AyrshireMinis.com - Suggestions/Comments

Hi All,

I have set my site - www.ayrshireminis.com - live for about a fortnight now. It is written in PHP with a MySQL Database.

I would really appreciate it if some of you guys could take a look at it and let me know what you think of it, if you find any errors then let me know. Or if you notice something that isn't there that should be let me know.

Would really appreciate it if some of you registered for the forum and posted up a quick message :-)

Cheers Again!
Picco

www.ayrshireminis.com

-You use tables for layout - not good...
-The design is not very exciting, you need some more of that web2.0 feel
-shout boxes are so out...
-I have a 21inch monitor and your site does not look to great on it. For example your main text area stretches out into 1 very long line of text.

-You use tables for layout - not good...
-The design is not very exciting, you need some more of that web2.0 feel
-shout boxes are so out...
-I have a 21inch monitor and your site does not look to great on it. For example your main text area stretches out into 1 very long line of text.
same here

layout is very dull. I like how you have an option for languages, however ditch the drop down box.

The HTML 4.0 standard is deprecated. Try using HTML 4.01 or switching to XHTML.

Thanks, yes I am going to switch over to HTML 4.01.

Thanks for those comments, have been looking into moving to "Web 2.0" with this site. It is definately something I wish to do. Drop-down box not likely to be used do you think?

Picco

well, you have the flags to switch languages and the drop down box. You do not need both, so drop one of them :thumbsup:

Huh.

Your URL for German is http://www.ayrshireminis.com/mini/de/index.php?lang=DE.

But your one for English is http://www.ayrshireminis.com/mini/index.php?lang=en.

If you're generating the pages dynamically, what's the point in the /mini/de/ folder?

No, the pages aren't generated dynamically. After doing a bit of research it seems the best way to do this was to have two directories for the different languages:

/en for English and /de for German

Picco

That's my point.

Why put "/index?lang=DE" if you're not generating at all? What's wrong with "/"? Why is there no /en/ directory?

hi CyanLight, i've taken your recommendation and moved to HTML 4.01 and it all validates:

http://www.ayrshireminis.com/

Da, Picco

In agreement with the others except why do you use javascript for the color change on your navigation? It can be done in CSS and links.

You should read the link in my sig titled "Why Tables for Layout is Stupid".

try checking the code again... link is not opening here at my place...

After a few changes over the past few months (when I had the chance and time) I've changed the layout and general look and feel of the site. I still have a few CSS issues to sort out, and change the German version of the site to the new design - but, I would appreciate any comments on the site as it stands now:

http://www.ayrshireminis.com/

Obrigado,
Picco

I can't see the text of the link when I mouseover it.. it's a grey color that is swallowed in the green color. (Firefox 2.0.0.6)

The thumbnail images in the gallery really should be separate thumbnail-sized images, rather than the normal-sized image forced into a thumbnail size by way of the width and height attributes of the <img> tag. They will look much better and the page will load quickly.

The newsletter signup thingie tells me I've entered an invalid email address even when I've entered a valid email address. Also, there should be some mention there that to sign up for the newsletter, enter your email address.

Other than that... attractive colors, pleasant to look at. You aught to get away from using tables for layout though.

Here are a few things I noticed while browsing:

Your link rollover color is hard to read.

The logo doesn't appear on the forums?

You should resize the images you use as the thumbnails in the gallery, that way it doesn't take forever to load the thumbs, which you are actually just using the fullsized image scaled down. So it still has to load .5 MB per image just to see the thumb! It wasn't all of them, but people need fast loading pages.

Es gibt eine Fehler mit den detuschen Seiten. (Ich muss meine Deutsch probieren!)

I took a quick look, and when you want to switch the language to German from English, the drop down box doesn't work at all. And when switching from English to German, a fatal error occurs.

Nice work otherwise.