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Website Feedback for Design Course

Discussion in 'HTML & Website Design' started by gspasic, Aug 27, 2015.

0
  1. #1
    Hey everyone,

    I've created a website for a fake company and I've been asked to gather some feedback. I'm being assessed on not only the design of the site but also the functionality, it has to be working without errors. I've done my QA and I'm fairly sure I haven't missed anything. Would you be able to leave me some feedback on your thoughts of my website?

    http://test.itra.com.au/opencolleges/index.html

    Thank you,

    Guy
     
    gspasic, Aug 27, 2015 IP
  2. PoPSiCLe

    PoPSiCLe Illustrious Member

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    #2
    Well. You're using non-standard HTML (bad idea), you have 60 validation errors (many which are linked to the wrong use of HTML), and your site is not responsive (big no no today). There are also a lot of glitches in viewing the site - text is being pushed down into the footer, the lines next to the heading is overlapping or being pushed around, etc. Not a very good starting point, unfortunately.
     
    PoPSiCLe, Aug 28, 2015 IP
  3. COBOLdinosaur

    COBOLdinosaur Active Member

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    #3
    Having spent some time teaching this topic I will give you the bad news if I was grading it you would get a failing grade about 30 seconds after I saw it. The code is a total disgrace tables for layout; multiple h1 tags; block elements inside a span; errors all over the place.

    seeing the code I would not even look at how the page renders, because with all the errors it lacks accessibility and usability going in. If I was the teacher who trained to to think that was anywhere near to acceptable I would consider my efforts to educate you as a failure.
     
    COBOLdinosaur, Aug 28, 2015 IP
  4. kk5st

    kk5st Prominent Member

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    #4
    Unfortunately, I have seen college/university level web development courses that are still teaching html3.2 layout (including tables for layout) methods with html5 and css3 bells and whistles.

    I don't think I'd be as harsh as you COBOL, but I agree the errors are egregious. Guy, go to the W3C html validator to check your syntax and absolutely get rid of or fix all the errors.

    cheers,

    gary
     
    kk5st, Aug 28, 2015 IP
  5. ketting00

    ketting00 Well-Known Member

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    #5
    That was what most of the HTML courses teach the newbies, enthusiasms. They teach how to make it work first, perfect it later. You can expect even more to come. I'm not taking any courses but I take a peek quite often.

    Cheers,
     
    ketting00, Aug 28, 2015 IP
  6. deathshadow

    deathshadow Acclaimed Member

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    #6
    If someone I knew was being taught that, I'd go up to their teacher and give them such a verbal tongue lashing they'd probably have preferred it if I just punched them in the face.

    You want feedback for the COURSE, if that's what they're teaching you, and you paid money for it, they're ripping you off!

    But let's go through it line by line.

    Your very first LINE of markup says it all... It's a trap. You've got a tranny doctype on it which quite literally means "in transition from 1997 to 1998 coding practices" -- NOT a giant fatal flaw (particularly since 5's lip-service is basically dragging practices back to that point) but it doesn't speak well when we've been told for SEVENTEEN YEARS TO STOP DOING THAT.

    On your HTML tag you have no language declarations, you have the pointless "author" meta that not one single user agent has EVER done anything with making it a complete waste of bandwidth.

    Your description meta is semi-ok, but the "tense" of the sentence is wrong. The <title> already says it's travel tasmania, don't waste time repeating yourself. Reducing it to just "Specializing in taking you to the remote areas of the West Coast and Central Highlands." would serve the purpose far better. (and yank at least a few "stop words")

    The keywords meta, well... it's called keyWORDS, not keyphrases, not keysentences, but keyWORDS -- seven or eight SINGLE WORDS (exception being proper names) that exist between <body> and </body> as CDATA. Since "guided tours" does not even appear in the page text, you can pretty much guarantee that entire META will be ignored by search engines.

    Then your stylesheet <link> doesn't even have media targets, sending it to "all". I'm so sure your for screen layout makes perfect sense for aural and print.

    The MENU tag is the equivalent of a UL, and was removed from the specification 17 years ago for being redundant to UL. Because it's a list item IF you wanted the bleeding edge of 1997 development you'd have each of those MENU tags be LI replacing the DIV with MENU... but since you have NO business using the MENU tag (even if it is back in 5 for something ENTIRELY different relating to forms) that should be a UL where you have DIV.menubar and all those MENU should be LI.

