SITE REVIEW: www.waterloofc.net

Hi Folks,

This site is currently hosted on a very low performance dev server and temporary URL so please allow a second to download. It's just about ready to be shown to the guys and moved across to their official domain name in a live environment when I can complete those finer details.

I struggled greatly with the colours.... be warned, it's very LOUD Same as their official club colours.

Humour my ego or destroy my confidence It's a freebie site (I didn't charge) to add to my embryonic portfolio.

Let me know what you think ....

http://www.waterloofc.net

Cheers, Primordial ...

The slow server certainly kept me waiting patiently . The colors arent as bad as I was expecting, actually doesnt look to bad at all. It has kind of a christmas feeling to it for some reason though! Anyway, to some comments! Your menu items are a bit hard to follow. You've made everything caps lock and the menu heading size is slightly larger than the menu items, which makes it veeeeeeery hard to tell which is a title and which is an option. And given the one-legged server you're using, the rollover effects (green background) take a while to kick in and sort of ruins the whole menu effect. Even if the server was faster, I'd change the menu option fonts to something different than their parent titles.

The other pages seem alright. Over the forums, guests are allowed to post/create topics, modify that so only registered users can. The only other thing is to put in your meta content/description/keywords tags. Put alt tags for your images. Also, you should put all your css code into a separate file and reference it, looking at all your css declarations on the index page could make a programmer go dizzy! Just reference it and it'll make for easier debugging and reading. Very nice effort and a great rugby site.

I was a little scared of the green background when it first loaded, but once th rest of the site loaded it was really not bad.

I am not rugby expert but the page layout and design is pretty good for a not for profit effort.

In general, I think it is a fine effort.

I agree with daremedy about the titles, they are very hard to differenciate from the rest of the links. Also, your banner, IMO, doesn't look very good. I think it would look better if you took about the speckled effect.

Its really hard getting a site to work with green (i know this). And you seem to have got away with it okay.

Few points: Username should vanish when i click in the login box

Sponsors: would perhaps move them from the top. Their buttons don't look that good anyways

Forums... look very nice

A few cheesy graphics around the site that could do with some tweeking (email + pm on forums)

From a looks point of view, the site is not bad at all. Being a regular rugby club site visiter, vivid colours are not just normal, they are expected. Content is fairly standard and covers most things you would expect to see. As a suggestion, you might like to visit http://www.southportrufc.com to see what they have done with their content

Website looks good. My only issue was that the header loads so slow.

I don't like the header image. The idea is not bad, but it doesn't go well with this project. You have bright colours and contrasts all over the page, and the header looks totally against the site feeling. You could save the idea for another project, with less contrasts and make a header image bright and colourful.
My opinion

I agree about the headers, maybe you should keep the image text style, and have straight text as links. This should help with search indexing also.

Otherwise, I do not see too much to complain about.

A good colour scheme for a Rugby site nice one, but a bit on the slow side.

I'm getting an apache page?

How random is this, I live about thirty seconds from this rugby club!! In all the web forums in all the Internet...

You did a nice job. I love rugby and it was fun to read the information on your site.The resolution of your header is a little bit low i think...the text is not so clear, aldo it is very big 73.29 KB (75050 bytes).

Maybe it is a good thing to make a link under your sponsor buttons....nice for them and looks nice.

Also you can put in a back to top link.

Good luck.

Great job for a rugby site - not sure those colors would work for most things, but, they certainly work for this.

May I ask what you built this on? The URL shows phpbb - its obvious you built this on a DB app, just curious what it actually is (pardon my laziness, I guess I could review the source and figure it out )

Maybe you can change the header color a bit. Everything is ok except the header.