I everyone can you please take a look at my site [www.iforgive.com] and give me feedback on the design and the concept.


Thank you for your time
Gary

Will you forgive me if I write a critical review?

Well... I'm not gonna dwell too much on the styling or concept of the site. (It's not for me. Yuch!) But a couple little comments about content:

On the "About Us" page you start out: "iforgive.com is the # 1 online community designed to help you let go of anger, hurt, and bitterness, and to start living your best life today." That's pretty dishonest isn't it? I mean, how can you brag about your "community" when you haven't even one real "member" using the personals or forums yet?

What does it say about you and/or your intended audience that your keyword list includes "Budah" and conspicuously doesn't include "Buddha"?

As for the way it's crafted: It annoys me when people ignore all the "before you post" sticky messages at the top of the board. You could save us a lot of time by validating first:

http://validator.w3.org/ reports 42 code errors on the home page.
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ reports about 16 errors in the CSS file.

Also, you're wasting your visitors' time when they load the site by uploading a lot of unused code. Check out this site: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
It reports that your CSS file is 28K - bigger than I've ever seen before. 1100 lines!!! (And, apparently that wasn't enough for you, because there's also 28 lines of style tags in your main (html) file.

It raised a red flag for me when I viewed your page source and I see it starts with 130+ lines of Java. It's a safe bet this website won't perform well in search engines. 83K of external scripts!

When I scroll past all that junk, and finally find the doctype and head section, I see some other issues. At 146 words and 900+ characters, the meta "description" is the most ridiculously too long I've ever seen. That won't help you. The "keyword" field is also over-stuffed, but that field just doesn't matter much one way or the other. The other meta tags are a complete waste of time. (For example the "revisit" tag... the spiders will come back on their own schedule no matter what you tell them!) Are you a "control freak" or what?

Then, even after loading all that CSS, you're using tables for formatting. Hello? And you're defining font appearance locally too (i.e. <br style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 153, 0); font-family: arial;"> )

After taking all that time to stuff your description and keywords tags, you didn't make any effort to emphasize keywords in some of the simplest and most effective ways: No keywords in the <title> tag! Empty image <img> alternate text fields! No titles on links! No summaries on tables! Precious few keywords in anchor text! No sitemap yet!

I understand that you're just getting started, but just from a "craft" point of view, this website doesn't do very well and isn't very promising.

Considering your lofty ambititions, perhaps you should consider hiring a professional developer.

i like the look and feel of your site. It looks good in all the browsers ive got so i dont think validation is an issue!
CJacobson, are you going to sit there and slate people who's site doesnt validate??? Perhaps you should have a go at all the admin here at WPW, coz last time i checked this site doesnt validate either, i think over 100 errors, yet your an here all of the time!!!! Hmmmmm.

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Okay, quick example: click on the "discussion topics" link at the top of the "iforgive" page and REGARDLESS OF BROWSER (if your window is wider than 800) you'll see page-centering fall apart. The banner stays centered but the body shifts to the far left.

We can waste a lot of time bringing specific code errors to your attention and trying to help you fix them, or you can simply bring the page up to validation and eliminate almost all the errors quickly and easily yourself. It's actually easier for both the AUTHOR and the REVIEWERS if websites are checked out on w3c before being posted.

After looking at your source code and going by what I know about html, the first line of text after head, should be your title tag, then your description tag. I'm not sure why you have all that other coding at the top of your page.

I like the look of your site.

lizzi

The site does not have to validate...most people don't care.

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Gary
http://pilotjourney.com

<quote>
i like the look and feel of your site. It looks good in all the browsers ive got so i dont think validation is an issue!
CJacobson, are you going to sit there and slate people who's site doesnt validate??? Perhaps you should have a go at all the admin here at WPW, coz last time i checked this site doesnt validate either, i think over 100 errors, yet your an here all of the time!!!! Hmmmmm.
</quote>

That is another story.

Shall I be earnest?

The first thing I do when I see sites like this is click on contact us and leave.

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Interesting concept - who am I to say what will or will not work on the internet, a lot does that has surprised me.

