Feedback please

[primefalcon]

Here's the site

http://primefalcon.x10hosting.com/dev/index.php

I'm looking for general feedback on quality and bugs, thank you

[Mr. DOS]

You've got some weird stuff going on with your HTML - it looks like you've got some content in your page head. Also, in XHTML, the tags i and b are deprecated in favour of em and strong.

Using JavaScript for the "Edition" text and the date probably isn't the best idea because it won't display if the user has JavaScript disabled; if you do it with PHP, it's guaranteed to show up. The upside to the JS is that the time updates without the page refreshing. A compromise might be to have PHP generate the text, then have the script update it if the user does have JavaScript enabled.

The big heading could do with more spacing between it and the menu, and maybe a little less above it.

Your menu text is awfully big, and the contrast between it and the background isn't great. Also, spacing between the text and the top and bottom borders is uneven. Also, for those who don't have the font URW Chancery L installed, the text shows up in Times New Roman.

On that note, the whole site, excluding the header and the menu, is displayed in the browser's default font, which is, for most people, Times New Roman. Probably not the best idea - the font looks dated and ugly to many. At the very least, play with reducing the letter-spacing on the headers; this alone can make Times New Roman look more appealing.

Grammatical Nazism: the footer text, "This Site and all of it's contents are copyrighted", should be, "This site and all of its content is copyright © 2009 your name."

Overall, as a design, it could do with a little more colour; it looks quite drear and bland. Other than that, though, your layout is clean with plenty of whitespace, and comes across as entirely usable. Just be careful with regards to making content flow nicely around the image in the middle; for actual content pages, you might want to consider removing that and having a two-column layout with content in the left column taking 2/3rds width and a sidebar taking the remaining 1/3rd on the right.

--- Mr. DOS

[primefalcon]

You've got some weird stuff going on with your HTML - it looks like you've got some content in your page head. Also, in XHTML, the tags i and b are deprecated in favour of em and strong.

Using JavaScript for the "Edition" text and the date probably isn't the best idea because it won't display if the user has JavaScript disabled; if you do it with PHP, it's guaranteed to show up. The upside to the JS is that the time updates without the page refreshing. A compromise might be to have PHP generate the text, then have the script update it if the user does have JavaScript enabled.

The big heading could do with more spacing between it and the menu, and maybe a little less above it.

Your menu text is awfully big, and the contrast between it and the background isn't great. Also, spacing between the text and the top and bottom borders is uneven. Also, for those who don't have the font URW Chancery L installed, the text shows up in Times New Roman.

On that note, the whole site, excluding the header and the menu, is displayed in the browser's default font, which is, for most people, Times New Roman. Probably not the best idea - the font looks dated and ugly to many. At the very least, play with reducing the letter-spacing on the headers; this alone can make Times New Roman look more appealing.

Grammatical Nazism: the footer text, "This Site and all of it's contents are copyrighted", should be, "This site and all of its content is copyright © 2009 your name."

Overall, as a design, it could do with a little more colour; it looks quite drear and bland. Other than that, though, your layout is clean with plenty of whitespace, and comes across as entirely usable. Just be careful with regards to making content flow nicely around the image in the middle; for actual content pages, you might want to consider removing that and having a two-column layout with content in the left column taking 2/3rds width and a sidebar taking the remaining 1/3rd on the right.

--- Mr. DOS

That's exactly the kind of in-depth feedback that I was hoping for. Deifnately gives me a nice list to go through for now :-). Thank you very much!

I was actually planning on doing the server time in PHP and then add in the JS after, since the PHP bit is easy enough to throw in without interfering with the JS, the idea behind the JS was to have it show in the users own time, rather than the servers with PHP. I'm thinking I might actually do away with the time with php and just have the date and day.

The logo is only meant for the front page, and I actually wasn't planning on a column layout except where necessary outside of the front page (the column was just a way to add for visual appeal to the front page while display news items and such)

As for the copyright bit I will use that before I throw it over to the grammar Nazi Editor here (my wife, who is a published author so.... I might ad that before I show it to her lol), as it is I edited it from what I had before I uploaded it here, it kind of had a bit more humour to it on my local machine.

Also it has been point out to have some FF bugs (image readable issue) as well as some major ie6 bugs.