Hi there all,
I am just completing my first Source site. Apart from a issue with the header in that it isn’t rendering until it has loaded the video (which I am looking at) I would be really interested in peoples feedback on:
- Design - what do you like? what could I improve? What could I do different?
- Optimisation - can you see any opportunities for optimisation?
- SEO - have I done all I can in terms of SEO compatibility?
Please be frank as this is my first Source site (if you up a level in the URL you can see my previous Foundation site)
http://searchdogssussex.com/source
Thanks all,
Darren.
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Page weight is over 13mb. You need to dramatically reduce that. It might be the images, but more likely the sheer amount of content. Everything on that page needs slitting over about 4 or 5 pages IMO.
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Thanks for trying out Source. I hope you are enjoying it.
Like @steveb says, I think there is way too much content on the page. I think you’d be best splitting it out onto different pages and considering which parts are absolutely key to your message.
There are also a lot of different stacks / widgets on the page. I think there is too much going on and it makes the page less coherent. Additionally (in terms of optimisation) some of those third-party stacks are not the most efficient and are unnecessarily loading multiple copies of the same files.
Aside from design/UX suggestions above, there’s something odd going on with the scrolling of the menu.
On Chrome (using my Windows computer), it doesn’t seem to be scrolling at all (or at least it’s struggling to).
On Firefox, it only sort of works. The scrolling itself is smooth but the positioning is off. Scrolling up to something works as expected, but if I try to scroll down to something, the position is wrong. For example, if I am in the ‘Our Callouts’ section and I scroll up to “who we look for”, it works as expected. However, if I go the other way - start in the ‘who we loo for’ section and use the menu to scroll to ‘Our Callouts’ - that section sits at the bottom of the page, not the top where it should be.
Hopefully that makes sense!
Which third party stack are you referring to…I suspect its the animated title breaks?
Yep, I suspected people might say that. I think I know how I can split and still maintain the message.
I think in the first instance, if you split the content up (and try and get your video and images as small in file size as possible) then that will have the biggest impact. We could review again at that stage.
You need to seriously reduce the huge amount of content in sections. Your page is 16Mb huge!
See Website Speed Test | Pingdom Tools
For one page there is about 10 times too much stuff and all of those pie charts and graphs need to be hidden away IMHO. You have too many trippy colours and shades that all clash and confuse and you are risk of a visit from the violently offensive crime squad. You should stick to 3 colours and use the colours in your excellent logo. I would say just use the logo, a few killer photos of dogs and a few sentences to explain what you do for the new home page.
Also you should lose the video. The concept of rescue dogs is one that doesn’t’t need a video to explain it, so replace it with a great photo of a rescue dog looking straight into the visitors eyes - that’s all you need.
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OK everyone, thank you for all the input. I have now got v2 of the site up ready for your review :-)
One thing I am looking to do is allow the team members to manage their own section of the site/profile. If you look at ‘Meet the team’, when clicking on an individuals i’d like a profile page that has the standard header and footer, but the content of the page is fully editable by the individual - basically meaning I can hand it off to them and don’t need to maintain everyones profile page! Can you make any suggestions as to what I can use to do this? CMS?
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Initial comment: The header, the big image, is the same on all pages (least he ones I saw). It’s obviously a personal thing perhaps, but I’m not a fan of this practice. I always feel have the big header on the homepage, then a smaller one on the rest.
Connected to this is the fact that other than the browser bar I’ve no way of knowing what page I’m on. So in that smaller header also put the page title.
Also, on the pages I saw a lot of text blocks span the full width. I’d put large chunks of text in cols as it makes it easier to read. 700px max wide is optimum I find.
That is looking great! Taking the bulk of the text content off of the home page has made a massive difference.
There are still a huge amount of big images on the page though and I think it would be worth stripping back on this a bit. How many different slides are you using in the Impact header? I think you only really need a few different ones there as no one is going to spend that much time up there.
Would also be better if the content in the header was vertically centered - it seems to be sitting up at the top.
(And great to see some of the new Source Elements in use already - they work really well!)
OK feedback actioned.
- Have reduced number of images on Impact header
- Have added a ‘where am I’ title to each page
- Hero/large header on front page, smaller header on sub-pages - TBD but I will do this.
"Would also be better if the content in the header was vertically centered - it seems to be sitting up at the top."
I checked and the images are all vertically and horizontally centered. I’m not happy with the header at the moment. I don’t like the way the page elements (logo etc.) are misaligned over the content until the header images load up. Can you suggest why this may be happening? I’ve looked through all the Impact settings without much luck. Maybe i’ll post on the RW forum and see if Joe could make a recommendation.
Questions:
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Is it better to use warehoused images (hosted on the same server/domain) or add the images into Rapidweaver resources? Which is best practice?
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re. my previous question around user editable page content. I am want to allow team members to manage their own section of the site/profile. If you look at ‘Meet the team’, when clicking on an individuals i’d like a profile page that has the standard header and footer, but the content of the page is editable by the individual - basically meaning I can hand it off to them and don’t need to maintain everyones profile page! Can you make any suggestions as to what I can use to do this? CMS? My team members aren’t that tech so ideally this would be some kind of drag and drop editor - image here, text here etc.
I’ve never used Impact but there must be a setting to align your foreground content?
I tend to use warehousing but if you are only using images once on the site then it won’t make a difference. If you are using the same images in multiple places then you should definitely look at warehousing.
I don’t have a suggestion for you other than that this will likely cause more trouble than it is worth. People profiles are not something that change regularly and so I’d think it would be easiest just to do it in the first place. This will mean that the style / content is aligned too. You could maybe give people a template document to complete?
One other suggestion…I’d change the link colour away from blue as it doesn’t really fit. I’d make them the green colour that you use throughout.