    You also are using the TARGET attribute which is also on the naughty list, laughably for some goofball reason targeting "self" meaning that there is NO reason for that to even be there as that's the bloody default behavior! Likewise since you have a perfectly good wrapper with a class on it, if EVERY tag with the same tagname is getting the same class -- NONE of them need classes!!! Target in the CSS off the parent instead of wasting time slapping class="link" on every blasted one of them.

    Then there's your use of headings. You may have noticed a few people saying multiple H1 is a no-no. This is because the h1 is the heading under which EVERYTHING on the page is subsections. H2 indicate the start of subsections of the H1, and so forth down the line. Multiple H1 makes no sense as those numbered heading tags have a semantic and structural meaning and DO NOT MEAN "text in different sizes". Same for HR which indicates a change in topic/section where text is undesired or unwarranted. If you aren't starting a new grammatical/structural section of the page, HR is the wrong tag as whilst it may draw a line across the screen by default, that is NOT WHAT IT MEANS!

    Of course you have the STYLE attributes all over the place. Unless that style is conveying data (like width on a chart or progress bar) most of the time if you are using the STYLE attribute, you're doing something WRONG. Thankfully you didn't use the STYLE tag, as then you are definately doing it all wrong.

    You seem to have alt text on tags like DIV that don't even HAVE alt text. Alt exists for input tags of type="image" and IMG tags, and that's really about it. Don't go slapping that on other tags as that's broken gibberish.

    Naturally everyone else pointed out the tables for layout. Tables are for tabular data, something you definitely do not have here. This is made worse by you having nonsense like TH tags (table headings) with no data for them to be headings OF. Then you have anchors wrapping block level tags, something that was invalid until HTML 5 hit a few years ago, and is STILL unreliable rubbish and IS completely invalid in a 4 tranny or XHTML document.

    This is further compounded by outdated attributes like ALIGN which also have NO business on any page being built where CSS is present in all but the RAREST of cases (again, tabular data the only real exception for that and that's just because mozilla still hasn't fixed 18 year old rendering bugs in their HTML 4 implementation).

    You also seem to have just randomly made up your own tags. There is NO SUCH THING as a P2. You're also closing some tags wrong as even if there WERE a P2, you'd close it </p2> not <p2/> -- self closures are for "empty" tags, aka tags that cannot contain content (as opposed to those that do not. <div></div> is NOT considered an "empty tag" by the specification... and yes, that's confusing. The deeper you get into HTML the worse the language gets -- almost like it was written in Scandanavian and poorly translated to English)

    ... and then the final "insult" being the presence of clearing DIV. Something completely unnecessary any time after 2003 if you've been taught even the most basic parts of using CSS.

    Even as a decade and a half out of date document, it's a train wreck of how not to use HTML. I would suspect some VERY basic fundementals are left out of your course; hardly a shock since IMHO most "career educators" aren't qualified to even open their mouths on the subject.

    Pretty much you've got 11k of HTML doing probably less than half that's job. Not sure how much of that is you being a beginner, or how much of that is the mere notion that someone teaching this actually has a clue. There's a reason I consider degrees in IT related fields to be worth less than a sheet of bog roll.
     
    deathshadow, Aug 29, 2015 IP
  7. COBOLdinosaur

    COBOLdinosaur Active Member

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    #7
    All that detail may help, but if they are being taught badly the solution is to get them out of the environment and into online learning that is presenting standards based modern methodology. Even if the standard is not the one preferred version, or the teaching includes what some might consider flawed ideas, real learning instead of academic bullturds might at least result in a valid or near valid page, that can then be refined and polished.

    Training like we see here turns out wannabes who think they are now developers and all they have to do is plug in a theme to a third party trash bucket and bring it here for us to fix for them. The right way to train developers is with apprenticeship, not a lot of theoretic crap in an isolate classroom and school lab. they need to pay the price of screwing up as part of the training, and you are never going to get that in an education system designed to prevent failure; and rewarding "effort" even when the result does not meet minimum standards.

    I guess I'm ranting... must be the DS influence.
     
    COBOLdinosaur, Aug 29, 2015 IP
    cronik likes this.