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....

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.
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