All,

I've just put up a new website on our Mississippi River trip to support the Audubon Society. If you've got a few minutes, how about taking a look and seeing what you think, what needs to be added/taken out, wording, etc. I'm trying to get this thing cleaned up before the book comes out in a couple of months.

Thank you in advance,
-John

http://www.sourcetosea.net

7/13/2006 2:00:49 AM

I really like the color palette (the light blue and light brown), as well as the subtle diagonal lines at the top. I also like the inclusion of the contact form, as well as the clean, simple navigation.

One thing I think it might slightly lack is a compelling image on the initial homepage. Perhaps an image that spans the entire width (beside the navigation bar) of the Mississippi would be more alluring initially than the present vertical shot (though I do like that shot).

You guys have some good photography in there, and it looks like the trip was a blast.

Keep up the good work man.

-ZiP!-

7/13/2006 2:23:17 AM

i think the title panels looks a bit generic, like you'd see it on any blog, same thing with the title font

i personally don't like webpage headers that use actual web font rendering to make a title because of the aliasing at higher sizes, it looks cheap to me

oh and the nav at the bottom is weird - the extra | at the end

and you may want to add a © before the 2006 if the book is copyrighted

other than that seems ok to me

[Edited on July 13, 2006 at 2:54 AM. Reason : title nazi]

7/13/2006 2:52:16 AM

something like this maybe (yay insomnia)

7/13/2006 3:39:13 AM

^ yeah I like that better than the generic title bar. Otherwise the site's nice and doesn't suffer from too much flash, like so many other sites do.

7/13/2006 7:30:05 AM

why's there no page4? seriously though, and this is way picky, but rename your pages to something a little more descriptive. otherwise, looks pretty clean

oh, what's the story with the white, blue and blue bars above the search form?

[Edited on July 13, 2006 at 7:50 AM. Reason : and use bigman's title image. much purtier]

7/13/2006 7:48:26 AM

Thank you for the comments. I really do appreciate them.

I did this with Rapidweaver, using their templates, hence some of the genericness. I'm sure you can go into the code somewhere and change the banner, but I have no idea how to do it. That's the part that drives me most up the wall.

I'm going to change that photo on the homepage. It's there more as a marker than anything else. I'd also like to add a map to the sidebar with clickable links to our journals by the section of river we were on. While I'm at it, I'd also like to put some internal links at the top of the link page that would hop to the appropriate section down the page.

I'm a complete idiot with this stuff and am fumbling my way through. Again, I really appreciate the comments.

7/13/2006 9:07:14 AM

i agree overall with everyone here - nice site so far. for being a "complete idiot", it could have turned out a lot worse (http://www.ncsuliving.com/ anyone?)

additional comments to what everyone else has said:
- definately do something about the URLs of each page. Make them descriptive, and don't nest single pages inside directories. e.g. why do sourcetosea.net/page1/page1.html when you can just do sourcetosea.net/page1.html . Better yet though, do sourcetosea.net/sponsors.html, sourcetosea.net/photography.html, sourcetosea.net/meetus.html, etc

- why do the photography and "meet john.." pages have a black/gray template? It looks OK, but i don't see why it doesn't use the blue/tan like the other pages.

- lose the 2 blue bars above the search box

- do you only want the search box on the front page? seems to me, people would be more inclined to actually perform a search when they're on your journal pages, which don't actually have search boxes. actually, does the search even really work? I'm not sure that form is set up correctly....

- I'm generally a fan of putting 3-8px of margin at the top of the page to pull the header off the top just a bit. You could try that to see how it looks, but it's still fine this way.

- do something about the footer. If you put links in the footer, I would add "Home | Contact". Otherwise, just leave the links out and leave the copyright. I would also include the footer in the main content box instead of having it hanging there in the middle of space in the tan backgroud. To differentiate it from the main content, put it on a light gray background or something, and make it not as tall as it is now.

- I don't know how much more effort you want to put into this, or if you're still continusously updating the site, but I would consider moving it to a CMS or a blogging engine like Wordpress. You can easily import this template into Wordpress, then make static pages for all your normal pages, but use the blogging features for your journal entries. This will make it much easier to manage your journals, and you'll get all the added benefits of Wordpress, like integrated search, permalinks for individual journal entries, user comments, updates from any computer.
As I look through the journal entries, though, it appears this was just a one-time thing, and it's not really going to be updated anymore? Just cleaning it up for the release of the book? If so, it's probably not worth the effort to move into WP or anything - just get it looking a little better with all the suggestions here.


--
^if you're having problems updating the HTML manually (i've never used RapidWeaver, but i'm sure you can get into a code-edit mode somehow).
You should be able to save that image from BigMan into your /images folder. Then open styles.css and look for
#pageHeader {
height: 100px;
background: url(images/header_bg.png) repeat-x;
text-align: center;
position: relative;
}

change that to
#pageHeader {
height: 100px;
background: url(images/sts.jpg) no-repeat;
text-align: center;
position: relative;
}

then go into your regular template and delete all the text from the header. i think that should do it for you.


