arbitration site

[jon spain]

People

I would like an honest view of www.arblaw.org.uk, please! Some of the images are larger than the screen but I decided they're best left that way because of what is being covered (it was wriiten using NetObjects Fusion).

[gidgit]

Hi Jon, umm, honestly Jon, I think this sort of information would be better suited to be published as pdf ... Too much time is taken on the load of all those graphics ...

[RTK]

Jon,

You deliver a lot of information there...

I'm not sure negative text (light on dark) is the way to go. It can be very tiring to read it that way. People are used to consuming a lot of information in black (dark) on white (light). The old monitors with amber text on black were removed for a reason...

Not sure of the significance of the numbered (1, 2, 3...) links on the index page? Your "site map" is more informative as to what the content is, as far as I can tell.

The individual graphics are not all that big, and should load rather quickly even on a slow connection. I don't think you need PDFs for that sake... But it could be a nice service to have them available for download, printing, attachments and other documents also.

I'm not sure if it's proper netiquette to pre-load all those graphics when you hit the main page - it might freak out some people to see that they are loading all kinds of "things" that they don't see on-screen. Perhaps other people can provide their view on this.

For the flow-charts... You obviously spent a lot of time on them, so why not incorporate your website url in to them also? As they are spread around, more people will get a chance to visit your website, and people will see where they got them from.

The arbitration_england_wales and personal background links, when hovered - spread to the right and mess up your main content (it doesn't look all that pretty).

Some things here that I hope you will find helpful.

I think you are on your way though.

[jon spain]

Gidgit & Risto

Thanx, I'm grateful for your comments. Taking out the lefthand navbar seems to have cut out a lot of downloads and makes the page easier to see. White links have been turned into yellow and I've put the revised version at http://www.jonspain.com/arblaw/ and I shall be grateful for any thoughts, thanx again!

Jon

[jon spain]

Well, I was hoping someone might have time but I guess I was unfair to expect more from busy people. I've now updated the original website and I found eliminating the navbar speeded up just about everything!

[MerryOtter]

Jon,

This is an interesting site. It must have taken you a lot of effort to prepare all the diagrams, then overlay the "hot spots" and links.

My first thought is about the charts themselves. Is there any significance attached to whether something comes out above the central bar as opposed to below it? Is there any "order" to be followed?

My second thought is that as I clicked through it, I can't help but believe putting more work into a dynamic "core" presentation system would not be worthwhile. What I mean by this is a programmatic solution where you would maintain a simple outline somewhere and the program would automatically create the visuals. Doing something like that would enable you to update the site more easily/regularly, and do things like indicate visually which nodes are "expandable" automatically.

It's quite possible that a Xara product like "Menu Maker" or "Webstyle" might be the perfect "out of the box" solution for this kind of thing. Especially if you are not married to the precise look-and-feel of the visual charts.

I also noted there is not much in the way of annotation on the charts or "ending nodes" where I get an article about the topic or point being made. This might add significantly to the value of the site for your visitors.

Merry

[pauland]

Congratulations on the amount of information you've provided - clearly a lot of hard work has gone into the site.

My main comment is this - the colours you've chosen are probably not helping you. yellow on blue doesn't sit well with me and I'd suggest that if you want to go with a similar colour scheme you make it perhaps white on a navy blue, or consider other schemes - black on white, dark blue on white..

For me the current colours don't have enough gravitas to make me trust the information you've provided and by that I don't mean I think you're providing incorrect information, it's just that the colour scheme is giving me the wrong perception - it's too jocular for the subject matter.

In print preview, the pages dissapear completely and I think it would only be possible to print out what you've provided with great difficullty - something that's very important for a site of this kind so that people can re-read what you say offline. There are ways around this, but probably require more effort and expertise on your part. As has been said earlier, providing the information in a PDF would get around this.

Perhaps some others might like to comment about the colour scheme, on what might otherwise be a very functional site.

Don't be discouraged by my comments - I can see that there's a lot of good stuff there. If it were my site, given the nature of the content, I might be tempted to have a page with a disclaimer for errors or omissions.