Bonneville America Forums Forums Off Topic Discussion Forums Lounge Website suggestions

Hi all,

I've been working on a website for my father's shop and I was hoping I to get some feedback from some of you. Any suggestions would be helpful but what I'm looking for in particular is: loading speed, too slow? (I've been debating building a light version of the site for those with slower internet speeds, worth the trouble or not? ), is it easy to navigate? dead/broken links (I haven't found any yet), general suggestions on how to make the site better. Thanks all!
Here's the site: www.234motorsports.com

My computer is slow as c#@p but it seemed to load ok. The layout is good but does your dads' shop have a logo you could add to the main page? That would be my only suggestion. Cool trikes by the way.

Thanks Night Rider. We're working on the logo, they have one, I just have to get it. The idea is to have it in one of the top corners of every page and have it link back to the home page. Thanks again!

Loads fine for me.....good looking site !!!

Looks good to me , 'cept the guy on the flatracker is about to hit a huge sheet of black ice . Must be real cold up there .

Site seems to work fine.

Just rode through that area with Snert going to and from the NE Septemeber Rally. Wish we'd have known - we could have stopped in for a bit.

There's an awful lot of "whitespace" even though it's technically black. I want to see a logo and maybe some sort of photo (or photos or graphic) masthead at the top where it says 2-3-4 Motorsports. And tighten things up a bit. A little nip, a little tuck. Other than that it looks pretty good.

Here's something I've been working on over the past couple months for one of my poker buddies.

http://www.ellisonforcitycommission.org/

You want help with the logo? I have an idea, but you have to clarify what the 2-3-4 means. I'd hate to get it wrong.

P.S. Is there some reason why the sub-pages don't follow the same format as the homepage (the image in the background, shown on the left and right of the content area)?

Okay I read what 2-3-4 means...

Now I'm gonna vote for Dan Ellison , he's our guy .

Thanks for the input. I really appreciate it. Nice work Friar, the layout of your site is very user friendly. Everything is there where it should be.

The lay out for the homepage was a little more "showy" with some pictures and other things but it just ended up feeling too crowded. Getting the balance correct is truly an art. As for the layout being different on some of the pages, it sometimes depended on the content and I would like to get a different background pic for each page, one of the main reasons I haven't done that is that I was worried it would bog the site down too bad. Now that I know that that isn't an issue (thanks to all of you) I'll work on getting everything uniform. Thanks again for all your comments and suggestions. I'll mess with it as I get time and keep you all updated.

I like it.

He he.. a mac user... recognized the iWeb layout there.

If your site is not going to grow too much, then iWeb will do a decent job (although if you start changing pages often, it will start messing with the code... an example is the Bikes for Sale page, Safari renders it fine, but Camino is not reading it well)

If you ever grow past 20 pages or so, may I suggest Joomla?
It is a CMS and it might look difficult to use the first time you look at it, but it is very nice and easy to design a full website once you get the way it works. It has a huge pool of users and information forums, and best of all... it's free (Open Source)

What's iWeb? I don't have a Mac. I'm running Wordpress on Dreamhost with a modified 3rd party theme called Fusion.

Oh, wait, were you picking on speeducky?

Percevan, You nailed it. Everything was done on iweb. I'll probably stick with it for now as it's very easy to manage and update for me. I'm slowly picking through some of the glitches with the code. I haven't figured out how to manually go in and change it yet but I have learned that some of the buttons will help with alignment and what not (and by default the code, although I have sat down with some friends who are much more savy than I to look at the code, and their response has always been something along the lines of "what the?") The lesson that Safari displays differently than other browsers was one of the first I learned. Haha, the site looked fine when viewing on safari but when I got to work and looked it up on InternetExplorer it was all jacked up. Thanks for the tip on Joomla, the fact that it's free and has a good support network is a real perk. What's up with the bikes for sale page using Camino? If it's a simple alignment issue I may be able to fix it, if it's anything else it may take some figuring.

Friar, iweb is web design for idiots, if you can manipulate powerpoint, you can use iweb. It does have it's shortfalls but so far I like it and my mac

Don't worry, I didn't say there was anything wrong to put up something using iWeb. It's a great little app when one doesn't want/need to deal with coding (I did do a few small sites using it).

May I suggest another little app called htmltidy to help clean up the code a bit. It won't repair the major mistakes that iWeb does sometimes introduce, but it will help a little.

Here's what I see with Camino, although Firefox and Safari have no problem rendering the page correctly:


Since only the very few still use Camino, I wouldn't bother too much (only 1.1% of my website traffic use Camino). I am stuck with it because of all the setup and bookmarks I already have and the transfer to another browser would be a pain...

PS... What? FriarJohn... you are not using a Mac? .. well nobody is perfect, at least you got good taste regarding motorcycles ..

Heh, I like to build my own computers and these days there isn't anything you can do on a mac you can do on a PC that I want or need to do.

Make sure your phone # is large and on every page.

I'm just glad I could get a mac vs PC debate going on a motorcycle site that is strange what it's doing on Camino, I'll try the htmltidy to see if that may help. Thanks perceval.


Thanks for all the help and suggestions everyone.

Deon, you definitely should stop in nest time you are through the area. There are some amazing back roads close to the shop.

Matt, I'm pretty sure the phone # is on every page, in the top left. Should it be larger or are there pages missing it? I'll double check on my own to ensure that it's there. Thanks.