[Edited on July 13, 2006 at 10:34 AM. Reason : .]

[Edited on July 13, 2006 at 10:35 AM. Reason : .]

7/13/2006 10:29:40 AM

The color changes were just something to monkey around with. I'm going to stick with the blue for now.

I'll take a look at the search thing. I thought it was set up but what the hell do I know.

Honest to god I've used this program all of two weeks and am still learning just the basics. The URLS are a big example of this. I'm assuming that if i change the file from "page3.html" to "photography.html" or whatever the URL will change and not get screwed up in the process?

I'm bagging the footers, just as soon as i figure out how to do it. They look like shit. Keeping the copyright though.

The trip journals are static. I might link to a blog, but I'm also going to be sending out monthly newsletters and including them as another button on the side. We'll see.

I'd love to change that banner, and will do it once all the other basic stuff is ironed out.

Again folks, thank you.

-John, the noob "webmaster"

7/13/2006 11:11:12 AM

dont really like the changing of themes on different navigation buttons. fairly simple, hard to go wrong

7/13/2006 11:29:51 AM

yea just stick with the blue.

the black is no good.

Other than that, it's clean, easily readable, and I think it's an EXCELLENT website for someone who is new to the process. GREAT JOB

7/13/2006 11:59:01 AM

Thank you, but it's much more the software than anything else. I'm really enjoying the process though, and will probably take a course at Wake Tech to learn more about the basics. I do like sort of knowing what's going on rather than farming everything out.

I was just pressed for time to get this thing in better shape. The book's coming out in October and our old site was really thrown together needed replacement. It was just some "website tonight" thing that limited us to 7 pages or something.

Thanks ya'll,

-John

[Edited on July 13, 2006 at 12:15 PM. Reason : .]

7/13/2006 12:13:53 PM

has nice appeal to it, but it looks like a wordpress blog. good job, and keep up the good work.

7/13/2006 2:05:21 PM

did you just add that guestbook link?
was that included as a rapidweaver option - to use "Advanced Guestbook" in an iFrame?

first, go into the Advanced Guestbook administration and update the color scheme to match the rest of the site.
second, try to save guestbook.html as guestbook.php. Then go into the code for that page, remove the entire <iframe>.....</iframe> section, and instead add
<?php include 'http://sourcetosea.net/advancedguestbook/addentry.php';?>

that will make it so the guestbook is actually an integrated part of your page, not just as an ugly scrolling inline frame. The content frame will stretch and grow as the guestbook grows, instead of the iframe just getting longer and harder to scroll.

7/13/2006 4:28:55 PM

mawfawka straight busted out "http://www.ncsuliving.com/"

ahahahaha

-ZiP!-

7/14/2006 1:23:51 AM

Agentlion,

Yes, just added the guestbook, and yes, it looks like shit. I'd like to just do something like the Contact Me form that's on their - simple, clean, and direct. I can't stand flash, blinking shit, autorun music, or any of that kind of shit on a website.

I'll try and monkey with what you said to do. I might just add the blog and let people comment on that. From a long-term marketing perspective though, it'd be nice to have the guestbook to collect emails so I can sen out announcements and such with an opt-out feature.

7/14/2006 8:33:53 AM

also be aware that, especially when your book gets out or media sites link to your site, your guestbook will get slammed with spam. I dont' know if Advanced Guestbook has advanced (or any) spam filtering, so you might end up spending a lot of time going through and deleting lots and lots of messages. Most good blogging engines, however, have pretty good built-in or add on spam filters.

7/14/2006 9:44:42 AM

That's what I've heard. We didn't have the guestbook thing when we were on the river and getting a shitload of visits/day,not that I could have managed it from the canoe in any case.

So what do you think is the best plan? Maybe do some sort of "sign up for our free newsletter" thing that emails us like the comment page in addition to a blog instead of the guestbook? I'm really not going to have time to ride herd over spam all the time.

[Edited on July 14, 2006 at 10:11 AM. Reason : .]

7/14/2006 10:09:49 AM

just require approval before comments are posted. it will keep out 99% of the spammers just because they Assume you will catch their crap

7/14/2006 10:16:48 AM

Good idea. We're going to be doing the newsletter and update thing anyway so I'll add the signup page when that comes around. I'll play with the guestbook changes but it looks to be a real pain in the ass. I'd like to just add some plain-jane off the shelf guestbook from somewhere if possible. We'll see.

Again - ya'll rock. Thanks for everything. I made more changes yesterday and am dealing with the html folders and whatnot today.

7/14/2006 10:42:26 AM