Please say opinion and suggestion to our site!

[Glocker]

Hello!

My name is Alexander Wolf and I am director of the Ukrainian Bells of Chernobyl NGO which dedicates itself to assistance to disabled and victims of Chernobyl. We plan to develop our cooperation with Western countries (US, Canada, EU) so on.

To achieve this goal, we had developed our site www.dzwony.iatp.org.ua (http://www.dzwony.iatp.org.ua).

Now, we need your advice and critics very much. Whether the Webpage is good enough and understandable? Whether English and German is good enough? Whether navigation and structure of the site is good?

Thank you very much for your friendly advise and assistance.

Alexander Wolf
www.dzwony.iatp.org.ua (http://www.dzwony.iatp.org.ua)

[ubik]

the image you have on the main page is 52KB and it takes very long to load. I took the liberty of compressing it to jpeg medium for you, if you would like to save and use this one instead, it would make your page load slightly faster:

http://xs73.xs.to/pics/06121/ja-and-dana.jpg

[mlseim]

Well, it's not very attractive, but I'm guessing the content is more
important than the look. I viewed the HTML source and realized
that it's all "white space" and very little HTML. What web page
editor did you use that spread everything out like that?

This thread should be in "site reviews" anyhow.

[bpaulsen2000]

Incredibly slow load on broadband.

[Glocker]

Thank you very much,

I am using Nvue to write my pages and WS_FTP to modernize the page. Of course I am not professional, we are non-profitable organisation and the site is more to serve as informative "newspaper". Thank you very much and what you mind with "white space"?

Alexander

www.dzwony.iatp.org.ua (http://www.dzwony.iatp.org.ua)

[ronaldb66]

I think mlseim means the markup (HTML code) is spread out really far, with lots of empty lines in between.
Now, some empty lines and indentation can go a long way into making a source legible, but this is overdoing it, and all those empty lines add a lot of unnecessary bytes to the overall page size, increasing download time.

The pages are rather slow to load, but this can be due to the server your site resides on; if you're on a tight budget, there's probably little you can do.

The home page (due to the slow loading, I haven't looked at much else) is rather bland; even though you may not want to create anything fancy, I'd recommend paying some more attention to a consistent layout, with a clear page hierarchy, a header stating the site's subject, consistent navigation on all pages and in the same spot on each page, etc.


Oh, one more thing: I went to the "Photo Gallery", expecting to see photos; what do I get? Endless amounts of text--too large text, the intro taking up much of the top end of the page already.
Play down the intro, actually show (small versions) of the photos with reasonably short bylines to each, and link them to a detail page showing a larger version of each photo and the entire text you use on the gallery page now.
This way, you give visitors what they expect from a photo gallery, make everything much more compelling and give the photos the attention they deserve.

[Glocker]

Hallo ronaldb66,

yes we are on the tight budget. The site is hosted for free, this is american program of the broading of the internet access, so they give possibilities for organisations also NGOs to be hosted for free. I believe this is fine.

I know now, where my problem with slow loading wass, the pictures (images) on index page (both Ukrainian and English) were too big. we reduced them double. then, the icons - four flags were too big as well. The size of one of them was about 360 x 250 pixels! In Monday I shall modernize the site.

Thank you for Photo Gallery, cute suggestions.

Alexander Wolf
www.dzwony.iatp.org.ua

[Glocker]

pspdownloads,
you said images are too large to load, OK, but whether index pages (from Ukrainian and English page) are rapid in loading? Because I decreased all the images on the pages. Where are you from? Because as you see, people had problems from all the world-wide.

http://www.dzwony.iatp.org.ua

[kewlceo]

I think mlseim means the markup (HTML code) is spread out really far, with lots of empty lines in between.

I remember using Nvu to create pages once upon a time, and it adds a ton of space between the lines of code, making it tough to read.

[Glocker]

OK, what program except of Nvu creates html pages? Nvu is very easy to use.

www.dzwony.iatp.org.ua (http://www.dzwony.iatp.org.ua)

[kewlceo]

OK, what program except of Nvu creates html pages? Nvu is very easy to use.

TopStyle Pro (http://www.download.com/TopStyle-Pro/3640-2048_4-10193427.html?tag=tab_ur) is a decent choice. It isn't WYSIWYG like Nvu, but you can preview your changes to CSS and (X)HTML while you work in an editor that preserves your formatting.

[Glocker]

[QUOTE=ronaldb66]I think mlseim means the markup (HTML code) is spread out really far, with lots of empty lines in between.
Now, some empty lines and indentation can go a long way into making a source legible, but this is overdoing it, and all those empty lines add a lot of unnecessary bytes to the overall page size, increasing download time.

OK, using now Top Style I have seen many such lines! I deleted them in both index files of English and Ukrainian version. Maybe, my site is loading faster for now?

But nevertheless, the size of this files was not much decreased. Initially it was 10 KB, now - 7 KB. Is that important for those using high-speed modems?

Thank you very much!

www.dzwony.iatp.org.ua (http://www.dzwony.iatp.org.ua)