Please review and explain any comments fully.
Do I have too many links ?
http://www.chestertourist.com

please rate 1 to 10 for

Speed
Usablity
Content
Relevance
Look and Feel

Hi,

Speed A little slow on my DSL connection

Usablity - Some of the links didn't make sense, like the News didn't seem to be news?? I'd add a way to return to the top of the page on the long pages rather than having to scroll all the way back.

Content Great photos - wish I was there

Relevance Seems like everything you'd need to know about the city

Look and Feel - I like the look and feel. I'd make the black lettering on the home page another color, tho, and use a different font for Area Attractions. Unless my Yankee eyes just aren't used to old english script!

Overall, a nice place to visit.

__________________
Getting It Write, Inc.
The Small Business Marketing Pro
Real Estate Marketing Assistance: Real Estate Websites - Brands - Logos
http://www.buildrealestateresults.com

speed = 3/10 - loaded very slowly, in fact I'm still waiting :S
Usability = 4/10 - The buttons are hard to read, not very user friendly i am afraid.
Content = 7/10 - the content is good. Text perhaps a little small.
Relevant = 8/10 - the content is all definately relevant, the design is not.
Look and Feel - I will take this to mean design - 5/10 - Its not awful, but could be much improved. Is chester a dark and gloomy place? The site does seem to give this impression, while i am aware this is not true, potential tourists might think so. The banner and the rest of the site are not very well integrated, it seems like they were designed seperately and put together like two pieces of uncomplimentary jigsaw. Perhaps a collage of different tourist attractions, with Chester Tourist over the top would be better?

So in summary, change the buttons to make the clearer, make the colours a better more welcoming, improve the banner and make sure it compliments the site as a whole and make the font size larger.

Good luck and merry christmas.

__________________
Pet Care - Pet Cat Care

have a look at :

http://www.hauntedchester.co.uk/gallery.htm

I am guessing many tourists will be older, retired folks, possibly with eyes not so sharp. I find the font on the web site small and difficult to read.

Using my browser "larger text" menu did not help.

The script text on the menu buttons is pretty, but not easy to read.

The white text on top of pictures gets lost and difficult to read.

I am doing this review on a 1280 x 1024 screen.

I did a search for "rental car" and got no results.

Latest news from Chester...Pictures of Paris????

I would decide if the site is to be about Chester, or a web link portal. I would recommend cutting back on the links, focus on the mission.

__________________
Rik Rasmussen
Two Way Radio Directory
http://twowayradiodirectory.com

I am not sure why my site is so slow.
I am trying to reduce the amount of graphics.
and making the pictures a bit smaller.

Could it be the java script ?

I want to add a 'google' search to my site.
I am not sure how you do this ?

My site is non commercial but if car rental want to give me some money to put copmmercials on my site for them they are welcome.

You just copy the html from Google's web site and paste it into your code.

I have it on my home page if you want to see it.

__________________
Rik Rasmussen
Two Way Radio Directory
http://twowayradiodirectory.com

will do thanks.
Also adding car hire information.
Can you think of any thing else that is missing ?

Even if the listing are free and limited, I should think you would want to list services a tourist might want to know about if considering a visit.

You could use the click info to sell ads.

Thinking of my own trips to Europe, I come up with these:

cars for hire
photo processing (not everyone uses digital yet)
shipping and packing
newspaper shops
laundry & cleaners
tailors
library
maps and travel guide vendors
internet cafe or other location where email can be checked

__________________
Rik Rasmussen
Two Way Radio Directory
http://twowayradiodirectory.com

I'm on a 3mb cable connection and your site took forever to download.

The navigation buttons are very hard to read with that script font, plus the words don't fit into the navigation buttons you created (some of the letters get cut off, which looks like a mistake, not a style).

__________________
Marcie Wolf
AlphaGeek Web Design | MarcieWolf.com

I have just been doing some adjustments.
I am not sure why my site takes so long to load.


I have taken all off site referenced graphics off and saved them to my own website. They appear to load quicker.

I may have have to reduce the graphics quality and size but I do not realy want to do this.

Looks like a trade off between style and speed.

Any Ideas ?

You have 43 images on your opening page. Although many of these are small, it is not helping a fast load. Loading external images will also slow matters - like the counter and Bravenet logo (which is also reasized to make it illegible). If loading is unversally slow your hosing could also be the culprit - pinging your site times out. (Pings could be blocked by your host).

I would also add that you pages does not fit 800 pixel width (still 33% of screen resolutions). The text is small and the textured background detracts from the readability.
Your link color is not intuitive - almost the same as non-active text.
There is an unhappy mix of fonts in the "Chester Menu", the menu items and "search".
The white text in the header becomes unreadable over the white in the image. The same applies to image 'title_ct1'.

The link to ButtonITnet is dead and the alt text says 'best viewed in 800 x 600' - But your index page is 892 x 919 ...

__________________
Paul Bilton design services ~ Sites not Sights

Yes I have just found part of the problem.
I have taken the java script out of files and put it directly into the head of the index page.
It is now loading alot quicker.
I still need to do some more work on the graphics.
I may have to take off some graphics as well.

