Re: Volunteer work:)- new Kona Coffee Farmers site

beans@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:55:47 -0400, David Rivers <david@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Donn Cave wrote:
I adjusted the colors per Donn's suggestions. Thanks.
After I posted my comment, I realized that much of its tone was arrogant, which was unwarranted. I also hope to do more than "sound" professional. I'd like to actually offer some insight, so I will try to explain some of my criticisms.

SEO is search engine optimization, which concerns itself with how well your page is indexed by Google or the other search engines. (In the U.S., Google and Yahoo hold most of the market share, followed by Microsoft's Live Search and Ask.com. These stats, of course, vary somewhat by your target demographic.) Good SEO involves many aspects of the page design, including (but certainly not limited to) well-structured HTML documents, appropriate HTML <meta> tags and <title> tags, semantic HTML, keyword-optimized (essentially what is called "friendly") URLs, a good domain name (which I forgot to mention you guys have covered), and copious, keyword-dense content. (Also many search engine ranking criteria are private trade secrets.) A page's structure is very important because header tags <h1> through <h6> should demarcate a web page's structural hierarchy, just as a well-planned URL scheme should demarcate the entire site's hierarchy. These headings should be found throughout your HTML documents. Search engines use them to determine relevancy. An appropriate <meta> keywords tag will also show relevancy of your document, and an enticing <meta> description tag is sometimes what's shown by a search engine in the description of a page when it's returned as a search result. If you're unfamiliar with these HTML tags, check out www.w3schools.com for more info. (The World Wide Web Consortium is an authority on Web technologies, and their W3Schools site is an excellent resource for tutorials on these technologies.)

I stress SEO because it's great to have a website, but sort of pointless if no one can find it. Also many of these SEO issues are also accessibility and usability issues. Accessibility is concerned with how the document is read by, for example, text-only browsers such as Lynx, which might utilize an application to speak the text aloud or convert to Braille for blind users. (Which reminds me that all of your images should have a descriptive "alt" attribute, which describes each image to said disabled users.) It's coincidence that many of these SEO principles also apply to accessibility. Usability is also affected. If a page has description headers, you can better scan the document for the information you're looking for. You can also better find the correct document if they're demarcated with appropriate meta information.

The tables versus <div> tags is probably not worth worrying about. Tables used to be used, before CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) were well supported by major browsers, to lay out a document. Now they really should only be used if you have, say, an actual table of facts and figures, or some other kind of "table". This is an example of semantic markup. Although HTML is a loosely, at best, semantic markup language, you should try to mark up your documents with semantic HTML tags as best as you can to maximize SEO and accessibility/usability. (More info. on table-less layouts: http://www.w3.org/2002/11/homepage)

Basically, we're left with the design of the page. Assuming that people can actually find your site, they get to see it! I do like some of your design elements. The beans background is an example of an appropriate, attractive, unobtrusive background image. Unedited photos as background are falling out of favor in moder web page designs, but I think they can be done effectively, such as in your usage.

The main graphics are also visually appealing, although I'm not sure the focus is where it should be, or if there really is any focus whatsoever. When you first look at the page, what are you first drawn to? What's your initial impression? I suppose when I look at this page it looks like it's for a coffee seller, not really a growers' organization. Perhaps the association's logo should be more prominent?

The layout of the home page seems like an afterthought. Up top you have a three-column layout that degrades into a 2 boxes, and then one column of copy. The center-aligning of text isn't aiding symmetry. The layout of content and appropriate usage if whitespace (the lack of content) is an important consideration that should probably be rethinked. Most websites follow the 2- or 3-column layout. Here is some example code you can scrap: http://www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/page_layouts/

As for the colors "needing adjusting". Allow me to elucidate this ambiguous remark. Just as the placement of content on your page ought to be thought-out and well-balanced, so do your color choices. Sometimes a good way to come up with some appropriate colors is to use an "eyedropper" tool (such as the Colorzilla Firefox extensions: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=colorzilla&cat=all&sort=weeklydownloads) to extract colors from some of the graphics you use. Perhaps instead of a red background in the side nav., you can extract a brown from the coffee beans backdrop? Your links should probably just be blue. This is a Web convention from which a designer should rarely consider deviating. Some of your headers (which aren't in header tags, as I said they should be!) are green and some of the list items are red. Your coloring of page content seems very random and purposeless.

One more issue I didn't previously consider is typography. I'm not sure the Tahoma font is most appropriate to convey the "professionalism" of a trade association, but you certainly shouldn't use text as small as is in the "Upcoming Events" box. While I am young and optically healthy and can read it perfectly well, that would be a problem for visually impaired users.

I hope this reply helped to expound upon my earlier remarks. If you really do care and have any more questions, I'd be happy to help even further.

Thanks Dave. That was very interesting. Of course I am an absolute
non-geek, but I am going to send your comments to our programmer
because you are correct, what good is a site if it isn't found
quickly. We're trying to get it circulated widely but we are just a
volunteer and non-profit group. Our main thrust was and will be to get
the information about Kona Coffee farmers out to the world, as much as
is possible. We're quite unique and spend tons of time trying to do
the right thing for Farmers, of which I am one. And our other thrust,
if you read our Mission, is to get our State Legislature, over on
Oahu, to listen to our small farmer issues. Big fight!

Again, we paid a programmer to do a huge amount of databases that are
mainly available for our Members- under Member Log-In.

Don't guffaw, but I did the rest using DeamWeaver because that is the
extent of my abilities and we don't have lots of money to spend so DW
works for me.I did use the eye dropper color available in DW.

Thanks again. I sincerely appreciate your comments even though I
honestly don't understand them all:).

aloha,
Cea

roast beans to kona to email
farmers of Pure Kona

;) Happy to help.

--
David m Rivers
http://davidrivers.name
.

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