I can not comment from a technical perspective but here are some areas that you could improve.
1. When visiting your site and selecting a topic from the top navigation bar the page you go to is not identified. For example, when you mouse over a tab (i.e. articles) it turns orange - great. When you actually get to the articles page nothing tells you that you are there - maybe keep it orange when you are on the page.
2. When you visit the store I could not find a way back to iforgive. Your logo no longer provided a link to your home page.
3. As previously mentioned the discussion topics page does not center when I view it.

Good luck with your site and changes.

Gary, I already responded to your other thread:
http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=53313

But I did want to point out that many sites don't validate, and as far as I know it's not a prerequisite to requesting a site review. That said, it's usually fairly simple to make a site validate and is worth the effort.

OK, the site needs a lot of improvement so what I will do is just point some issues I noticed and maybe you can fix them. Along with validation, centering, content and other things previously mentioned.

Even though it seems you spend time making the site look good you left a lot of text to touch the left side of their <td>. That doesn't look good.

You have way too much text colors and text sizes. Deside what you like and keep it. e.g you have dark green and black text, lose one.

If you want your community to grow, remove ads or reduce them. You have some pages about 800x600 with 2 728x90 in it. Do the math.

If you want people to trust you, use a real address and telephone.

Good luck.

my 2 cents...

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Hi thank you for taking the time to look at my site i have lots of work to do to fix this any other tips would me great.


Gary

Hi there...
the overall appearance of the site is decent. I like the colours (although a little more consistancy w/ text colours would be nice), and how it is laid out. It's fairly easy to navigate thru as well.

Many of the issues with it have been brought up, so i won't repeat them, except for the validation thing.

It's not just to do with how your layout will appear in different browsers, it's about accessability in general. For someone (gary) to just dismiss validation because John Q. Public doesn't know what it is is a bit on the ridiculous side. If you develop your site from the beginning following validation guidelines, your site is GUARANTEED to perform better, in all aspects.

Anyways, keep at it, you'll get it figured out!

If you have a moment, could you please review my site here?

Thanks!

Interesting theory. And what exactly is it based on? The fact that Gary quite rightly recognized that the vast majority neither know nor care what validation is, the acknowledged flaws and limitations of validation in general (in particular, the W3's validator), or the limitations that validation puts on functionality of a site (e.g. iframes, which can be used to direct a user to another site without loading it in another window or leaving the initial site, links that load in new windows).

This is not designed to dismiss validation completely, but it's designed to point out the primary goal: meet the needs of the end user. And validation just isn't one of those needs. It's always something to be strived for, but not at all costs.

Now that I've got that nasty little bit of business out of the way, my $0.02.

First of all, I like the logo from a strictly aesthetic point of view. I think the content of the site is kind of sappy, but hey...that's subjective and really not what you're after.

My issues with it are design issues for the most part, but not ones I think that have been touched on yet.

First of all, you don't have a default font explicitly defined. If you want your site to look consistent across the board, you should really pick a common font for it and stick it in your CSS. Like this:

body {
font-family: Arial;
color: #000000;
background-color: #FFFFFF;
font-size: 100%;
}
Adjust accordingly, and you're a good portion of the way there without having to do all that much.

Second, the default choice for that first select box on Step 1 shouldn't be "not ready". If you're promoting forgiveness, people should be "ready" to forgive, right? Use the positive energy of your site.

Third, it should say "Hello, Guest", not "hello, guests".

http://iforgive.com/sitemap.shtml

You're missing the site map completely.

As far as the Javascript and CSS issues mentioned earlier, your best bet would be to put them into their own .js and .css files, respectively. That way, you can call them as you need to. Some of the CSS, from what I can interpret of it, is designed for specific sections and should only be called from those sections. I'd imagine your Javascripts would be the same.

CJacobson: I think you were a little bit harsh on the guy. It's one thing to give constructive criticism, and it's another thing entirely to cross over the line and bash them, especially considering that you gave no alternative suggestions in cases where they could have been made.

If you don't like something, that's cool, but at least do the other guy a favour and give them some guidance to help them out, even if it's not much.

By the way, I do agree with most of what you said as far as your base points; I just don't agree with the way you went about bashing him over the head like that.

The only point that I disagree with is the implication behind the misspelling of "Buddha". The one thing that I have noticed is that it appears to be pretty consistent throughout. It is possible that the guy doesn't know how to spell the name. I've seen it spelled "Buddha", "Buudha", "Buudah", "Boodah", "Budha", "Budah", "Bodahu", and about a hundred other ways.

