Site Review Wanted?

This site is a friend of mine http://www.electronics-lab.com/ I think its a nice site it has alot of content but things like the resolution bother me. I have high resolution but others dont and have complained about it. Also it dont resize with the size of the browser so it really doesnt work well when viewing it with something like outlook.

Can you guys to me a favor and write some things that you hate and have to go and some things that you like about it. I want multiple opinions so i can provide him with them.

Please dig deep and provide some good information about why he should change things or should leave them be.

Pros:
Good layout
Good colour scheme
Cons:
Tabular, unsemantic layout
Complete lack of CSS
Text may be too small for some
Slow to load

It is a good layout, although I am personally not in favour of the background image that you have selected. My point are as me''s, with the addition that your source code requires a lot of work to clear up the code that is not necessary to be there, and to add code that should be there, e.g. the Doc-Type.

You use a lot of tables, which is not something that I am fond of, and in your case, is not really required.

Also, things like the below could do touching up.

<img NAME="bar_05" SRC="images/bar_05.gif" WIDTH="83" HEIGHT="28" BORDER="0" ALT>

Should be:

<img id="bar_05" src="images/bar_05.gif" width="83" height="28" alt="" />

Simply adding the below to your CSS Stylesheets could reduce the output code quite a lot if your site involves the use of images, or images that are used as links:

img, img a {
border: none;
}

You can improve the code quite a lot, and feel free to ask if you need help. w3schools (http://www.w3schools.com) will be very useful if you want to delve into coding up to standards.

I hope that will help.

Why are you using images in the horizontal navbar? That could be done with normal text links.
I agree with ionsurge here, the background would probably look better if it was white...

I concur with me' : the layout is quite usable, there's loads of great content, and the general feel is clean and professional, yet friendly.

It's the implementation that's the downside: as said, way too many tables, many of which can immediately be replaced by clever use of CSS, tons of font elements, etc.
Furthermore, the layout simply is too wide; many people still use 800x600 resolution for a variety of reasons, and those that use higher resolutions may very well not want to use a full browser window.

Bottom line: the layout should at least fit about a 750px width.
A good chunk of real estate is wasted by the pretty graphic trim on the left side; reduce it, ditch it, or have the contents flow over it.
Also, the logo in the header is rather overpowering; reducing that in size will also free up some width. Along with that, the horizontal menu bar should be reduced in size, firstly by removing the useless repetition of the site address: either lose it, or place it under the logo in the same color.

hi,

I mostly agree with all that has been said here. Just a word about the background image.. I usually don't like them at all but in your case I don't know why but it doesn't bother me. Probably because it's discret. Now I'd like to point out four things:

1-when the user or password fields are not correctly filled in, you redirect to an error page. I don't think that the possibility of re-enter the fields is gonna be very clear to your users. You should keep the fields the way they are in the first place: why suddenly a blue bg color for the error page's field and why horizontal and no longer vertical? The login button is also diferent. You should have unity between all your elements so that the eyes can move real quick to the problematic elements by recognizing them without reading anything.

2-same thing with subscription form, if an error occurs, you should put the fields to fill in again, without the user to have to press the back button (which anyways doesn't work to go back to the subscription form on your site) or click on any link...

3-if you use a hash function, what follows is pointless. You should check for invalid chars in the password fields... not only in the user field. I've entered a bogus password containing a * and it went trough... You should get my user name (bouchel) and erase me from the list.

4-last but not least... the list of the users would be better if ORDERED by username...

Otherwise, nice job. very nice site.:thumbsup: