Your opinions please

[blain]

I have been playing about with this site today.

What do you think.

NE1 Internet (http://frost-genealogy.co.uk/ne1)

[mark87]

Not bad, I think though that :-


The header section is too tall.
The orange headings clash with the grey background.
The footer is too squashed up.
Bottom of text far too close to footer line.
Could do with some more colours.

[blain]

The header section is too tall.

Only at very high res


The orange headings clash with the grey background.

I am contemplating with the idea of swithing the grey with a khaki colour.

The footer is too squashed up.

Unsquashed

Bottom of text far too close to footer line.

padding added

Could do with some more colours.

Not sure that I agree with you on that one, but we will see what other people think.

[mark87]

Why not make the #top a fixed height instead of a percentage?

[blain]

they are exactly that smallfont keywords, they are not there to be read by people...there for the robots.:thumbsup:

[Pennimus]

hey are exactly that smallfont keywords, they are not there to be read by people...there for the robots

...something which is liable to draw undesired attention to your site from the powers that be should someone - a competitor say - choose to report this. You have been warned.

[slushy77]

Hi Blain,
The current color scheme on this site looks ok - the grey just needs some adjustment to work with the orange. Please dont change it to Khaki - it will clash with the blue and orange.
h1, h2, and h3 need some padding to take them away from the edge of the browser.

I dont know if the small text at the bottom of the page is a clause in a contract, a recipe for cookies or keywords for robots, but I am not going to strain my eyes to find out. Any content placed on a webpage must be human readable, and of value to the target audience. After all we design webpages for humans not robots.

[NickPresta]

Those words for search engines below your footer are a surefire way to NOT get indexed by google.

[Pennimus]

No, it will not prevent the site being indexed by Google or any other search engine - how could it?

[NickPresta]

http://www.measuring-up.com/seo-reference/seo-glossary.html#keyword-stuffing
http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2003/HowWebSearchEnginesWork.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_spam

By keyword-stuffing, you're doing nothing that making your page look odd.

[Pennimus]

Hi Nick,

I'm not the site owner, by the way, just to make that clear :thumbsup:

You'll note I've already warned blain about the dangers of keyword stuffing above. However I was disagreeing with your statement that it will stop the site being indexed, as this simply isn't true. It may provide a reason for the site to be banned from the index once it's been indexed, but that's a different kettle of fish entirely and generally relies on somebody reporting a site (it happens, depending largely on how many vigilantes you have in your industry - in blains case it's highly likely to happen) or a search engineer stumbling across the site (rather unlikely).

Merely trying to correct the slight misinformation in your post.

[Tynan]

surely can't be hard for robots to detect text below a certain size can it?

I assumed that they did

[Pennimus]

Maybe it isn't, I just don't believe (and nor have I seen any proof to the contrary) that any search engine could justify not indexing a site due to small fonts; after all, many sites innocently use microfonts because they 'look cool'. Sites with keyword stuffing (either standard text, tiny text or invisible text) abound in all search engine indexes; they only draw undue attention when a human user reports the abuse or if an engineer takes action. This has been confirmed by search engine representatives, notably Matt Cutts of Google when discussing the banning of the BMW website from Google for keyword stuffing (amongst other abuses) a month or so ago.

[Tynan]

i read time and again that invisible text and tiny text is penalised, it certainly should be if it's clearly not there to be read

give it a go and report back later

;)

[NickPresta]

Search engines now a days, especially with Google's new implementation, will mark that text as 'invisible' because it notices that it's too small, doesn't have any connecting words (verbs, like, is, as, the, etc) so it won't include those search terms in your site indexing.

So if those words are helping you what's the point of including them?

[Pennimus]

Perhaps it would be useful if we wait until Blain actually gets back and says his piece regarding this. I get the distinct impression that you two think that...

1. I'm advocating keyword stuffing, and
2. That I own or have something to do with the website in question.

In fact nothing could be further from the truth on both counts. I wholeheartedly agree that the text should be removed and that it could potentially cause the site to be penalised, just not because it will prevent the site being indexed thats all! :thumbsup:

[NickPresta]

I don't think either of those two things. I know you're just trying to help.

=)

[blain]

OK here is the lowdown

This template is a redesign of another site.

The content on this site is the same as the content on the original site, with the exception of the greek.

the keywords were on the original site so they were added to the redesign.

If I had designed this site from scratch, then the keywords would not be there.

They are there for comparison only, so can we stop talking about them and praise my UBER design skills instead :D :thumbsup:

[brett7481]

Browsing in Opera 8.52 at 1280x1024, half the left menu is cut-off. I can only see the trailing end of the words. I also think the gray and orange clash... I would go with the khaki.

FYI... That's Latin, not Greek :)

[blain]

It may be latin, but using it is called "Greeking"

Is the left menu problem sorted now?

Ok which colour works best

This one (http://frost-genealogy.co.uk/ne1)

or

This one (http://frost-genealogy.co.uk/ne1/khaki.html)

[brett7481]

Never heard it called Greeking before... oh well :)

Nope, I still can't see the menu. Not sure, but I think it's sue to the -1.5 left margin you have on the nav.

Personally, I like the khaki.html one better.

[Mike Darling]

When I resize my window it messes up :P

Orange and grey have never worked for me.

Maybe a different roll over effect on the text in your menu

Stronger looking headings :)