Review My Casino Website Please?

Hey Guys,

Myself and my team recently (about two months ago) launched www.roulettegames.co.uk. I was wondering if you guys could tell me what you think? It's actually a standalone site with basic PHP at the moment, however we plan to move it all to wordpress in a couple of months to make it easier to manage.

If you have any advice regarding the design, or thoughts on additional functionality, I'm open to help!

Thanks

 

1) You should probably post this in the review section.

2) Warning, I can be a bit harsh -- consider this the Gordon Ramsey treatment.

3) since this is more the section about code, I'll be talking a lot about the code.

So... let's get down to brass tacks.

First impression is a fixed width layout that's too big for my netbook and too small for my desktop, that doesn't resize very well when zoomed. You do seem to attempt to use dynamic fonts (good thing) -- but the 0.9em on body followed by 0.8em on para's results in 14px for large font/120 dpi users, and 11px for small fonts/96 dpi -- uselessly tiny... The color contrasts between the text and the background are a bit hard to read. (that whole grey on grey thing) further exacerbated by the background pattern. The footer contrasts are completely illegible, that section needing a good deal of perking up.

The image slideshow thing at the top seems a total waste of space and bandwidth, but that's my opinion of 99% of the websites that use them -- it's 'cute' the first time you visit a site, it's annoying rubbish should someone try to visit more than once. NOT a fan of those on any site that uses them, particularly since these days they're most always tied to some fat bloated idiotic BS library like jQuery or Mootools.

Takes forever to load, that's probably related to the 59 file requests and almost a megabyte total transfer size... the markup alone is 28k for a mere 5k of plaintext and 23 images -- most likely about 30% more code than should be there. Naturally the 33 markup errors means it's not HTML, it's gibberish.

Looking at the code I see the typical jquery bloat, an incomplete HEAD (though at least it's XHTML 1.0 Strict, that's a good thing!) -- you have no MEDIA attributes on your style links, endless pointless DIV and classes all over the place, absolute URL's for no reason, -- though it is refreshing to see someone come close to using a table properly. The heading orders is cute, but broken since I'm willing to bet that the headings in the footer are not subsections of "newsletter" (the h2 preceeding them), nor are the sidebar areas subsections of what you put the H1 on... and that's what lower order headings mean, the start of a subsection of the higher order (lower numbered) heading preceding it.

Even your comment placements that could trip rendering bugs in both FF and IE (yes, I said COMMENTS) -- if comments end up between inline-block or floated elements, or between siblings of positioning they can trip all sorts of odd and nasty behaviors like IE's 'double render' bug, or the disappearing content bug that IE7/lower often has and that crops up in every other FF release as a regression (or worse, the FF4 bug of treating them as a empty inline-block element)... There's a simple way to avoid that though, move the closing comments BEFORE or inside the element they are for.

So instead of
</div> <!-- #footermenu -->

You just swap them around
<!-- #footermenu --></div>

Though at least unlike some folks you're not wasting time saying </div><!-- end footermenu div --> (since we could never figure out that a /DIV was the end of a DIV)

A lot of it is just nonsensical code -- like your H3 inside the UL.

<ul>
	<h3>Awareness</h3>
	<li><a href="http://www.gambleaware.co.uk/">Gamble Aware</a></li>
	<li><a href="http://www.gamcare.org.uk/">Gamcare</a></li>
	<li><a href="http://www.igcouncil.org/">IGC</a></li>
</ul>

Code (markup):

The only thing that can come after a UL is a LI or a /UL -- you can't put a H3 there. That either needs to go in a LI (which I'd argue against semantically), or before the UL. (which if you want them positioned together, that's DIV's job)

I'd also suggest easing up on the poorly rendering webfonts -- they are not attractive, certain renderers make them look even worse (freetype), and they suck down a hefty share of bandwidth... though at least you restricted them to headings and not flow text.

In other words, needs a little work.

 

EXCELLENT! That's some excellent advice. I don't agree with all of it, things like having a jQuery head piece (which brings in most of our cash) but everyone is entitled to their personal preference.

You have however raised some brilliant points about the poor quality of the coding on the site, the company we had work on it were terrible. I did realise this during the production but was too late to really cancel - i figured we'd get the job done, then worry about correcting it later. Which will not be in the too distant future, we have a new guy on the team and he is rapidly going through fixing up all errors on the sites improving all coding.

Thanks for all your imput Mr Ramsey haha!

Cheers!

 

I actually like the design quite a lot, but I have to add on top of what deathshadow said that there is very low contrast on the newsletter box as well. Also, you could find a way to preload the hover images of below your ad slider, because when you first move your mouse over them it flashes for a second while the image loads.

Other than that, I like it. 33 validation errors but hey, it looks pretty. Good luck with it!

 

Thanks for that, really appreciate the help. I will definitely be looking into every you guys have said really helpful stuff!

 

So you decided to keep it a stand alone php version and not use wordpress?

I am struggling with my site http://www.liveroulette.org.uk which is definately not a beauty and needs upgrading, not sure if wordpress will be a good choice for content management with all those plugins and possible duplicate content in archives, tags etc.

 

Enhance the logo ,
please ,and 8 out of 10.

 

Appears to be a good site to me.

 

Nice Design

 

Adding to the good advice you have been given by other forum members, I have to ask, aren't you doing any social network integration?
Regards