A big Thank You!

Freeway
1

Just wanted to say thanks to all who have answered my endless barrage of questions the past few weeks. Your help has been invaluable.

And, well, here is my first Freeway site. Go easy on me, please…

http://www.rmswp.com/

Thanks again…

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2

Hi Robert, love the design. As all the English are snug in bed by now, I thought I’d offer a few helpful pointers as you learn Freeway. Humans will really like your site. The search engines will have a differing opinion. Most of your text … in fact everything but the contact page… is graphic. That means it’s virtually invisible to the search engines. As most of this graphic text is fairly standard and not really stylized, you should consider switching to HTML text during your next round of revisions. With the big blue CSS button turned on, you should be able to plop your html text right over those graphics. You also might want to read the section in the Freeway manual on description and keyword meta tags to give Google et al a helping hand. Great job! Wish my first site looked half as good. Keep it up!

Andrew

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3

Hi Robert,
Well done on what looks like a great first site. A couple of things that I though I would mention;

  1. Try and make more of your site content from html text rather than images. The pages will be smaller, faster to download and you benefit from search engines and users being able to interact with the text and catalog your pages,
  2. The main navigation bar at the top of the page is missing a home button. I found a link in the footer bar but having one at the top as well would help.
  3. Although I like the use of the pop-up windows (for example http://www.rmswp.com/designpeople.html) they all lack any site branding or navigation. This shouldn’t be too much of an issue as most people will open these pages from the main site but some will also open them directly from search listing results. Allowing users to get back to your main site is going to be important task for these users.
  4. The link to the Spotlight Learning site (on the publishing page) opens the site in the same browser window. Again this makes it hard for users to return to your site. Consider opening the site in a new window by setting the target property to _blank in the hyperlink dialog box for that link.
    Again well done on the site.
    Regards,
    Tim.

On 10 Jul 2008, at 17:01, Robert Bovasso wrote:

And, well, here is my first Freeway site. Go easy on me, please…
http://www.rmswp.com/

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4

Good comments from Andrew and Tim. Here are a few things:

  • I find the white text too small for my eyes: if you made it HTML, as already suggested, I’d be able to re-size it with my browser. I do wonder, though, if the text shouldn’t be a bit bigger anyway. On the Home page, the four big coloured links to the other pages draw my attention away from the tiny text of the presentation: I get the impression that this text is not important.

  • There’s a problem with the flash animations on the Publishing page. If I click on one of them, then click on the “back” link at the bottom of the animation, I expect to be taken back to the page I came from, but this link points to http://www.spotlightlearning.com/Index.html which doesn’t exist, so I get a 404 not found error.

  • The “Contact” link on the bottom of the home page is not working.

  • On the Print page, the PrintPOD picture looks like a link, but doesn’t link to anything.

  • It’s not always clear what the pictures are linking to. With the picture of the two dogs,even after I’ve clicked on the link I’m not sure what it’s main point is: is it about privacy or is it about design-for-print projects?

  • On the Publishing page, the bottom left and bottom right picture seem to link to the same thing.

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5

Wow. Thanks for the responses and critiques.

We had a tug of war with graphics vs. html and graphics won ONLY because it was difficult to get the text to stay in place and break where we wanted it to. Line breaks were crucial to the design.

The next site I am working on (starting today) will have the same “problem”. It’s very graphic and using html was making text go all over the place. I’ll see what I can do with the other sites I have to do (probably two more very soon).

Michael: Thanks for finding the flubs! Me and the other person I work with went through it a million times!

The Publishing page: That Spotlight Learning site is being redone (all the Flash is going and getting redesigned) so that’s sort of temporary. All links go to the same place, yes.

The Print page: We asked our print department to supply us with info for that entire page and they haven’t, so we had to wing it. No, that last pic does not link to anything.

I will fix the flubs!

Thanks again. I will show my colleague this page so she can see these comments as well.

Bob

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6

Hi Robert
You can use shift return to force a line break.
all the best
Brian

Robert Bovasso said recently:

Wow. Thanks for the responses and critiques.

We had a tug of war with graphics vs. html and graphics won ONLY because it
was difficult to get the text to stay in place and break where we wanted it
to. Line breaks were crucial to the design.

The next site I am working on (starting today) will have the same “problem”.
It’s very graphic and using html was making text go all over the place. I’ll
see what I can do with the other sites I have to do (probably two more very
soon).

Michael: Thanks for finding the flubs! Me and the other person I work with
went through it a million times!

The Publishing page: That Spotlight Learning site is being redone (all the
Flash is going and getting redesigned) so that’s sort of temporary. All links
go to the same place, yes.

The Print page: We asked our print department to supply us with info for that
entire page and they haven’t, so we had to wing it. No, that last pic does not
link to anything.

I will fix the flubs!

Thanks again. I will show my colleague this page so she can see these comments
as well.

Bob

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7

Sometime around 11/7/08 (at 07:49 -0400) Robert Bovasso said:

We had a tug of war with graphics vs. html and graphics won ONLY
because it was difficult to get the text to stay in place and break
where we wanted it to.

Learning to live and work with this sort of thing is pretty much
essential! As a design challenge, see what you can do to avoid
graphic text everywhere except when merging with other graphic
content. You’ll learn a lot and your sites will be more findable too.

k

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