SeasonWorkers.com new version launched

[RFH Reseller: JohnnyW]

I'm bleery eyed this morning! Finally got a new version of my site SeasonWorkers.com live yay! It's my main site which had been developed in classic asp for the past 4 year and it was time to bite the bullet and re-write it in asp.net and give it a much need makeover.

I totally forgot how much code i had written for it in the past though

Anyway it's done now, still fixing a couple of wee bits but let me know what you think: http://www.seasonworkers.com

[RFH Reseller: nick]

You were so close to doing it without using tables , still I do think you have done a great job with such complex pages.

The critique:
You have no non-visual alternative to the captcha on your contact form. I stumbled upon recaptcha recently, which you may be interested in.
Speaking of the contact page, would be nice if the address etc. was marked up perhaps with micro-formats as a vcard and in a dl list or something.
Using captcha to stop abuse of your contact form, and then publishing your contact email in the plain is a bit odd. I know it isn't marked up as a mail link but I don't think that makes a bit of difference these days.
I would add 'on focus' CSS (:focus) as well as the :hover styles for menu items, otherwise you loose that visual feedback when navigating with the keyboard.
There is a fair bit of inline styling which you could move to the style sheets.
Some navigation requires javascript, such as the centre table for searching resorts/jobs etc.
Some links do not have title attributes.
There is quite a lot of inline javascript for various bits and bobs which could ideally be done unobtrusively.
As far as I can tell, the only images without alt tags are the adverts (top right), even if you just add alt="" that should tick another accessibility validation box for you.
Not sure I'm with the menu dividers on the top nav bar having their own list elements, but fair enough.
I think the pages are quite heavy (in kb).

Well, there you go, that's my input. I am not trying to be negative of course, like I said, I think you have done a great job, but maybe you'll find some of this feedback useful.

[RFH Reseller: JohnnyW]

Ooooft!! I think I'll go back to bed

Seriously, thanks for mentioning those points. I'll be the first to admit I'm not up on the DDA stuff as much as I should be so input like this is genuinely helpful.

A couple of points I was aware off and this is going to sound half-assed (because it is) but I really just needed to get the site up there and deal with some of the issues in the coming weeks. This site is a part-time project which I do after the old 9-5 so the time I can spend on it is pretty limited and it was getting to the point when the old site was lacking updates just because I couldn't spare the time keeping two versions running concurrently so the bullet had to be bitten and the new site had to go up in its current form.

My answers on a couple of points:

Using captcha to stop abuse of your contact form, and then publishing your contact email in the plain is a bit odd. I know it isn't marked up as a mail link but I don't think that makes a bit of difference these days.

I realise that isn't quite right but to be honest that info@ address is long gone it gets heavy amounts of spam which gets filtered pretty well on RFH but the problem was we were getting a lot of spammed contact forms which look legit in the inbox (obviously) so it was to cut down on those as the person who works on the admin side of the site was getting annoyed.

Some navigation requires javascript, such as the centre table for searching resorts/jobs etc.

Yeah this is a .net linkbutton which does a postback it always renders the link to use javascript to simulate a form post. I'll be changing the search boxes to use AJAX for changing the search sector in the near future.

There is quite a lot of inline javascript for various bits and bobs which could ideally be done unobtrusively.

Again .net in action

As far as I can tell, the only images without alt tags are the adverts (top right), even if you just add alt="" that should tick another accessibility validation box for you.

Yeah I wrote a banner management system with this new version but the admin person has to go through it and setup the banner on the site when this is done the alt text will be added via the DB it was just a placeholder ad that was put up in the meantime but the al text has been missed out by mistake.

I think the pages are quite heavy (in kb).

Yeah I agree, i did have a discussion with the guy that writes the content for the site (i'm just the coding monkey) and he uses a lot of the control I wrote (such as displaying latest vacancies, location vacancies etc basically anything in the right menu) heavily I was trying to get him to cut down on their usage quite a bit.

The viewstate on some of the pages is quite a lot too so I'll be looking at cutting that down quite a bit too.

Another thing that is adding to the page size is the way .net renders nested controls as it appends the parent names to the contol name aswell so it can reference them on postback.

Which means that a control inside a gridview which is inside a user control which is inside a master page contentplacholder actually gets it's id rendered as =
"ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_LocationVacanciesMainCo ntent1_grdCountryVacancies_ctl02_hpl"
this repeated 10-20-30 times starts to cause quite a bit of code bloat.

Anyway enough talk I better get fixing

Thanks again for your input Nick, very much appreciated

[RFH Reseller: nick]

No problem. I still think, even as it stands, it is very much one of the better coded sites of this style I have seen - and though I don't use it personally, I do know that .net doesn't help with meeting some of my points! So good luck, I'm sure it will score an excellent from me in the not to distant future

[RFH Reseller: JohnnyW]

Thats one of the things I noticed aswell, a lot of the big jobs board sites are terribly coded. Although to be honest if you'd seen the markup on the old site you'd have cringe nested table central :-D

Anyways I better get back to fixing some issues on the site. I implemented a google maps search facility (http://www.seasonworkers.com/searchworld.aspx) for finding jobs with this version but just noticed that Northern Ireland is off the west cost of Australia!!!

[RFH Reseller: Sol]

You should check the necessaity for the Viewstate on each control, as this causes unnecessary download for the client.

[RFH Reseller: spire128]

When I used to use USA based hosting, and was inexperienced and did not realize that the delay on getting the page was due to the host, hosting thousands of sites on a server and the latency, I looked for ways of speeding the site up, and to this end I stored the Viewstate for each page in Session on the server which reduced the size of the page quite a bit.