SITE REVIEW: iTrade

Hi everyone,

I have just completed another website + forum which I have been working on over the last few weeks. Please give me some feedback on the colour / style, maybe even the idea.

Thanks heaps,
Fex

URL: http://www.itrade.net.nz

I like those colors, but why there are images on the main page... I mean why didn't you made it with CSS, but puted in those main text images (community, item valuing and help desk)?

And what about main menu? big image again with image map (image map, if I'm not wrong, is depracated by W3C (?!)) This menu could be boult with CSS help too. And then the page would lode more faster....

And more about those main text images: search engines now can't index your page content, but if it was normal text, than there could be no problems!

I agree. The navigation image could be sliced into its individual buttons. And the 3 images at the bottom should instead be css divs with the text as text not as an image. Visually impaired would not be able to use your site, the site readers would not be able to read the text in the images. Search engines would not be able to index your site becuase all of your content is in images and they dont read them. They only read the textual content of a site. I do like the colors though.

It seems like the idea is unique and I like the logo. But as the two posts above me have said, you should split up the navigation buttons and use plain text on the community, item valuing, and help desk images.

Best of luck!

OK, I had thought about the image and mapping thing. So are you guys saying to just have coded boxs with the image and text inside?

What sort of code would I need to do this? You can have like hard lines or dotted lines and that sort of thing can't you?

I mean instead of having on long bar with the buttons being coded into them as a image map, chop them into individual images (each button) in photshop/gimp/imageready/whatever you use for iamge editing. Then use a div or a table to put it all back together. so you would have like 4 or 5 buttons instead of one image. Google for image slicing or navbar creation for more detals. You can have borders or not, it all depends on what you want and how you use css.

OK I have chopped up the menu buttons now. How does that look, I left the three main images on the homepage though.

Well having the main text of the site as images really doesnt help you out any. Search Engines will not be able to index your site since they will not see any content. People that have vision issues will not be able to enlarge the text so they can read it and the visually impaired will not be able to get any contect out of your site since the browsers that 'read' the site to them will only see images, and thats if you used alt tags for the images.

The use of images as the main content is just a bad idea in general. I hope you would reconsider and use actual text.