Scottish Munro Website

Paul Saunders

James wrote:
> Please check out my newly updated, private Munroing website -
>
> The Alternative Munros at
>
> http://www.jamesmccomasproperty.net
>
> comments appreciated!

My main criticism would be the same as Duncan's, your photos are much too
large. It's not a problem for someone with broadband, but even then, your
images are much larger than they're displayed on the page. For example, one
of your images seems to be roughly 1024 pixels wide on the page, but the
actual image loaded is 2272 pixels wide and nearly 1 megabyte in size!
That's a massive waste time for anyone still on dial-up, and a massive waste
of bandwidth for you (which could become a problem if your site becomes
really popular).

In fact, not only should your images be smaller, but it's far better to use
thumbnails to link to the larger images. That way your pages will load much
faster and people can choose to click on the thumbnail if they really want
to see the larger version.

I've glanced quickly at the source code and you seem to be using Yahoo Page
Builder, whatever that is, so you may not have much control over things. I'd
recommend using a better web page editor though, because that one looks
awful. For one thing it's using layers and they're not displaying correctly
on my browser (I'm using Firefox). Some of the text is overlapped by the
images on some pages. One page (page5) seems to be empty, until you scroll
down far enough to see that it isn't.

I also notice something about page width being set to 1050 or 1070 pixels.
This is too wide. Most people use resolutions of at least 1024x768 these
days, but you'll be alienating a lot of people by going wider. Nobody likes
horizontal scrolling on a web page. There are still many people who think
that a web page should be no wider than 800 pixels, but I disagree, that's
only 5% or less of people these days. Anyway, even if you design a page for
a 1024 wide resolution, you should allow for scroll bars. Depending on the
actual browser used it's unwise to go wider than say 980 pixels, but to play
it safe I'd recommend 960 pixels, which happens to be an excellent number
for divisibility.

Paul
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