[Pro] Site review by my peers

Freeway
1

Hi there,

I would really welcome a review of a site I have just completed in respect to optimising, making the site faster etc etc… or ways I could do things better.

Many thanks

Jon

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2

Hi Jon,
There’s very little I can recommend. The site is both elegant and is
for the most part very well constructed. Well done.

Looking through the site there are a few minor things I would suggest
looking at if you have time;

  1. On the booking page (http://www.bmwspecialistreading.co.uk/booking.html
    ) the radio array should have a default value (either morning or
    afternoon)
  2. The opening times link in the footer goes to the home page where
    the times can be found in the sidebar. These are, to me at least, a
    little hidden away and could do with either a page of their own or
    adding to the how to find us page.
  3. Some of the page titles are quite short and to the point. These
    could be rewritten around your core keywords for the site as they play
    a big part of driving (no pun intended) organic traffic to the site.
    The title for the location page, for example, is simple ‘Location’.
    Change this to ‘Locating the Grosvenor Motor Company - specialists in
    BMW and Mini servicing in the Reading area’ and you should see your
    organic ranking increase around keywords like BMW, Mini, Reading etc.
  4. Consider adding tooltips or some visual indication to the five item
    icon menu to the right of the main image so that users know what to
    expect when clicking on the items.
  5. The sub menu for the services tab is exposed on every page on the
    site apart from the home page. This isn’t a big deal but once you are
    aware that it is there it’s a shame to see it missing from the home
    page.
  6. If you can try and consolidate some of your CSS and push the styles
    into an external style sheet (either manually or using one of the
    actions). This will help speed the site up as pages can use cached
    styles.

All in all Jon this is a great looking, and functioning, site.
Regards,
Tim.

On 18 Aug 2010, at 16:11, wingnut wrote:

I would really welcome a review of a site I have just completed in
respect to optimising, making the site faster etc etc… or ways I
could do things better.

http://www.bmwspecialistreading.co.uk/

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3

Cheers Tim,

Very thorough and extremely helpful. I will certainly take on board everything you mention - add pages for times, look at the titling more closely.

Regarding the ‘services’ menu… I completely understand what you are saying and it has been a concern of mine. The submenu is actually there, but by having the carousel contained inline, it ends up hiding the submenu. I have tried a variety of different ways to counter this but in the end I had conceeded due to time constraints. Any tips are always welcome.

Cheers again - I really appreciate your help.

Jon

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4

Jon, I like it - simple and clean design. Love the service menu on the right with the subtle reference to the icons displayed on a car’s dash.

Cheers, Marcel

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5

Well done!
Very appealing visually and easy navigation.

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6

Hi Jon,
Try the following markup placed on your home page at before end head
(Page/ HTML Markup/ Before );

<style type="text/css">
<!--
#nav1 { z-index:1000 !important; }
-->
</style>

It should set the z-index of the navigation to above the carousel.
Regards,
Tim.

On 18 Aug 2010, at 17:22, wingnut wrote:

Regarding the ‘services’ menu… I completely understand what you
are saying and it has been a concern of mine. The submenu is
actually there, but by having the carousel contained inline, it ends
up hiding the submenu. I have tried a variety of different ways to
counter this but in the end I had conceeded due to time constraints.
Any tips are always welcome.

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7

Thank you so much guys for taking the time to comment… it’s always good to know.

Tim you are a superstar! THANK YOU!! Putting in that extra bit of code did the job perfectly. Just one question… what on earth is z-index:1000? I now know what it does, but I always find it helpfult to understand the code I use incase I need to use it in the future.

Cheers again I really appreciate it.

Jon

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8

Hi Jon

The layout breaks if the visitor increases the text size. The new Relative Page Layout Action in FW 5.5 should sort this out.

Cheers

Mark

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9

Ahh ok… I’ll have a go. I produced it initially as a box model but obviously something has gone a bit pear shaped.

Many thanks
Jon

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10

Z-index is the third dimension of Cartesian (x,y,z) three-dimensional
space. Imagine that every element on your visible page is on a clear
pane of glass, parallel to the face of your display. Those panes are
numbered, starting at 0 for the body of the page itself and increasing
in number the closer they get to your eye. If the body has no
background-color, then you can even have negative z-indices and still
see those elements too.

Setting an item to an absurdly high z-index ensures that it won’t be
covered up by another element that appears later in the source code
order.

Walter

On Aug 19, 2010, at 4:52 AM, wingnut wrote:

Thank you so much guys for taking the time to comment… it’s
always good to know.

Tim you are a superstar! THANK YOU!! Putting in that extra bit of
code did the job perfectly. Just one question… what on earth is z-
index:1000? I now know what it does, but I always find it helpfult
to understand the code I use incase I need to use it in the future.

Cheers again I really appreciate it.

Jon

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11

Ahh cool… that makes sense. You are the Oracle!!

Thanks for clarifying.

Jon

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