SITE REVIEW: SisterPlay.com

This website was created by a group of women in Southwest Georgia--thus the name SisterPlay.com. Much of the material is related to women and the children in their lives, but we do get a few fellas to visit. We would appreciate your constructive and honest feedback on our website:

http://www.sisterplay.com


Thank you.

Oh, the colors. I think I'm going to throw up. Remember in school when teachers would tell you that if you're going to change text colors you need to at least keep letters of the same word the same color? That applies to the web as well. Which means the banners, links, and anything else that does that all need to be redone.

Don't use Word Art to make banners for a website. It always looks bad. I can barely read the 'SW Georgia Community Resources' thing. Use an image making program, even if it's paint. It will come out better.

You need to pick a font color. With the font color changing so often it's impossible to tell what's a link.

While I'm thinking about links, there's no reason to have the text size change on the mouseover. It moves everything around.

Why is 'Submit your free business listing' two links?

Get some kind of rollover for your navigation. Especially when you have images set as the links, people need to be able to easily tell where they're about to go.

I went to see how many errors your site had according to the W3C code validator (you have 56) and most of them look like they're either from Front Page or Microsfot Word. Don't use those to make websites, especially Word.

It needs a lot of work. And while the counter makes it look like there have been a lot of people visiting I'm wondering how many of those were people associated with the site, how many were people refreshing or visiting the home page again, and where the counter started counting from.

good site

Waffles wrote:

...went to see how many errors your site had according to the W3C code validator (you have 56) and most of them look like they're either from Front Page or Microsfot Word. Don't use those to make websites, especially Word.

It needs a lot of work. And while the counter makes it look like there have been a lot of people visiting I'm wondering how many of those were people associated with the site, how many were people refreshing or visiting the home page again, and where the counter started counting from.



I knew we would get the don't use FrontPage comment... We know that, but that is a done deal. FrontPage was used to build the site from day one. I'm not sure what you mean by Word errors. We're not starting over and we are really novices at this, so we will do our best to use your feedback within the parameters of FrontPage to improve. We started the counter at "0"--three years ago. The initial site was YouthPlay.org. Everything else grew around that site--culminating into SisterPlay.com. There is also swgamenusonline.com. And then the blog. And the discussion board. We were a Google site at one point and really got quite a bit of traffic through that partnership. We also get quite a bit of traffic from people making their way to the discussion board. And from the blog and the menu. Depending on what is going on we get slow traffic and heavy traffic. YouthPlay is probaby our steadiest ticket item and we don't have a counter there. And lastly, sorry we made your stomach sick.

Front page is adding bits to the code that aren't valid at all. Some of it is close, some is just way off and I have no idea where it's coming from. FrontPage and Word both do that, with Word being a lot worse about it.

It's not the fact that FrontPage doesn't make you learn 100% what you're doing, it's that it does a crappy job of doing it for you.

Sometimes I write articles in Word and paste them to FrontPage. I only do that on the "Articles" page, so I would not expect that to be all over the website. I may have done a little of that on on the index page as well. Again, that's two pages. Could the majority of the errors you are getting be generated from these two or three pages? Or is the problem more pervasive than that?

I only looked on the home page. From a quick look most everything else is a lot better. The 'YoutPlay' page needs to have the colors changed, that green just isn't good for text on top of the white.

But the home page being that bad is a big deal. It is most likely someone's first impression of the site.

From your first post in this thread I'd guess that someone involved has children. If you're lucky, maybe they have some website making skills that can be put to good use.

I know you don't want to hear about how bad FrontPage is. But it adds so muchc rap to your code it's not even funny. It makes the code nowhere near valid, which means that anyone using a screen reader won't see the site the way you inteded. Different browsers may display things differently. Also, it uses more bandwidth because you're wasting space on things that just aren't doing the job as effectivly as valid code.

I like how your site is content rich, but I would update the overall layout design to something more modern (look up web 2.0 designs).

Am I hearing you folks correctly? Are you suggesting we rebuild this entire site using a development tool other than FrontPage?

Yes. And that tools name would ideally be Notepad.

You don't really need to start over if you do this. Run your page through the validator that I showed you earlier and fix what's wrong. The basic structure isn't that bad.

wooow too colorful, please change it as soon as possible. its pushing the visitors away for sure.

Macromedia Dreamweaver even if they're putting in additional codes into the page is better than Frontpage, I think, and it also has the interface like Frontpage so you will not get lost as well... I have to say that you must not paste your articles from word since that is worse than creating pages in Frotnpage since it includes loads of unecessary chunks of codes. What you have to do is paste the article from word to notepad, then paste it on your editor then put your every paragraph into <p > </ p> tags.

I suggest that you read a lot of tutorials on html so you'd be less reliant on frontpage We've all been there so you'll be okay in the long run ^.^ Just read a lot

Looks like one of the first website ever created. Great if your going to the classic look.

I like the look--kinda funky. It is the first site I have looked at tonight with some content depth. That advice column is a hoot. If I were in that part of the country it would be my homepage--it appears to connect to everything and everybody.

Hi, as a man, I'm not really your intended audience, and I'm no professional web designer by any means, but here are my comments as a visitor to your site....

1) I'm with some of the others here when they talk about the colours... they do assault the eyes a bit! It's best to stick with letters of the same colour for words, don't mix and match the colours of the letters. It's not nice to look at, and it's also quite difficult to read. If you must go with this colouring on the letters, contrast it with a dark background.

2) The site looks old, like it was made ten years ago. The different word text effects look a bit cheap, almost like an early demo page for MS Word, to show off what you can do with text. If possible, keeping the effect on the text constant for the menus (at the top) would provide an easier view for the user.

The layout isn't bad, and I do like the look of the Youthplay inc are on the bottom right. If you can change the look of the other panels so that they are more matched to this, I think might be a bit nicer.
Overall I thik the problem is that the person who designed this is trying a bit too hard to make it look flashy. A more understated site will often look better. Currently nothing really jumps out of the page at you, because everything is so colourful and brash, it's hard to find a focus point.

Sorry if my comments seem a bit negative, but my first reaction when I loaded the page, was "ouch!".

I liked your blog. I know your blog is using a standard blogger template, but maybe you could try formatting your site in a similar colourscheme to that. It's clean and not overbearing, and then visitors would know that your blog was affiliated with your site, just from the colourscheme and format alone....