tmt: Off to a good start here!! Just trying to get the sites posted for review before the match against Leeds (you were ahead when I checked). Some quick thoughts:
1. The right hand edge of your page isn't well defined. If you are going for a fixed look then I'd run a 1px black line down the right hand side.
2. An odd thing to jump out at me but the diagonal line to the right of home and below 'bringing' is jaggy - it really is the little touches that really make the difference!!
3. You have probably pushed the font you use for navigation just below the level it should be used as they look a little fuzzy - I'd have a play with another pixel font.
4. I like grey but that ad really draws the eye - which will please your advertisers but won't help you. I'd add a few splashes of colour here and there esp. in places to draw attention to them. Its working well just below the ad so spread it around a little. I might also colour in at least one football shirt in the header graphic or better yet that flare on the right. It'd make a nice touch and stop people from ignoring your banner.
5. You might want to make it clearer what the 'just in' feature is for. Its not clear what the difference is between that and the latest news as they each contain news and site update info.
6. Nuts I see from your poll that most people think Argentina will win and I have £20 riding on the fact that they don't!!
7. Add a DOCTYPE.
8. On the meta tag front it looks OK. You need the content-type one. Also add the abstract one which is a one sentence version of the description. I don't think author and copyright are required if you are clear on the page and that setting for the robots tag is the default so it isn't needed. I've not seen the Set-Cookie one so I'm off to look that up but I don't see why its required.
9. Use more CSS and get rid of the FONT tags and all sorts of formatting like this (small, bold twice):
quote:
<font color="#000000"><small><b><B>May 3, 2002</B></b><br>- <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.cmgamer.com/Stories_HQ/thad.shtml">Thad's Story (Season 1)</a><br>- <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.cmgamer.com/Players/links.php">700 Players in DB</a></small></font>
and this is interesting (its done a few times):
quote:
<FONT STYLE="color:black; font-family: Tahoma, ; font-size:7pt; text-decoration:none; ">
it gets a little better elsewhere:
quote:
<div style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 10px">
but a better use of CSS probably makes most of that unnecessary (see briggl's CSS tutorials over at the Gurus Network).
10. There are some nestings of tables which are at least 3 deep and that just can't be required (actually in the right navigation there is some nesting at least 6 deep).
11. Your poll results (and the poll?) are brought in from outside using an IFRAME - this cuts it off from NS4.x users (and anyone who has disabled IFRAMEs for security reasons).
12. Again I would try for PHP/MySQL from your hosts - your TITLE isn't very informative and you could run an awful lot of the external stuff inhouse.
Overall it looks good and works well a few touches would really polish it up nicely. My main problem is that the code is pretty bloated and a lot of the fat could be trimmed making for faster loading and more accessible pages (those nested tables don't help on either front). Using more CSS will really help you and make things easier to update. Changing to PHP would really help you but I suspect that isn't an option (but ask it can't hurt). A lot of work has gone into this and it shows - good work.
Emps
posted 05-07-2002 21:54