I have redesigned my site (again)
any comments on speed/load time/colours/size/
font/readablity/navigability

You have gone for a rich feel on your site, which is nice and different. However the overall effect is gloomy which is BAD.

You have a very crowded page. The opening screen is a 3*3 matrix which is one column and row too many I suspect. I am viewing on a 17" lcd which is far from grandiose but it would be presumptuous to think that your target market is using anything better.

As for the content, you have worked hard. Minor comments on 'walk the walls' I would add descriptions/locations (even if only the start point). Also may I point out that it seemed counterintuitive to me to click left arrow to go forward.

Good Luck

John

__________________
John Owens


Fax +44 1509 890822
ENvi@BTinternet.com
www.GoodViews.co.uk
http://uk.geocities.com/j.o.skillsap...tinternet.com/

speed site loaded in about 1 second (1mb connection)

vast improvment on the original site maybe just needs to be a bit brighter

however the text is too small and that lets the whole site down maybe because im not using a screen size of 800x600 which I Dont think is the most common size these days

a couple of the pics are under exposed and one is doubling itself (is it set as background?)

you are going in right direction

http://www.dirtydisco.net
uk internet radio
Im still learning

There are some elements I really like. There are some amazing pictures on there. It also seems to have a lot of information packed in there, although at times, it seems a little unorganized. Since your trying to cover one subject from many sides, I'm not sure how you'd do that other than it would need to be layered. By that I mean start on the homepage with brodcategories like hotels, maps, events, history, etc, then each those can be treated as mini sites.
There are some technical glitches I noticed. Keep in mind I'm on a MAC using Safari 2.1.4.
The white helvetica text is way too small and there is some black times (default text) sitting on top of that great backround. Are you using CSS? You should, it makes things much more consistent. They're a bit of a pain to start off with, but if you make a bunch of them at once (different sizes and colors) its like having your personal text pallette.
"&nbspBusiness " is on your top navigations bar. you need to get rid of the "&nbsp". I kinda like the navigation bar on the left on the feature page, but it seems a little low res and the text is too scripty (although it might be nice if it weren't low res). I hope you're trying to get some money for this. Avis and Holiday Inn don't need any free advertising.
I didn't notice a problem with speed, but I didn't go into any ASP stuff either.
I use PHP mostly via Dreamweaver, but I find I need to do some hand coding.
What do you use?
Oops, I see you are using CSS. It just looks like you missed some spots.

Hope this helps,

Fred

I got the hosting company to ping the server.
these are the results :

Pinging 80.94.196.10 with 32 bytes of data:
67ms
63ms
65ms
65ms

Average = 65ms

Do they look OK ?
I have been working hard to reorganise the site.
I have done alot to reduce the size of the page and the graphics. But it seams a little slow some times.
Even on simple pages.

I go along with many of the previous comments. The text is too small, the overall appearance is gloomy and there's generally "too much of everything" for a site's homepage.

Try running your site through an online checker such as www.sitereportcard.com

On their HTML check alone, there were 157 warnings and 1 error. <be> is not a legitimate HTML tag.

Paul

__________________
London Web Design Agency | London IT Support | IT Support - Mac & PC

just trying to reflect the atmosphere of Chester.
see
http://www.hauntedchester.co.uk/gallery.htm

are response times ok now ?

please state connection type
time in secs to download index page

Hi, I have not really looked at page (in terms of code) but... when I came back to the comp speed report said

14.4K 230.51 seconds
28.8K 115.35 seconds
33.6K 98.90 seconds
56K 59.42 seconds
ISDN 128K 18.34 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 1.77 seconds

somewhere there is an issue.. page should take no time to load....

Nigel

__________________
J.N.Lew Design Group : Web |Computing | Marketing
Color Management and Adobe Photoshop

my hosting company are investigating the speed issue.
The only thing about the index page that is not straight forward is a bit of java script to say goodmorning/good afternoon. Display random picture and quote.

I thought the internet would be able to handle this.

Hello James,

The appearance of your site has come on leaps and bounds since I last reviewed it in September. However, you are still using outdated software that writes HTML 3.2 and it's stacked full of errors. The W3C report at http://validator.w3.org/check?verbos...ertourist.com/ found 362 errors on your first page! Throwing that many errors at any browser is bound to slow loading while its trying to work out what the ***king hell is going on.

Added to those you've got 2 broken links at http://www.chestertourist.com/sights.htm and http://www.chestertourist.com/things.htm

Your Javascript links generate 'Response status code: 501' meaning they're not accessible to people not using a Javascript enabled browser.

If you check your site out in Firefox (the best browser) you will see '&nbsp' (space) in front of each link on your over-wide horizontal navigation at the top. It looks like this;

|&nbspNews | &nbspVisiting | &nbspStaying | &nbspMap | &nbspWalks | &nbspShopping | &nbspBusiness |...

IE doesn't show them because it's too clever and 'fixes' errors!

If I were you I would focus on the code and refrain from trying to find external excuses for your terrible load time. Keep it simple and clean, get rid of the unnecessary Javascript and eventually you'll move on to other websites.

Good luck.

Tim