Topic: Greenock Hockey Club

This is the site for my local hockey team that I play for:

Greenock Hockey Club

I've only completed the main page and the news archive (which I'm really pleased with :P All that clever PHP).

I just want your general impressions of the design to see if you like the way I'm going. The colour scheme is based on the club's home strip.

You can check out the menu as well. All of the links work, just no content is displayed.

[Yes, I know there is a spelling mistake. This will be corrected next time I upload.]

Currently working on: an accessible, standards compliant bulletin board system

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How's it looking now?

I changed the colours a bit and added a random image. In the future, each image will open a new page when clicked on displaying it full sized.

Currently working on: an accessible, standards compliant bulletin board system

Go me

Might want to fix the link.

Hrmm, but the criticism part.

Its fairly easy to navigate, in my opinion.. almost too simple. Very clean, but there are really no graphics, and nothing to establish a theme for the site. When you go to the seperate sections (IE Ladies, Mens) you have to go down at least 2 subsections before you actually get content to appear, and that is sort of discouraging. Perhaps you can make it to where you can click on the subfolders and the active page stays up until you get to the page with the content, and then it changes.

It sort of looks like you made this site with a template or a WYSIWYG.


My Artwork - BMEzine.com

Nope. I hand coded every character. As I said before, the site is incomplete. So, surprisingly, there is very little content.

What sort of graphics could I put in? The logo is going to get redesigned when the site is complete?

Currently working on: an accessible, standards compliant bulletin board system

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While I'm sure it's spectacular server side (and I wouldn't know if it wasn't ), client side it bothers me a great deal so I'll just comment on the visuals of it.

busy - tone down the dashing and the >> these in tandem with the disjointery gives the overall tone: jumble

disjointed - I hate boxes floating on page type designs. I much prefer things/elements to be together, part of a whole, while still being distinguishable (as nav, as content, etc). You're disjointed problems have to do with the floating dashed border boxes, lack of consistent spacing, lack of consistent padding, lack of alignment, element sizes. The home page for example, your divs "news_box", "images" and "details", three is no happy harmony with their widths and margins between the lot. See what I'm gettin at?

colors - the interaction between the colors here is not working to my taste. I think if I were faced with having to use these colors I would go with lots of white and take the blue and red hues and up the brightness, lower the saturation on them for background colors to markoff divisions of elements, then use the full colors as accents where needed. As it stands the red and blue are just too dark and flat to be used so prominently.

markup - you appear to be interested in coding to XHTML doctype CSS standards and all that but there some stuff in your markup that's off, looks like one of my first drafts on a site: a mess some img tags aren't closed, you've got double entity ids in your tables (replace the spaces with underscores), stuff like that peppered around.

gotta ask: what's a "jug book"?!



EDIT :: oops, forgot, you have a problem in IE at 800x600 with your left and right floated columns rubbing, the content drops down below the nav

(Edited by JKMabry on 05-20-2004 16:42)

Most people like the dashing and none have commented on the >>

There is no harmony between the widths (that's my style and a number of people have commented that they appreciate it). The margins are all the same.

The colour scheme is the clubs colours and they have been lightened up. Any lighter and it ruins the whole scheme. Remember. This is mainly for the hockey players to use.

Those <img /> tags were a mistake as I used the same PHP code from an HTML site and I had forgotten to alter it :$

I do use underscores. I never use spaces!

The floating thing is a bug in IE (the worlds worst browser :'( )

A jug book? You'll find out if you visit the site when it's complete :P

Currently working on: an accessible, standards compliant bulletin board system

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<tr>
<th width="5%" id="Position" scope="col"><abbr title="Position">#</abbr></th>
<th width="38%" id="Team Name" scope="col">Team Name</th>
<th width="7%" id="Played" scope="col">Played</th>
<th width="7%" id="Won" scope="col">Won</th>
<th width="7%" id="Drawn" scope="col">Drawn</th>
<th width="7%" id="Lost" scope="col">Lost</th>
<th width="7%" id="Goals For" scope="col"><abbr title="Goals For">For</abbr></th>
<th width="7%" id="Goals Against" scope="col"><abbr title="Goals Against">Against</abbr></th>
<th width="7%" id="Goal Difference" scope="col"><abbr title="Goal Difference">Difference</abbr></th>
<th width="8%" id="Points" scope="col">Points</th>
</tr>

nice critique of my critique, glad you're happy with it



edit: can't nest bold in code UBB

(Edited by JKMabry on 05-22-2004 03:09)

Ah. That's for accessible browsers. Screen Readers read that allowed so people with sight defects other dissabilities are able to make sense of the information displayed in the table.

At least, this is what I believe happens.

I think a screen reader would read the table as something like this:

"Position: 12"
"Team Name: Greenock 2"
"Played: 22"
"Won: 5"
"Drawn: 3"
"Lost: 14"
"Goals For: 35"
"Goals Against: 48"
"Goal Difference: -13"
"Points: 18"

If this is otherwise I would really like to know as it would help with my other projects.

Also, I was just making sure to answer all your questions :P

Currently working on: an accessible, standards compliant bulletin board system

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I think you're looking for this:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-TECHS/#gl-table-markup
specifically this:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#identifying-table-rows-columns

Actually. Just ignore that bit :P

I validated it and it said there should not be a space. It'll get changed next time I upload.

Thanks.

Currently working on: an accessible, standards compliant bulletin board system

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I've updated the site quite a lot and moved it to a different server. The new address is:

http://ghc.ithium.net

I decided to make my own logo. It's my first ever proper graphic It's alright I suppose. A lot better than the previous one though :P

I'm mainly looking for how accessible you think the site is, have I got all the sections you would expect and what to add/remove.

Thanks a lot.

Currently working on: an accessible, standards compliant bulletin board system

Go me

You might want to think about doing something like this with the menu
http://www.ssi-developer.net/css/menu-rollover-effect.shtml

watch out for jaggies on images. example your header image.
You may want to resize all your thumbnails to the same hieght . that will make it look cleaner
And there are great things you can do with CSS background placement.
You can really break out of the square table look.
Maybe for the news and league standings you can do a zebra effect
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/zebratables/
Other than that looks like you are going in the right direction.

I'm not to keen on the link effects. I don't think they'd really add anything to the site.

It's my first proper graphic so I'm sorry that it's a bit poor. I'll try and make it less jaggy.

The thumbnails are all created dynamically using GD so it should be easy to change that.

I might try the zebra effect for the news. I never really though about doing that. I don't think I'll use it for the league tables as the colours used differentiate easily the league champions, who gets promoted and who gets relegated.

Currently working on: an accessible, standards compliant bulletin board system

Go me

I decided against the zebra effect but I changed the thumbnails. It does look a lot better IMHO.

Currently working on: an accessible, standards compliant bulletin board system

Go me

hey,

first impression is that the logo and menu are totally lost. I know you want to draw a viewers eye to the content. even though they are two sections, they just appear as one big blue space wrapped around the top of the content. I know they are there eventually, but there is a lack of cohesion in the design and those items are totally lost. I think this is a color issue, though I have seen plenty of light/dark layouts that are cohesive. Could also be all those dashes. just seems very busy and a bit jumbled.

also, the different widths of elements in the content area are very distraction. no reason for the news and random images sections to be different widths and I would think then that the width of the columns for the standings would also be that wide.

lastly I might add a bit of margin above the logo (which needs to be smoothed out - plenty of tuts online on how to do this), seems like it is running off the page and I keep thinking it should scroll up further.

keep working at it, it should come along fine.