Would Love Some Opinions On This Response I Recieved On Another Forum

Hello all,

I was on an Internet Marketing forum, a major one, and had ask for a review and/or critique of a squeeze
page I created. I didn't mention what I used to create it - I just wanted some opinions. And yes, I made
it in Xara Designer.

Ok, 98% was positive, but this one, the one I copied below I found interesting.... I was just wondering what
some of the more experienced, programmers types think of this.... sorry to ask you to read all this, but it
really has my curiosity up, being that I'm not a programmer by any means.

The squeeze page is http://www.thebestinternetmarketingcourse.com
And the response I'm talking about is here....

Quote:

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Header is way too large, fixed width layout is too big for my netbook and too small for my desktop, falling apart miserably and not fitting on the screen once zoomed... something is causing the border to flicker while scrolling, possibly some broken or incorrectly applied CSS.

If this is a new site, the use of a tranny doctype is basically saying to the world the code is in transition from 1997 to 1998; not exactly bleeding edge development methods. It appears to be built using presentational images in the markup, non-semantic markup, absolute positioning of elements that have no business not being in flow, inaccessible forms (thanks to that stupid malfing AWeber BS) -- it's "yet another" laundry list on how NOT to build a website... hence the 28 validation errors (which in tranny means you don't have HTML, you have gibberish), and 33.9k of markup to deliver a mere 2.7k of plaintext and MAYBE 5 or six content images and one object... basically three times the HTML that should be used.

It has nothing remotely resembling header navigation, proper document structure, semantic markup, images off or css off graceful degradation, or any of the dozen other things that are key in terms of accessibility. You've got massive slab fixed-size background images building the layout instead of letting flow do it's job -- worse you have TEXT that only exists as images, meaning search engines, screen readers, and people who block images due to bandwidth restrictions or caps basically aren't going to see anything -- just what off the shelf 'tool' did this?

"XARA HTML filter" -- no clue what that is... actually I do know what it is -- another rubbish WYSIWYG that tricks people into THINKING they can make a website; the end result often being very pretty, but ultimately useless on anything other than the magical combination of screen size and OS the person who painted it together happened to be on. In a lot of ways I'd say said page reeks of the "but I can do it in Photoshop" mentality -- which has exactly two things to do with accessible useful websites -- and Jack left town, took his **** with him. That it vomited it up as windows-1252 character encoding pretty much says all we need to know about it... Probably their "Webdesigner MX" which is basically same thing as Dreamweaver or the artist formerly known as frontpage -- only thing about them that can be considered professional grade tools are the people promoting their use.

Total page size is also MASSIVE -- 576k is ridiculous for that, but even more of a worry is it being built from 76 separate files. Handshaking ALONE that's anywhere from 12 seconds to a full minute just ASKING for the files, much less downloading them. (and anything more than 5 seconds is considered 'bad').

Though at least your description meta actually seems to try and use that for what it's actually FOR... the keywords could use a trim though since it's keyWORDS, not keysentences, not keyphrases, keyWORDS -- 7 to 8 single words with 100% relevancy to the content of the page, preferably totalling less than 128 bytes.

Basically you've drawn a pretty picture of a website using broken outdated methodologies, instead of actually building a website.

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For a moment, it bothered me.... then I realized that I was having success with it and realized it was doing what it was intended to do.
So, I guess this guy was just vomiting up his knowledge in his field...

Thanks for you time and input...

Cliff

Cliff, you will always get these guys who hand-code everything because they think that is how a site should be built, it was 10-15 years ago, but then software such as dreamweaver came in and changed that dramatically. A hell of a lot of websites these days are created initially in photoshop and then developed into sites. It seems this guy thinks that designers should keep out of web developing. The site loaded quick enough for me, and the validation errors are not that bad, even major sites will have validation errors on them, it's not something that I worry about; I have seen most web design companies proudly displaying the validation icon and when checking their site is shows up dozens of errors, try checking youtube or ebay or msn.com or windows.com and see how many errors come out.

If you must use text as images then give the image an alt text name which should help anyway. Some of the thinking out there is that cheap software such as xara is not for professionals, and the funny thing is that the same people are using free software such as wordpress to create websites. I would consider myself a professional now after 90 or so websites created for clients using xara; all of which I consider professional sites, so I can tell you that what matters is the skill of the person using the sofware not the software which creates great sites. A lot of the sites I have seen from these hand coders are frankly crap in design and worse still for seo. All my sites with seo created using xara are in the top 10 for their particular keywords and some are number 1 nationally for their keyword. I would recommend 8 to nine keywords (some 1 word, some 2, 3 and 4) but these days the keywords are not as important as they used to be, good, original and updated content is king.

