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Please kindly give me any review for my website for further development

Discussion in 'HTML & Website Design' started by whutsongcc, Jun 23, 2015.

  1. #1
    Hi,
    I'm a new member of the forum. I would like to ask all of you for some opinions about my also newly created website, what should I do to improve the side, the pros or the cons.
    Absolutely anything will benefit me, thank you in advance for your kind consideration. Sadly, I'm developing the site alone, so it would really help me to gain some feedback. The site was online for three days only. (I wrote a number of posts before the page was online)

    www.whutsong.com
     
    whutsongcc, Jun 23, 2015 IP
  2. Adam_UK

    Adam_UK Member

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    #2
    Hi whutsongcc,

    It can be nervous the first time you submit a website for others to review. There is always an element of personal attachment to it at first. I suggest not taking any criticism of your site personally, instead take the position to ask questions, make mistakes and learn.

    Since your site is a WordPress site based off of the following theme http://demo.alxmedia.se/hueman/ It may be worth asking in the WordPress section of this forum. That is because many of the suggestions given to you may not be implementable if you do not possess the ability/know-how to change the theme/child-theme's code, or you will most likely ignore them.

    If you are wanting a career in web development I would recommend learning the 'mark up' and relevant languages as soon as possible to transition away from using WordPress. While WordPress as a CMS may seem convenient in the short term it becomes a regret later on, especially if you are interested in getting better at web development. If however, your site is simply a hobby and you have not interest in learning to write even HTML or CSS code. I can empathise with you using WordPress as a crutch. However, my recommendation would still be to come away from it. Preferably by downloading the CMS to a USB stick, then burning it.

    Concerning your site, there are a small number of validation errors most likely due to the themes/plugins you are using as I doubt you are touching the HTML yourself. You can look for validation errors via: https://validator.w3.org

    I am assuming you have no real control over the actual website code/style, and you are mainly responsible for the site's content choice. Therefore it would be pointless to advise on code changes. If this is incorrect, it would be worth mentioning.

    Concerning your conent. There are a number of things you have tripped over and before going any further with this, may I ask:
    • Did you write a plan for your website?
    • Did you plan out all of the pages, what they would contain and think about how best to convey this information to an audience?
    I ask this as it doesn't seem like you did. I feel you may have had an idea, started the site then etched it out idea by idea. If this is the case, I would highly recommend going back to the drawing board, and defining what it is you want the site to do. Then think about how you can inform a new visitor about what your site does BEFORE they even start to scroll down or move around your site. The tiny hard-to-read subtitle at the top doesn't really cut it, and it's hard to read (<-- There is a hint there to make you think about it, the colour and style). Once the purpose of the site is clearly defined in the gist viewing, other aspects such as your uninformative navigation menu can be worked on.
     
    Adam_UK, Jun 24, 2015 IP
  3. whutsongcc

    whutsongcc Peon

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    #3
    Thank you so so so much for your answer. I really appreciate it! I will go back and do a plan for my website contents again!
    About the coding-design, I don't think I can do so much now.
     
    whutsongcc, Jun 24, 2015 IP
  4. Adam_UK

    Adam_UK Member

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    #4
    No worries. There are people on here, better than I at giving feedback and advice. It's worth seeing if they will write anything and take it on board since some will go thought your site piecemeal (Explain parts piece by piece). I have not done that, as I don't have time and it's clear you need to define a clearer purpose for your site to work from. I am assuming you are collating a selection of music found freely on the internet and then categorising them.

    If you run into a brick wall when planning your site, break it down. Think about what is the purpose for your site, what does it do, how does it achieve this, who is it's target audience etc...?

    You also want to be able to write your own unique text content(Of a decent length) for each of your pages and post, relevant to the purpose of those pages and post. This is very important for search engine indexing and ranking. The current embedded third party content won't help you in this regard.
     
    Adam_UK, Jun 24, 2015 IP
  5. deathshadow

    deathshadow Acclaimed Member

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    #5
    Now, word of warning, I can be pretty harsh. I don't rap, I don't jive, I just give it to you how I see it. If that's going to be a problem and you don't ACTUALLY want help or to hear what's really wrong, just stop reading now!

    I'm not even going to dive deeply into the code; it's turdpress, it's instantly poorly coded trash -- as evidenced by it being 80k of markup to deliver 4k of plaintext and 15 content images, possibly as much as EIGHT TIMES as much HTML as should be present! Static scripttardery in the markup, static style in the markup, and a nasty case of "Semantics, what's that" makes it a slow loading accessibility disaster before we even TALK about it's appearance -- that it then pisses itself with 551k of scripttardery in 20 separate files and an absolutely absurd 575k of CSS in 14 separate files? Developer ineptitude at it's worst and what one can expect when off the shelf tech is just thrown together any-old-way. Hence the insane 1.2 megabyte pageload in some 63 files explaining why it takes 42 seconds for it to finish loading here! "real world" just from the raw number of separate files a 'first load' should take anywhere from 11 seconds to a full on minute. Worse, it doesn't even look like most of the scripting or CSS is even being cached here -- likely from there just being too blasted much of it.

    From what I'm seeing of that page, I don't see much legitimate reason for it to be more than around 100k in a dozen files excepting perhaps the stupid social plugin crap; there's a reason you don't see a lot of successful websites using the full versions of those.

    Design-wise you've got accessibility failings across the board -- goofy illegible webfont (good rule of thumb? do NOT use webfonts on flow content!), insufficient colour contrasts (light grey on white? Dark Grey on grey?), fixed metric (aka px measurement) fonts that do not auto-enlarge to the browser or OS preferences, much less the scripttard show/hide of the sidebar thing that results in navigation not even EXISTING on mobile.

