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[Mottster]

If someone could take a look at my site. The site is a dedicated weather search engine. Just looking to get some feedback on the design and layout of the site.

[BC]

Hi Sean,

This is a short review of first, initial impressions - I'll do a more detailed one in the next 24 hours.

These are my first (and most vital) impressions :

1. Good, balanced layout with excellent choice of color themes at the top. I'll excuse the Java loading as it's fairly important to the site, but you could achieve the same effect with DHTML....

2. Your 'logo/banner' needs a slogan. It looks too empty by itself there. At the very least, expand the logo to take up most of the white space to the bottom and right of it.

3. As you scroll down however, the site starts to feel 'disjointed' because of the asymmetrical look. The boxes in the left/right columns don't come down to match each other and the 'Visit these other great sites' box basically sits there with plenty of valuable white space sitting to the right. Not a good look. You need to fill up something there... I'll go more into that later.

4. Too much white space down the bottom just above the bottom ad banner.

Overall, good first impressions, and I'll expand on this later on in the night/next morning.

Cheers.

[Mottster]

Thanks for the initial feedback. My java applets are the horizontal scrolling bar and the counter. If there's away to make them with DHTML then please fill me in.

As for the white spaces, the system used to build this site was at 800x600. It seemed to be ok at that resolution, if there's a way to make the site adjust itself between different resolutions that work.

[BC]

Hi Sean,

Here's my full review (in addition to my previous comments)...

====================================================
Browser : Netsheep 4.7... err... I meant Netscape.
OS : WinNT
Browser resolution : 800X600
Speed : decent
====================================================
Disclaimer : these are all purely suggestions and you don't have to act on them if you don't wish; however, the suggestions I have below are aimed at increasing usability and the design of the site, with the ultimate result of being a site to return to for a visitor.
====================================================

1. You've already acted on some of the points I nutted out previously - good job. It looks better already now. However, see the four 'regions' - Search, Current Conditions at weathertalk.net, Directory of Web Sites and Latest Weather news headlines. Currently there is a big fat space gap between Search and Directory, and the Latest News Headlines has some space to the right. I would suggest that it looks more symmetrical and much more cleaner if you reduce the width of the Search box to match the length of the TD colored cell containing the Directory of Web Sites, while also forcing the Latest News Headlines to right-justify and make it the same 'width' as the 'Current Conditions at weathertalk.net' box. It looks more uniform and cleaner.

2. I suggest more headlines if possible for the Latest Weather news headlines - at least 5 or 6 or even more. This would also help to reduce the amount of white space below that box.

3. Need to make your 'subscribe to newsletter' form's design/layout consistent with the rest of the site, as also the Top 50 sites - if possible.

4. Back to the spaces problem, this appears throughout the site. Take your time to experiment with different box sizes to rid of the excess space. White space is good, but excess makes a page feel extremely empty. The best way to handle the white space/resolutions problem is to test out, try then use different relative values for everything so that they stretch out to the correct width/height when used at different resolutions.

To be honest, it's not a real biggie, it just affects perceptions of how a visitor views a site.

5. With regards to the DHTML scroller, you might like to check out http://www.bratta.com/dhtml/scripts.asp or http://www.webreference.com/dhtml (upper right corner) for DHTML scrollers.

That all said and done, the color theme chosen is very good and the layout is generally fine. Good work!

[sergio]

Originally posted by Mottster
If someone could take a look at my site. The site is a dedicated weather search engine. Just looking to get some feedback on the design and layout of the site.

Next time when request site reviews, make a easy url of your site in message. It will be much more easy to reach it.

[Mottster]

Sorry about that. Here's the URL:

http://www.weathertalk.net

Thanks for the feedback!