I agree with Sketch. You are never going to please everybody and it is senseless to even try.

Do the best you can do and if you are happy with what you have designed, and your client is happy, then this is what really matters.

Thanks Sketch and Gary....

I feel better now........ LOL

Sketch as far as the text image and using an alt name, this site is not in the least concerned with SEO..
I drive traffic to it myself and could care less if Google disappeared tomorrow.

Thanks Guys!

Cliff

At first I thought you had all text as images but in fact I think you might have a transparent page border image covering most of the text? I don't know if it's the case or intentional but I'd suggest moving that large border image lower in the layer stack so your text is on top and is selectable and more visible seo wise. It might not matter too much but I would also suggest trying to fix the validation errors if you can. There are definately things you can do to make it better and give people like that less to complain about but if you're not bothered about seo and the site does what you want then you can probably just ignore most of the criticism and advice. Btw that auto play video is annoying, just saying :)

If the site is working well, then that's the most important thing.

Clearly your critic has some attitude, but does raise some good points and he is absolutely right in much of what he says about this particular page in comparison with a page developed by a HTML-aware web designer.

Two of the images on the page total 230K. Worse still both those images are the same image ( A web business explained ). So even without optimisation those images could be the same images, but scaled. You could easily optimise those images as jpegs - at least give it a go.

As has already been said, you should have alt text for your images. This is easily done and has been mentioned time and time again on talkgraphics.

There's no doubt that this page would have been built in a completely different way by a HTML/CSS practitioner and any HTML guy that built the page like this would be harshly criticised - but well knew that, didn't we? Xara removes the usual HTML skill level required and you have to pay for that by losing some behind the scenes elegance and flexibility.

The critic is right - the page is heavy, requires multiple accesses to the server to be loaded and in comparison with a hand-coded page is very inefficient. Most people have fast internet access and won't be too bothered.

Definitely optimise the images I mentioned earlier. To give you a comparison, those images are circa 230K. Earlier this year I built a "heavy" website with loads of animation and functionality in flash and it weights in at something like 500K. Your two images alone are almost half the size of that. And your page download is 560K - bigger, I think than the site I worked for weeks on! (in case you're wondering, my client had a lighter page loader built to engage the user because of the download delay)

Here is the result for estimated download speed:

56K	123.35 seconds
ISDN 128K	45.41 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps	13.99 seconds

I ran the HTML through here: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

Which shows how the page is made up and importantly identifies the heavyweight graphics which can be optimised.

I think the conclusion is that the page is doing it's job, so great, but it's certainly true that this is, in normal web terms, a highly inefficient page with a comparatively slow load time that you can and should optimise for download speed and SEO benefit.

Your critic may be harsh, but he has correctly identified things you can improve upon.

OK Here's a second thought. I revisited the site and figured out how to get Chris Ferrel to shut up (I really do not like websites where some overly enthusiastic spokesperson starts yelling at me--I'm sensitive). You are selling Internet Marketing here correct?

Even though page load time is not important to you, it should be for most persons trying to market their goods and services on the Internet. So in this respect, your site should load almost instantly. And looking at the page, even though there is a lot going on, it seems like the page should load faster than the times Paul is showing. As a designer who worked for 15 years in advertising and had my own graphic design business for 12 years, I think the site design is too cluttered and lacks a central focus. I understand the need to communicate the idea of there being a lot of activity and energy but this is not what I am getting out of the page layout. I might be a design snob and maybe this design is perfect for your target audience.

You may remember the early Sharper Image advertising. And before that, I forget the guys name who used to do those full page ads in the airline magazines. Those ads were always persuasive and while they hammered you in ten different ways telling you why their product was so revolutionary and why you HAD to have it, they did it in a very clever and organized way. And they did it mostly with simple visuals and well crafted ad copy. I think your site could benefit from being simplified and more focused.

Great post Gary.

Once again,

Thanks to all... always much to learn....

Cliff

I hope my criticism is helpful. I know I unloaded both barrels. :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by gwpriester

I hope my criticism is helpful. I know I unloaded both barrels. :)

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Gary, if you're speaking to me, you couldn't insult me even if you tried. With all I've gained from you since
becoming a Xara person, I am eternally grateful.

