Please review www.stankoproducts.com

I'm working on this site, www.stankoproducts.com, for a family business. Any suggestions or critiques would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance for all your help.

Here's some help.. Since you have stuck to the simple retro model, that leaves you plenty of room to tell people what you do in a big way!

If it were, I would first get rid of the logo as an image and I would make it text and an H1 at that

Then under that, I would MOST CERTAINLY tell people in big type h2, what this site is .. or what the company does.. or what the USP is.. or something.

I still have no idea what the company is. I didnt take the time to investigate either.

also Id say take the page background to a lighter grey. Cut that grey in half or more.

o i see. its a tool and die company..

Man.. put that big somewhere.. so people get that immediatly. otherwise, whats the point of the site..

matter of fact .. allow me to ask you THAT.. what IS the purpose of the site?

Thanks for the suggestions. I actually just changed the "banner" section from text to the image to see how I liked it and planned to switch it back this weekend. I will look into changing the background color and updating the information, especially the main page. Thanks for the suggestions.

Heck yeah man.. just always think clean clean.. like for instance, with as few images as you have, you don't need to super compress them .. keep em nice and clean..

But again, I ask.. what's the point of the site...

Is this just a fun fun project for you? Are you just trying to help you family? Does their business need some extra exposure?

Little bit of "fun project" and trying to get some extra exposure for the business. I'm really just tooling around on it in my free time, but I prefer to make it look the best I can.

You've used presentation classnames, such as "p.center", think in terms of what it is, not how it should appear when naming selectors (classnames and ids inclusive)

I'm not too sure of red-on-grey

And instead of using images, use properly marked up text, such as <address> for your address, and <h1> for the title.

I do commend your attempts at standards compliance, nice to know the message is getting through

Like I said before, if I'm going to take the time to do the site I'm going to try to do it well. Thanks for the advice on naming the classes and id's. The red and grey color scheme are the companies colors, not my choice. Just trying to keep the site in line with their stuff. Also, as I mentioned above, I had the text for the "banner" area but changed it yesterday to see if I liked it better (I didn't like it either) so it's going back to text. Thanks for your advice so far and any more would be appreciated.

(After being requested by PM....)

Web Standards Man (myself) reviews and grades sites in 4 categories:

• Code Validation [ 0 = Disregard for code, 1 = Virtually none, 2 = Some attempt, 3 = Transitional, 4 = Strict, 5 = XHTML1.0 Strict / 1.1 ]
• Aesthetics [ 0 = You can guess, 1 = FrontPage Themes, 5 = CSSZenGarden or better ]
• Accessibility [ 0 = Negative usability (eg JavaScript generated menus), 1 = None, 2 = Alt text, etc.../ some attempt, 5 = True content/appearance separation and renders fine in Lynx and Jaws
• Coding Practices [ -1 = Low-End WYSIWYG tools used obstienciously, 0 = No effort whatsoever, 1 = Excessive tables for layout, etc..., 5 = Semantic XHTML w/ CSS ]

so lets see how your site scores up:

Code Validation:

Flawless implementation of XHTML1.1 and CSS it completely validates on both accounts.

You get 5/5

Aesthetics:

You said (was it in PM? I forget) that the Red-on-grey thing wasn't your descision, but it is hampering the aesthetics of the site.... Sorry, but it really is just plain ugly

Grey disappeared from the WWW back in 1998 when Netscape decided to change the default web-page color

You get 1/5

Accessibility:

Your images are properly alt'd (although language like: "The SPI Logo" is preferred over just "SPI Logo")

You've correctly marked up practically everything on the other pages... For the first time ever I see someone using <dl><dt><dd> for forms, nice one

However, your use of Flash on the "Parts" page isn't really defensible, consider replacing it with a marked-up version instead.

You get 4/5

Coding Practices

Overall, your code is semantic

However, there are some issues with your CSS classnames, consider replacing them with "functional" names that describe what the element does, rather than what it should appear like.

Note that classes are meant for repated elements, you've used them as unique selectors, in which case you use the ID hook/selector.

4/5

Total Score: 14/20

...Which is the highest score I've ever given. Kudos to you

You were really let down in aesthetics, however.

1 point i would make is although your flash images on your parts page, looks good, but it takes ages to load even on broadband and by the time it had loaded in i was board, I would hate to think how long it would take to load on dial up. even in th cache normal images would be quicker cos of the way it as the images loading.

Plus your form validation isn't upto much i doesn't even check is its a valid email address.

Your status bar message reads 'for visitng'. I'm making a big guess, but I guess it should say 'for visiting'.

Consider that altering the status bar is a big "no no" as far as web usability goes. The user should be able to trust the browser chrome, hence why I'm also against changing the colour of the scrollbars.

I agree!