but I doubt many (if any) would stray away from the computer's default browser, IE. On the other hand if this is a site you plan to use in a portfolio, you may want to claim it's fully cross-browser compliant. In which case it's obviously worth fixing the issues. Just remember some of the browsers on Browershots probably have about 10 people world-wide using them (possibly downplaying them a bit, but you get the idea).

[unistake]

You guessed it -  70% are IE.

 

I think I will edit a few things and tidy up the css but it should be ok for 99% of people.

[.josh]

Homepage by itself as a first impression looks good. I like the font and the main picture and IMO the minimalistic styling helps accent the picture and font and that works.  But then I'm wondering....

 

"An Invitation" :  I can almost see this as being the equivalent of an About Us type page, but it also looks like a statement of services.  IMO it is short enough (and can be shortened a little more) to  be combined with the Homepage, with the main picture being a bg pic.  IMO I would slice up the pic to have the table etc.. be alpha'd down to around 33% and have the "An Invitation" text on that left side, whith the flowers on the right with more alpha/more clear.  Kinda how the pic already is now (I can see there is less focus on the table in the pic to begin with), but lower the alpha and add the "An Invitation" text to make the overall "Homepage" be a fancier "Invitation".

 

"Tea Party" and "Workshops" pages...I'm having trouble figuring out why these deserve their own sections....they are both very short and 100% text.  Are you planning on expanding them in the future? IMO this should be combined into a single "Events" category.  Also...your actual styling is somewhat minimalistic, which works great for accenting "fancy" text and pictures but for pages like this...makes them look somewhat bland.  Might consider throwing in some kind of pic somehow as a bg or maybe if you DO combine them, the "fancy" font headers with the section (which would be "Tea Party" and "Workshops" might help.

 

 

Gallery page...the ever-present "receive a telegram" bar at the bottom  works for the shorter pages where there is some space between it and the main content container.  For longer pages that end up going under it...make me think that the "receive a telegram" is an annoying slide-out ad-bar.  I would suggest keeping a space between the main content and that "receive a telegram" bar and add "scrolling" to the main content container for longer pages.  But not a standard scrollbar. IMO the design feels better without scrolling, so it would be better if for example on the gallery page, make the pictures shown individually with right and left buttons to slide a new picture in the front, like a rotator script, something like this (in principle, restyle to fit your theme, of course).

 

 

 

"Say Hello" (contact us) page...form fields bleeding over the right side of your container...is that on purpose?  Because the way it looks now (IMO) looks more like broken code than a "style".  I would suggest removing the picture and put the whole form back in the main container....which I know I just bitched about lack of pictures but contact us pages are usually exceptions to design and should be as clear and simple as possible.

 

 

The ever-present "receive a telegram" bar at the bottom... I don't like how the email address input field is taller than the submit button or how both of them are bigger, clunkier and less "elegant" than the actual "receive a telegram" font.  None of that seems to mesh well together, like it's all clunky and mis-aligned.  I would at least make the input field and submit button the same height and align them horizontally with the "receive a telegram" text.  I would also right-align the whole thing instead of having it be in the weird slightly off-center position you have it at... either make the right edge of the submit line up with the right edge of the content container or else make it all the way to the right of the browser window (after all, it IS in it's own "slideup" div, kind of separate from the rest of the content).  If you are feeling extra froggy, make the form field default value (that "email address" text) disappear on field focus, and change the style of the text field and submit button to fit the colors / theme of the rest of your site more.

 

[attachment deleted by admin]

[unistake]

Hi Crayon Violent,

 

Thanks for the feedback - more than I expected off this post!

 

The plan is to add more details to each web page in the near future.

 

I have been finding out from over 5 people today that the website looks different and somehow broken code in different browsers - the form is meant to be under the picture on that page.

 

The email did have an onClick value "" etc but this was playing up so removed it for now.

 

Thanks all for the feedback - great information