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ADAM, you're right. I was a bit too harsh, and I'm sorry about that.

But I stand by my comments about validation. Running websites through a validator (like W3C's) and ironing out code errors should be a routine step before submitting for review here. There are plenty of simple code errors in the iforgive source code.

In many cases, validation before submission would save reviewers' time and result in better reviews.

The iforgive website does have some interesting bugs! For example, in IE on a Mac the banner ads intermittently fail to load. (I'm sorry that I don't know why. I hope pointing out the problem is more helpful than ignoring it.)

How many of us have the resources to check our sites in all the different browser/operating system combinations, let alone all the special software that impaired web-surfers use? Ran is absolutely right that non-standards-compliant code often causes accessibility problems.

Yeah your site is the one of the best. You have surely worked hard on it. It shows.
All about that validator stuff. No one cares much. Once a visitor comes to site and likes it he or she will surely come again.
That is of importance.
Moreover there are many HTML programs available the code optimization can be done if you are free someday.
Right now don't worry too much about it.
Your site is not going to hit No 1 place next morning if you check your code.
So take it lightly. And let the users decide what is good and what is wrong.

This is not designed to dismiss validation completely, but it's designed to point out the primary goal: meet the needs of the end user. And validation just isn't one of those needs. It's always something to be strived for, but not at all costs.

But can programming errors confuse the bots, so that the pages are not indexed? If that is the case, it can be very profitable to correct the errors.

Personally: I have not worried about validation myself, but I have not sent my sites for review etiher. Neither am I in the SEO business, even if I have read a lot about SEO.

I have also read, that a lot of (nested) tables is not good for at least some bots.

Bad contact info is worst.

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Agreed somewhat, depending upon the nature of said errors.

For example, an inline frame will confuse a lot of bots.

But let's use my inline frame example cited above. I've got a site that makes use of inline frames to present pages from other sites to the end user. Now...iframes, in XHTML 1.0 strict, are bad, bad, don't validate, very bad, go to your bed without any supper. And the pages contained with said iframe will likely not get indexed (although I'm sure most bots have picked up on them by now, I don't use iframes often enough to care.)

So let's assume you're right. Let's assume that the pages contained within my invalid iframe code don't get indexed.

The pages in my example don't even belong to my client. They belong to suppliers/vendors/other websites that my client neither controls nor operates. So do I go and "fix" my error? There's no point, since it won't lead to increased profitability.

By the same token, target="_new" is a no-no. But again, I use it all the time to send users to different sites to ensure that they know they're on a different site and so that the original site is in its own window. Knowing, as I do, that a good number of users don't even know the back button exists, this provides a means for them to quickly and easily get back to the site I built and not lose their place.

Do I "fix" that error? Hell no. I can see profits disappearing as a result.

Again, I'm not dismissing validation completely. I'm pointing out that it's incumbent upon us as web geeks to understand our validation errors, the fixes behind them, and the pros and cons of each fix.

CJacobson: that's cool. I've come down hard on the odd person myself. I just don't do it unless I believe someone has some bad intentions, and this guy has at least a semi-noble purpose for his site.

Having said all of that, you're dead right on the validation.

cani11: the best thing you can do is start by validating (or attempting to validate) your code.

Here's a link to the W3's code validator results for your domain to get you started:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...pe=Inline&ss=1

As you can see, something's very wrong here. Usually, the W3 will give you a list of your validation errors. But for some reason, it can't even do that.

As a result, I had to go to the more obsolete but in this case more effective NetMechanic website (www.netmechanic.com) to get this:

http://r.netmechanic.com/toolbox/sum...anic&fv=5&ft=3

I'm not sure if this link will work since it contains what I believe is session information, but try it anyway.

Your biggest problem is that you've got all of that Javascript before the <head> tag of your document. Put it in the <head>...</head> tags, and make your life easier as I mentioned earlier by putting it in .JS files.

Then, repeat the validation process and do so with as many errors as you can solve. Once you get it down around 5-10 (or less, ideally), then come back and see if we can nail down the rest. There are just too many to be able to solve quickly.

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