Website Feedback

[Guest]

Welcome to the For The Love Of Port Website and Forum. Our goal here is deliver the best Port-related site on the Web.

Your feedback is very important to improving our site, so please post any requests, problems with the site, etc. here.

You may also email [email protected].

Thanks for your supPORT!

Administrator
For The Love Of Port

[*John Trombley]

--and best of luck for all your new endeavors!

Hello to Dorene and Taylor.

[Roy Hersh]

Thank you John. Believe it or not, the Administrator of this BB is not me. Stewart Todd is the man with that plan. I handle the content and he works his magic behind the scenes. He will normally be the guy responding to suggestions or questions on this particular section of the Forum.

Ihr Freund,

[Alan Rath]

Some friendly feedback: I know Stewart put some nice effort into the Intro, but I find these pretty graphics a bit frustrating (at least after you've seen it the first time, and just want to get to the main page). I know it's a common approach, but consider just jumping directly to your index2 page. Now, if you can send me the smells as well as the sound of a glass being poured, that might be different Not a big deal, just my first impressions.

One possible bug: On my screen here at work, the index2_1 and index2_4 jpg's are displaced, and the "For the Love of Port" text is chopped up. I don't see a _2 or _3 jpg.

Regards,
Alan

[Roy Hersh]

Alan,

Thanks for the feedback. I will wait for Stewart to chime in on the techno stuff, as I am out of my realm there.

I can tell you that you can immediately go to the Home Page ... by clicking on the "SKIP INTRO" button in the middle of the page with the bottle pouring. We are only going to leave that page up for a short while anyway (3 or 4 years at most!) so don't worry. This button was available even before the site launched on Saturday.

[Alan Rath]

Interestingly, the main page (after Intro) looks fine here at home. Difference is I'm running 1280x1024 here, and the front page actually takes up only about 60% of the screen. Not sure what I've got at work, probably 800x600. Netscape in both cases.

Alan

[Guest]

I did some tweaking to the graphics tables, so take a look and let me know if you notice any difference in the graphics on your work computer.

Ah, the Web developer's holy grail - finding the right resolution for pages.

When considering designs, our initial thoughts were to develop the site at a fixed width that would show full-screen at 800x600. The down side is that at a fixed width, a higher resolution monitor will show the site only taking up a portion of the available real estate on your screen.

As of June 2005, Web metrics analytics reveal that approximately
11% are running at Higher than 1024x768
56% are running at 1024x768
28% are running at 800x600
5% are running at "unknown"

While a majority of users on the Web can handle the higher resolution designs, there are still almost 30% that run at a lower screen size, thus we decided to have a more compact design for this launch. (if you've ever had to scroll left to right to read a home page, as 800x600 users would have to do with a wider design) you know what a pain that is.

Roy and I see this design as an evolving, and we'll be taking the feedback to refine the design and usability (including dropping the splash page after our "launch" period) and making modifications as we move forward.

Thanks for the feedback! We're here to make this site the most friendly, useful Port site on the Web!

[Alan Rath]

Stewart, not complaining, just giving you some feedback to help with fixing things up on a new site. Turns out I'm running at 1024x768 at work. The top set of jpg graphics still looks the same. Looking a little more carefully now, it appears that your top-most jpg (index2_1) is displaced to the left. On my screen, the upper part of the "L" in Love is actually above the lower part of the "F" in For.

Hmm, I just fired up IE, and it looks fine there, so I'm guessing some kind of Netscape incompatibility. The rest of the pages look fine, and this Forum is perfect, so you should probably just ignore my feedback

As for screen resolution, the front page fits perfectly on my 1024x768 configured screen (I keep the window at about 80% of the total screen width, so I still have quick access to my desktop). The main problem with designing for 800x600 is that your special fonts (like the index2_14.jpg selection list on the left of the screen) get pretty small. I would consider designing for 1024x768, and let the 800x600 folks (who are shrinking in demographics, and probably even a smaller percentage of people who might use this site), fend for themselves. A hard decision, I know.

Anyway, what you've done so far looks very nice! I particularly like Roy in a coat and tie, as opposed to the shorts and tee-shirt you had up at first

Cheers,
Alan

[Alan Rath]

Since I don't have FTLOP shortcut'ed yet, I wondered if you had grabbed ftlop.com. Too bad those For the Love of Pets
people got there first!

[Roy Hersh]

I was thinking of trading them a 60 second TV spot in trade for FTLOP.com and a first round draft pick, but decided against it.