    It's very much what I expect from an off the shelf turdpress template; no, that's not a good thing. I would suggest pitching that entire mess in the trash and starting over -- I cannot see it actually amounting to anything more than yet another "also ran" website simply because it's slow, possibly alienates potential users, and in general is a laundry list of how a website should NOT be built both from a visual and development standpoint.
     
    deathshadow, Jun 25, 2015 IP
  6. whutsongcc

    whutsongcc Peon

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    #6
    Thank you for your answers, harsher means more helpful to me :)
    I've done what I could (for now) to already update the website speed, by using two optimizer tools. Thank you for your suggestions, I will try to figure out more about the code.
     
    whutsongcc, Jun 25, 2015 IP
  7. deathshadow

    deathshadow Acclaimed Member

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    #7
    Unfortunately I've never seen any such "tool" that was anything more than an overglorified placebo, and I'm including Google's useless "pagespeed service" in that. They all seem to think that adding more code, throwing more hardware at the problem in the form of CDN's and pissing away accessibility in the process by adding even more scripttardery is going to magically make sites faster or better, when it has the exact opposite effect.

    AT BEST it's a band-aid on a gunshot wound, at worst, well... your website is left to bleed out in a dark alleyway.

    Much like what Dan Schulz used to say about Adobe products, the only thing involved there that can be considered professional grade tools are the people promoting the use of such "optimizers". The best optimization tool is the one between you ears, it's just a matter of filling it up with the right knowledge of how to use it first.

    SADLY that means learning how to use HTML and CSS properly instead of relying on slapping together "off the shelf" code that... well, almost always end up like using a three pound lump hammer to drive that square peg into the round hole. There's a certain amount of knowledge needed before you can make sane and rational choices if serious about making a professional website -- unfortunately right now there are a LOT of "tools" letting people slap together sites before gaining that knowledge and experience, and it leaves them and the resulting work hobbled.

    It's why when people say "I don't want to learn HTML", or "I don't want to learn CSS" or even "I don't want to learn about accessibility" -- all I hear is "I don't want to build websites".

    Just to give you an idea how bad the code is, this simple section that JUST contains the opening of the document body, shows the heading and opens the content wrapper?

    <body class="home-page home blog admin-bar no-customize-support col-3cm full-width gecko no-js">
    
    
    <div id="wrapper">
    
    	<header id="header">
    	
    				
    		<div class="container group">
    			<div class="container-inner">
    				
    				<div class="group pad">
    					<h1 class="site-title"><a href="http://www.whutsong.com/" rel="home"><img src="http://www.whutsong.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/whutsong.png" alt="WhutSong"></a></h1>
    					<p class="site-description">Don&#039;t know what to listen? Songs for your mood, updated daily, ultimately for you, completely FREE</p>									</div>
    				
    								
    			</div><!--/.container-inner-->
    		</div><!--/.container-->
    		
    	</header><!--/#header-->
    	
    	<div class="container" id="page">
    		<div class="container-inner">			
    			<div class="main">
    				<div class="main-inner group">
    <section class="content">
    
    	<div class="page-title pad group">
    
    			<h2>? WhutSong <span>NEWSFEED</span></h2>
    
    	
    </div><!--/.page-title-->
    Code (markup):
    979 bytes of code, that's utter bloated nonsense probably written by people who lacked all that knowledge I'm talking about. (aka what one typically expects out of wordpress).

    Had that page been written "properly" I very much doubt that would be much more than:

    
    <body>
    
    <div id="top">
    
    	<h1>
    		<a href="http://www.whutsong.com/">
    			WhutSong
    			<span>-</span>
    			<small>
    				Don't know what to listen? Songs for your mood, updated daily, ultimately for you, completely FREE
    			<small>
    		</a>
    	</h1>
    
    <!-- #top --></div>
    
    <div class="contentWrapper"><div id="content">
    
    	<h2>? WhutSong <span>NEWSFEED</span></h2>
    Code (markup):
    Which is 369 bytes of code, and provides MORE than enough hooks for the style that's applied there. You do that level of code reduction and properly leverage CSS' capabilities, swing an axe at all the "JavaScript for nothing" -- and you can quickly turn that 80k of HTML into ten to fifteen k, gut the 671k of CSS down to a more reasonable 32-48k (there is little if any excuse for an ENTIRE website to need more than 48k of CSS other than developer ineptitiude -- no matter what the jerkwads promoting ignorance via things like bootcrap, YUI, blueprint, etc may claim), and ditch 90%+ of the scripting apart from what's needed for the social media plugins. (which are universally bloated crap, but it's not like we have a lot of control over that).

    Good rule of thumb -- if you see four DIV and a HEADER tag wrapping the first h1 on the page, with a dozen or more classes on BODY and every tag including that H1 ... well, whoever wrote the HTML doesn't know enough about HTML or CSS to be writing websites in the first place. Sadly that describes most of the people making "templates" these days -- one look at the halfwit nonsense filling up template whorehouses like ThemeForest or TemplateMonster proves that.

    ... or even the default skin for wordpress -- it's part of why I don't understand how anyone SERIOUS about building anything more complex than a blog for grandma would choose any off the shelf CMS in the first place apart from not knowing the essentials, or having been taken for a ride by all the scam artists out there and endless parroting of sick buzzwords.
     
    deathshadow, Jun 26, 2015 IP
  8. whutsongcc

    whutsongcc Peon

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    #8

    This is VERY, VERY helpful. I really do appreciate this A LOT. As a undergrads student, I should be learning HTML and JScript NOW. THANK YOU!
     
    whutsongcc, Jun 26, 2015 IP