SITE REVIEW: atMuch.com

Thanks everyone for taking a look, website is http://atmuch.com

I have had the site up for about three weeks and would like to get some feedback.

Thanks

I have to say... the design and color scheme looks nice and easy on the eyes... the idea behind the site isn't bad but it has validation 186 errors... see them here

I advice you to fix them.

Pop-ups on the menu under "Movies this Week" go under some elements on the site... may not be good if you want visitors to read whatever you wrote in there.

You got a nice message board there... except it lacks some sub-forums... so far it has only one... "Apple".

Good luck with the site Pennington.

It's nice and clean in design but loads surprisingly slowly for such a clean-looking page. something is slowing down your loading time - maybe the validation errors bogey mentioned?

Thanks for the update, I was looking at the validation and will look at fixing as much as I can, couple of questions on the W3 validation.

1. Is having some error on a page normal, I was looking at cnn.com ad they have 130ish errors on their site.
2. Other than bad form, how will the errors impact my site, let's say do they hurt me in SEO.

On the pop-up undder the movies I did notice this too and will talking to the developer they developed.

The message board was just an after thought but will be working on this more extensively next week.

Thanks for all the suggestion and looking at the site.

Yeah I've noticed this too, it may be a couple of the RSS feeds I have on the site, I'll also take a look at W3 validation. Thanks for taking a look.

The validation certainly helps... not only with SEO (I think it helps with it) but with compatibility with other browsers... the chances of it being compatible with IE as in Firefox are much greater with valid code. Also, loading time would decrease if the code is valid... I can help you out with some validation errors, such as give suggested solutions to validation errors... It is rare to come across a big site that has valid code, but when you do... that is a good thing

Thanks Bogey, if you can suggest something that would be great as not sure where I should start. I would definitely try to start this next week.

Well, for one, you can open your web page(s) in notepad... click edit, click "Replace" and replace <br> with <br />

I didn't have any trouble loading but the top of the site was a bit busy for me but I think that's more of a personal issue than anything wrong with the site layout! I really like the bottom of the home page layout with sections for different subjects and the clickable articles within each heading. Very easy and clear.

I was thinking about taking some the piece off as I wanted to make the site as clean as possible, thanks for the input.

I have a way you can make your site load faster and you'll use less bandwidth this way:

Look at your source code, you've got heaps of white space (in the form of line breaks and spacing), at this moment your source code alone is 85kb, now in my opinion that is way too much (mine is usually about 3kb-6kb). Anyway, if you were to remove all that spacing you would probably remove about 20kb of that file, so lets take that as the figure.

Let's imagine you get 500 visitors a day, each of these visitors needs to download the page (obviously), now those 500 visitors each download 20kb less which makes it 500*20 kb = 10,000 kb you're saving a day, take that over a month, and you're saving 300,000kb of bandwidth a month, that's about 300MB ... damn ...

Here is a workaround to that "Click to activate and use this control" thing in IE ... [Dead Link] ...

Okay, here is a screenshot of your site in IE6 ... please look at all the whitespace (surrounded by red squares) ... I think you should make sure that this isn't so empty ...

Then also you'll see that the poll's buttons are hidden beneath your nav-bar and not really readable, or clickable for that matter ...