[terydinho]

Well my dad is a pretty decent Pigeon Flyer... racing pigeons is quite a big sport for the niche market and it involves a fair amount of money so my dad wanted a site and voila... www.Lightning-Fast.co.uk

So if you can find time to have a look and let me know your thoughts - I built this site about a year ago before I was really into the whole CSS/XHTML movement so it is a bit different to my later stuff.


C+C most welcome


Cheers

[MolotovRuss]

It's a nice cute design, i'm sure your dad's very pleased with it!

Navigation is my only gripe, the red doesn't fit in, and the hover colour for the text is a bit random.

[terydinho]

Yeah I agree - red has always been his sort of corporate colour so he wanted it in somewhere! annoying but it had to be done. Also; the hover (thinking about it now) should have been something else because yeah, the grey doesn't work!!

Ah I love getting a fresh pair of eyes on a site!!

Cheers

[Iris]

Nice, cute and simple website.

I've gone through the source HTML of you webpage and it seems decent, though I haven't observed it in depth. For some strange reason, I'm liking the red menubar at the top of the webpage. Maybe it goes well with the sky or the pigeon. You, however, need to fix the hover text color of that same menubar; the color grey is not going to cut it. The logo (the pigeon) is neat. The body of your website, where you wrote the background info, is not exactly how I would have done it, but it works.

On a positive note, your dad should love it.

[terydinho]

Yeah he does love it - thanks for your comments Iris.

The menu bar hover will definitely have to go

But the rest of the site, i'm quite happy with it... and so is he... so happy days really.

Any other C+C is most welcome

[J.P]

Looks really cool, nice job.

Only problems:

. The grey on the nav bar, however you are aware of this so thats alright.
. I don't seem to like the advert for the DVD on the side, mainly because its not as soft and subtle as the rest of the website.
. The page for the DVD seems to be broken when i view it (Firefox 3), there seems to be div's overlapping.

[Scott S]

I like the overall aesthetic design of the site, however:

The use of spacer images is a no-no lol, as is the tabular layout. I'd consider re-coding it if you have that option.

I actually kinda like the red navbar, but as already mentioned, the grey has got to go lol.

Overall, a nice site, works well with the subject matter

[Skysurge]

Pigeon Racing has to be the most unique and awesome thing I've heard today.

[tigerlabs]

Skysurge, on Jan 13 2009, 21:27, said:

Pigeon Racing has to be the most unique and awesome thing I've heard today.

How cool is that!

Besides the problems mentioned above I love the site!

[terydinho]

Well thank you all so much for your generally positive comments.

Scott S: I know that the tabular layout is a big no-no and the use of spacer images is bad; but this was an early site for me, and all I really did was use photoshop to design and then slice it up and export as html (terrible I know) and then add div's over the top to get things how I like them. The site has been up for about 18months now (I think and we tend to do a redesign every couple of years so I will probably recode it in the summer

JP: Thanks for the heads up on the DVD page - I will look into the overlapping DIVs tonight. And I know the advert looks gaudy BUT it is effective as we have sold numerous dvd's since the advert was up and for my dad... profit comes before design lol

Again; many thanks for the comments chaps - really appreciated

[traxor]

It's a nice looking site, however there are a few things that I will say:

• You've used tables rather than DIVs, which is a big no go, with tabular data it'll load every time you refresh, increasing loading times, and not caching data, whereas with DIVs, data is cached, and therefore will load much quicker for the user with every DIV that uses the same .css file and selector.
  
• The site looks like it should be aligned differently, try aligning it centrally, I think it'd look much nicer, even if the advert is still offset
  
• Try having a some inconsistency in your pages, keep the same general layout, but have sub-layouts on different pages so that the user doesn't get bored whilst browsing
  
• I'd add a contact form to your site, just a little simple one to make it look more professional.

Other than that, I like it .

[Dizi]

I know you have already mentioned the reasoning behind the quite badly coded bits but here are a few tips anyways


You haven't declared a doctype...this is a must for sites these days so the browsers have an instant knowledge of what standard you are coding your site to, rather than having to guess.

Even for an 18th month old site you are using some attributes that depreciated a very long time ago.

This one is really because of the bad methods you have used to create your site but I felt I should say something as on your personal site you have written that you give "invaluable feedback on design, usability". Web design isn't just about how your site looks on the default settings of a browser, or even just about how it looks in a browser, there is so much more to consider. When I increase your sits text size, I kill your pigeon

[attachment=2686:one.jpg]

This is just down to you slicing and dicing the layout in photoshop and then saving for web, but one thing you should check is how your site works when the font size is increased, just so you can make sure your site is still usable when someone needs to do this.


Use an external stylesheet instead of having it all within the html document, this will make editing a lot easier for you.


I know when you are staring out it seems like web design is as easy as slicing and dicing an image in photoshop, saving as web then editing bits in dreamweaver. There is a lot more to it and I am happy to hear that you realise that now, and are hopefully on your way to creating sites that look as good on the inside as they do on the outside. I really like the design of the site, but the bad coding does let the site down. I hope you will share the changes you do to the site, when you have a chance to change it, As it would be nice to see how you have developed over the past months in both your designing and coding abilities

[terydinho]

Once again; thank you so much for the comments.

I appreciate that when it comes to coding a site, I have a lot to learn... that is why I am here at the best forum around

I have come a long way with my coding skills in the past few months since I have been coding more often and not just designing.

I always use external style sheets nowdays

Thanks for killing my pigeon made me chuckle