Webuser Forums: The new improved Ultimatehandyman (hopefully)

For starters the best thing about your site is that it has lots of excellent interesting "sticky" content with which to attract visitors to the site.

However, if it's okay, I've noted a few things:

The overall feel of the site is that it looks unfinished. The homepage doesn't really give a lot away, so users don't really get much of an impression for what your site has to offer. While there is a wealth of useful information on the site, first time visitors might be inclined to go elsewhere because it feels like it's a work-in-progress.

For example, if you could group together the links which are scattered around the page, such as the Disclaimer, DIY Forum and Contact together with the A-Z Contents / About me etc. that would tie things up nicely. At the moment, the Disclaimer etc. link looks very lost, as do the DIY Forum etc. links.

The search form also looks rather lost out there on it's own.

A big improvement might be to centre align your main table (I'm just looking at the homepage here) and set it's width to less that 96% - perhaps 80% for example. You could then give your page a background colour and that would give some form to the page.

I made a test page here:

http://jimpix.co.uk/images/wu/uhm3.htm

By grouping the non-DIY links at the top of the page, it helps give some balance to the page, and adding in a bit of colour to the nav elements also helps the user get a feel for things.

The thing that really struck me about your pages is that Front Page really does write very "cludgy" html which is not very intuitive or helpful.

For example, on defining the HTML for a DIY link it does this:




<a href="PLASTERING_CENTRE.htm">Plastering</a>




By using something like CSS / Cascading Style Sheets you could change that to something far more simple like:


<a href="PLASTERING_CENTRE.htm">Plastering</a>


You could then use your stylesheet to define the colour and appearance of your links, instead of putting it in your HTML.

This is another great piece of Front Page "bloat":


 
<o:p>

<a href="http://www.ultimatehandyman.co.uk/forum1/index.php">
<img border="0" src="DIY_Forum2.gif" ALT="DIY forum" width="154" height="30">
</a>
 
...

That could be replaced with:


<a href="http://www.ultimatehandyman.co.uk/forum1/index.php">
<img border="0" src="DIY_Forum2.gif" ALT="DIY forum" width="154" height="30">
</a>


In the long run, it'd probably make life easier for you to learn about PHP (since I see you have PHP hosting as your forum uses it). You could then use PHP / include files / CSS to build up your pages. That will in the long run give you a lot more flexibility.

For example, by using include files, you could have a 500 page site, and each page could "include" a file which contains your navigation elements (e.g. your list of links on the left). If you then find you want to add in a new section, you could just add it into the single include file, and then upload that, and all other pages containing that include file will be automatically updated - you wouldn't need to upload them all over again.

There's plenty on the web about include files. I wrote an "article" about how I used them on my site here:

http://www.jimpix.co.uk/words/asp_includes.asp

Also, what might make your pages cleaner and leaner would be to drop the use of HTML tables to control layout, and use CSS instead. CSS could also be used to control the colour of your text, and the appearance of your links - just about anything in fact.

Apologies for plugging my site here, but...

This page uses CSS to control layout and appearance:

http://www.jimpix.co.uk/gb/

but, without the use of stylesheets, it looks like this:

http://www.jimpix.co.uk/gb/Default.asp?rcss=zeros

Anyway, those were my thoughts. I think you have a really great site - if you have time to teach yourself things like php includes / CSS to control appearance and layout that would really help, as would learning about HTML from the ground up, which would allow you to get rid of Front Page! I think FP is good for starters, but for such a big site with such a lot of great content, then there are better alternatives.

I used to use Dreamweaver myself, but having an old PC I found it too slow to run, so I got into writing html by hand, and it has really helped me to learn about html and how things bolt together.

W3schools is useful for starters:

http://www.w3schools.com/css/
http://www.w3schools.com/php/
http://www.w3schools.com/php/php_includes.asp

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http://www.jimpix.co.uk/