Cliff

This post resurrects my own post regarding the Xara tag in the heading, where so-called "experts" can take a pot shot at it like this guy has done. I reckon it was the icing on the cake for this guy during his utlra-critical tirade, he landed in heaven when he saw that and added it to all the other ridiculous "flaws". I reckon the website looks good, loads perfectly OK for me and gets the message across as far as I can see. ( Except the text and auto staring video). But these are minor gripes that should not detract from a professional looking site that did not cost hundreds of hours or too much money, for which the client must be happy about? The guy who did the criticizing can continue to spout his expertise to corporations whilst we guys get the website designs out as clean and pertinent as we can for very little outlay. Keep up the good work Cliff. (and everyone else on here)

The critic on the other forum didn't need the Xara tag to know it was produced by design software, but you're welcome to ask for it's removal. This is very old ground that been discussed thoroughly in another thread.

I am not going to get into the design side of the site as the original post was about the guts of the site and I went over to the analyze site and to be honest it seems about 10 years out of date, I mean why on earth are they showing 56k or isdn at 128k, you would think that they would have updated the speed settings to match what is out there. I mean I am set in the middle of the yorkshire dales with a 50meg connection (actually speed tested at 25meg) so sites; even fairly large ones are loaded instantly. According to the site speedtest.net (which measures actual internet speed) the average uk speed is 17.14meg and in the USA it is 13.77, russia is 14.47, australia is 11.58meg and the top 4 countries are over 30meg with even mongolia which we always think of being in the middle of nowhere is 11.37meg in fact the top 100 countries are over 4meg - my point is why worry about what speed your site uploads on a 56k modem?

By the way the site is http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries/

You're right - I just cut and pasted the last few rows from the table in the analysis.

My internet speed is 10MB, so way below average. There are a lot of rural places in the UK and elsewhere that do not have fast speeds. I have cable but the BT phone system that my speed would be about 2.5MB.

In many ways the average is irrelevant - what counts is what most of your users are using. A 500MB web page will never be loaded by anyone on a slower speed connection and what about those who are browsing on an iPad or other mobile device - they won't have fast download speeds.

All that said, it never harms to optimise a web page. The page can probably lose close on 200K of download through some simple optimisation of two images.

Why exclude some users from your site when it is simple to make it more accessible?

Cliff if it helps... I've just gone onto your website. I use Google Chrome. It loaded right away [have no idea what my connection speed is]. It loaded without issues or any apparent waiting time. And every item on your page appears to work as it is designed to. I wonder if any of the usability issues or visual issues such as flikering borders and the like were because they were loading your page in IE or Firefox or some other browser?

Cliff,
Based on my last 12 months excursion into the world of internet marketing would say:

1. You are totally correct... "he's vomiting".

2. You have given class to the term "squeeze page".

3. The social networking icons you provided add utility not always seen on squeeze pages and should pay off.

4. Noticing concerns over download time, checked it out at webpagetest.org. They report initial download at 3.45 seconds, and second download at 1.57 seconds. Since time is dependent on locations and browsers the site allows selection to suit, so different answers for different folks. (You got an "A" on image compression).

5. The page looked great on my iPad, so forget the stuff about screen size. Only thing is iPads don't show flash, so if you had placed the video on YouTube and embedded it, that that would work. On the other hand, if you're tracking the site you know what kind of browsers your Viewers use, and it may not be a concern.

6. Regardless of all else if the site is doing its job for your client, who cares?

My best

Vern

You already have a 5, Vern. Is this 5a?

Thanks Gary ...

Ya gotta watch em every minute.

;)

I spent many years coding everything by hand, refining things down to the byte, and running my sites through every compliance checker imaginable. As the webmaster at a college that received a fair amount of traffic, this was the right choice. It's even more important if your site is receiving massive traffic, as every piece of bloat is magnified a million times.

All that being said, nowadays on my personal sites I build just about everything in Xara. For the traffic levels the types of sites most folks here are building, with just the smallest degree of caution the page size difference is completely insignificant considering the speed of most connections, and the pages are often actually leaner than many template driven solutions. While the perfectionist is toiling on refining a single site to pristine authenticated beauty (and having to stay on top of every annoying hack to maintain browser compatibility) you can build 10+ sites in Xara. And for many situations, that is exactly the right choice.