Hi, I am the webmanager for this website Honywood School - I just wondered what you guys think about it.

 

Just a little pre-info on it though, I know the colours are a bit harsh on the eyes and that georgia font is like the least good thing in the world, but these were design decisions that i was not in control of, you wouldnt believe how much i tried to be able to use a different font.

 

Also, this site is built using a platform called 'frogteacher' so its quite restrictive in its components and its only because i have been using it for ages that i have figured out ways to make things look a little less standard.

 

I would also point out that the 'news' section is not edited by me, when it was the font was not georgia and it had a clear seperation between 'articles'.

 

Anyway, I am just interested to see if you guys dont like the same things as me about this site.

 

Nice one peoples

 

Greigy

The website 'I' work on, god damn being illiterate! - lol - i couldnt find how to edit the title of the post, oops

 

Greigy

Now I've got my sunglasses, I'll take another look...

I've never used 'Frog' but the code seems rather bloated. Inline CSS is a no-no, here's a very generic but mainly true article about it; Inline CSS - no!. Same goes for the inline JavaScript.

 

There's also a considerable amount of HTML errors, here's the validation results of the homepage (may take a while to load as the homepage is hugely bloated).

 

The rows for the letters etc. are set to (I assume) overflow:hidden;, causing this result:

 

 

There's a few things for you to take a look at. I checked the site using Chrome and it all seemed to work okay regarding functionality - but Chrome always seems to have that effect on websites. Check the site in Internet Explorer 6, I'm sure that'll bring up some comical problems for you.

 

Please note that I'm trying to positively criticise the site - I realise I haven't given any pats on the back yet. It's a website, it works, it's informative - it just needs optimising and tweaking!

 

Best of luck

Cheers Andy, i couldnt agree more with you about the bloat and the inline CSS, but alas, these are not things i can control, its hard to explain the back end of frog, its basically a drag and drop situation and there really is no way to get into the code for the whole page, you can put in 'HTML Bricks' and i have done so in some pages, to kind of get around certain limitations, but you certainly cant do such jazzy things as uploading stylesheets and linking them - i can understand why this is done, in that it allows people who are not 'designers/coders' ie teachers, to make pages/resources, but coming from a 'i design in photoshop and notepad' background it was crazy limiting to start with, but now i have kinda taken the 'i have to work with what i have got' kind of mantra.

 

I have looked at the site in IE6, and yes, it is bizzare, its all those transparent png's that i've used to try and make the site look a bit less made from the standard components.

 

again, cheers for the feedback

 

Greigy

I wouldn't worry about IE6 anymore. After I have read the following:

 

The Google and March 1 references came from the search giant's recent announcement that it would drop IE6 from the list of supported browsers for its Google Docs online applications and its Google Sites hosting services starting on Monday, March 1. More recently, Google's YouTube named March 13 as the end-of-support date for IE6. (http://bit.ly/9yfFGH)

 

We don't need to validate our pages in IE6 and there has been a lot of articles floating around that we, as designers and coders, need to step up and design for modern browsers.

 

Anyway, I advise you to review your colour scheme. It is disturbing at the moment and if you want to deal with web design you can't really avoid of learning how to mark up with HTML and how to style with CSS otherwise you end up with a source code full of <td> <tr>.

Wow, that is one bright site...

 

Okay, for starters, the drop down nav is a pain in my butt. It needs to stand out... Fancy it up a bit. Fiddle with it, try the background blue you use (wayy at the very bottom of the page).

 

http://www.honywoodschool.com/index.phtml?d=59725

The tab browsing... Can you implement that on more than just one page?

 

I do like the login at the top part.

 

Where you have "Welcome to Hunywood", "News", "Quick Links"... Give those a padding (top & bottom). It looks unprofessional without some sort of padding.

 

Like "Andyl" said, fix that overflow.

 

Best of luck,

Matt

dont get me wrong, i, personally, can use html and css, but the CMS that we use at the school is self hosted and somewhat of a closed system, being as that is a large investment for the school and one that has already been made, i have to work with what i have, also, the colours and the fonts were some of the 'givens' that i had to work with at the start of the design.

 

There is no facility to edit the code for the whole page, only small areas of html, and it obviously pre-processes the code before putting it into the page as i tried to put in a </html> tag at the bottom of the page (of components) to get rid of the 'powered by frog 3.0' but that didnt work, so I tend to only use the HTML brick for adding things like the flikr widget, and just use the various other 'bricks' for the graphics and layout of the page.

 

Greigy

Hi Matt,

 

Yeah, that tab contianer is a component in the frogteacher page builder, the content of the pages however is basically just what the teacher responsible for that page gives me, some of them come and actually talk to me and we get something a little nicer in place, others give me a word doc and want it literally copied and pasted on, others give it to me scrawled on a bit of paper, and they are the teachers i like to hate.

 

I'll add some padding on the titles, its frustrating how the system deals with 'headings' as it calls them, you would have thought that being that the 'heading' component literally only does that, that it wouldnt be hard to have a reasonable pad applied as standard, but i guess maybe there is a situation where you would want to be able to butt something up against it :S i dont know.

 

Thanks for the comments though people.

 

Greigy

Hi Greigy

 

I myself used to be in exactly your position at the school I work in. I am assuming that you aren't a teacher, nor me. Now, being totally new to this forum - I don't want to upset anybody - but I find your school's website totally uninspiring and a bit boring.

 

Convincing a headteacher or Head of ICT that what they are doing doesn't maybe look too good could be difficult.

 

Here is how I approached it:

 

Our former school website was run by an ICT teacher and was a very basic and absolutely boring as hell site. The pupils at the school couldn't be bothered with it, nor could the staff and as far as I am aware, lots of parents didn't even know it existed. When I started, I had a really bad job convincing people to let me have a go at making it better. I don't think they saw it as important.

 

I don't know if you want to go down this route - but - I just went ahead and redesigned one in my spare time, included lots of info and pictures and then started to show it to people, especially the younger teachers who could see what a difference it made. Within weeks the new version was up and running and has grown through various different versions to the one that we have now. It is based on a free CSS template, my time was already paid for by the school and the hosting we paid for anyhow!

 

I think if I was you, I would try and convince the staff of the school of the educational benefit of a better looking website. Pupils are used to living in a multicoloured and flash whizzy bang world when it comes to online and I would imagine that a lot of pupils never even bother with it.

 

In my experience, pupils really like to see themselves on the website, they are proud of it and our website is a hugely used resource in the schools marketing campaign.

 

Can you show some stats to the head or whoever that ditching the investment and starting again (it doesn't need to be expensive!) is probably a good way to go.

 

Sorry for such a long post, I just want to help out.

 

Scottyc

 

ps. Take a look here - this is our school's website : www.swintonhigh.co.uk