SITE REVIEW: MagnoliaByOwner.com

Hey everyone,

This is my first site so I'm very anxious to hear all of your comments and professional criticism! Thanks for all your help ahead of time!

http://www.magnoliabyowner.com

Hi there,

I like the effect you are going for--curvy.

Just a few things that can improve it:

1. Redo the text links on the side. On my browser they appear aliased and jaggy.
2.Your logo is nice but fuzzy. It needs to be redone in a vector program and then output to GIF. It looks like a scanned image right now.
3. I think the links on the side could use a rollover effect.
4. The incoming triangles at the top seem out of place compared to the scrolly bits. Maybe that is just me.

Dave

Interesting that you chose Javascript as opposed to PHP or ASP to produce "includes." Something which is the designer's call, I suppose.

I like how the site has an organic kind of feel to it with the curves you used. I agree that some rollovers would help and get rid of the obliqued type on the menu.

I noticed you didn't pay attention to any SEO. You may want to reconsider.

Also, the logo and the "Grand Opening" banner are very low in quality as they are pixelized, those need to be re-vamped.

All in all, I think the website matches the content which is really what makes a website a good website (my opinion).

Nice job.

My only suggestion would be to make the header larger and make it a link back to the index. I like the house in the header and should see more of it.

Well the site looks nice but there are a few things to mention.


Just look what you've done there. Hidden the script from the old browsers using html comments. Good, then you went and used javascript comments to hide the script from every other browser If you don't want the script, just delete it lol.

You could also do with moving your CSS and JS into external files to remove some of the bloat. And remove the unwanted meta tags, there is no need for them.

this image should really be a gif or png, rather than a jpg file. In fact a lot of your jpegs could be converted to png for better quality and smaller filesize.

position:absolute is great for positioning stuff, but it is not good for a layout such as this. If you try using text-zoom on the page, the whole thing breaks. You should also not be disabling text zoom on IE because:
a) It is bad for accessibility
b) It will always work no other browsers, there is no point trying to control something you can't

Overall, it looks nice and it looks different - which is always nice - but there are just a few tweaks that could be done here and there.

Brutal file sizes, I think anyone on less than cable would leave before your page loaded. A lot can be done to optimize your images. If nothing else, slice them up, and maybe even include very low res alt images so that they would show untill you hi res loaded.

Hey thanks everybody!

All of your comments have been really helpful!