iGapYear.com feedback

[RFH Reseller: JohnnyW]

Evening all,

Just finishing off a new website and was looking for a bit of feedback.

The site in question is http://www.igapyear.com

Bit of background to it - The content of the site comes from another site I have on RFH http://www.seasonworkers.com

The SeasonWorkers site is written in classic ASP and is long overdue a design and coding overhall but at the same time it's still chuggging along nicely enough.

The site is for season jobs/courses and placements abroad and there are a number of different sectors on the site Summer/Winter/GAP year/Outdoor Sports and TEFL. Aswell as an advertisers section where companies login and place vacancies online, pay invoices, check stats etc etc.

In the near future the site will be moving to asp.NET and we also wanted to implement a 'microsite' idea where each of their sectors has it's own dedicated website. So I thought it'd be a good place to start rewiting SeasonWorkers from the ground up.

Basically iGapYear doesn't have any DB connections on it at all, it's toally powered by webservices from the SeasonWorkers domain. The thought behind this was that I'll be able to reuse this code on SeasonWorkers when it comes to the re-write and also I'll be writing some new microsites in the near future and it'll be a case of dumping the user controls from iGapYear.com into a domain changing a couple of config values i.e. Instead of looking up gap year placements it'll looking up the summer jobs instead and wala another Microsite goes live without too much work required.

Look forward to hearing your views on it, be gentle

[RFH Reseller: askjim]

Very nice looking site, did not bother looking at souce to evaluate xhtml / css build quality and the nature of the accessability of the site.

The one bit you need to sort out is the navigation. Once you select a 2nd level option it does not indicate where you are in the site but says you are home.

[RFH Reseller: JohnnyW]

The one bit you need to sort out is the navigation. Once you select a 2nd level option it does not indicate where you are in the site but says you are home.

Yeah it's on the to-do list, might have a look at it this weekend if I get the chance.

Thanks for the feedback.

[RFH Reseller: davidbending]

I like it. It's clear and simple. Navigation is good (although as pointed out it would be nice if the second level menu was sticky).
Most of all though I like the service the site provides. Good luck promoting it.

[RFH Reseller: nick]

It looks pretty nice, and the markup is not bad either, though if you run it through a validator it will find a few things.

I notice you have an IE hack in your CSS

* html body {
	font-size: x-small;
	f\ont size: xx-small;
}

I think it should be

* html body {
	font-size: x-small;
	f\ont-size: xx-small;
}

Looking at the home page... One of the key things I have learnt with design is to get the site's aim across really clearly right away. You have a nice explanation on there but its all in a dense paragraph of small type. I'd break that up a bit, get some emphasis on certain words to make it more promenant and readable.

I know the site gracefully falls back if javascript is dissabled allowing you to still navigate to the submenu options, however you can do a menu system like that purely with css, which is the method I personally prefer.

If I was really trying to be picky I'd say that although image alt attributes are great, I would always go by two rules with them. 1) You make them describe the actual image, as that's what they are meant to do, or. 2)If they have no useful relevance to the content then use alt="".

For those people with screenreaders mainly, adding a 'skip to content' anchor link above the menu system in the source, even if it is hidden by the css, is good practice. You could equally add 'to the top' and stuff too.

Erm, okay I'm starting to go on now aren't I. You could put some access keys in for key menu items. And I'd love to see some helpful title tooltips on links.

I'm done now

[RFH Reseller: JohnnyW]

Thanks for the comments Nick, will take them on board.

Can you point out the change you made in the CSS hack they both look the same to me.

[RFH Reseller: nick]

Can you point out the change you made in the CSS hack they both look the same to me.

They hyphen between font and size

[RFH Reseller: JohnnyW]

They hyphen between font and size

Oh yeah, cheers!

Been working too hard today I think