Is This Page Poorly Done

[grindy]

this is my friends page, and to me it looks good but when i look at the code it looks like its poorly written. lots of tables and lots of bad links it seems.http://www.mmmb.ca/http://www.mmmb.ca/styles.csshe asked me to fix it for him but I am not that good yet. i found 47 mistakes when i validated it with w3c and no errors with the css but it shows good in both ie and firefox.he paid 1200 bucks to do this page. i think the obvious errors are the tables used to place everything on the pageand the links on the right top side of the page don't seem to go anywhereI think he got ripped off

[Skemcin]

I wouldn't use the label "error" to describe what is wrong with the site. Honestly, its really not that bad, and for $1,200 if he got the whole site he got a great deal. I would look at the use of tables as a shortcut that made the $1,200 price tag even possible. Ripped off, no. Coded poorly, no. There is far too much emphasis placed on strictly CSS only pages. And trust me, I know all the reasons why - but sometimes a good table formatted page works just fine - even though its not "the" way to do it.This guys site is not that bad at all. I've seen much, much worse. If you've told him he got ripped off, then you might want to apologize, or at least make sure he hasn't second guessed or isn't second guessing the developer who did the work. Then again, if the developer is ever question, I'm sure they're competent enough to debate your logic.I don't want my statements to be misconstrued as being highly critical of you, but just be careful how quickly and how harshly you are to judge other peoples work - it will come back and bite you in the arse.

[Ingolme]

Truthfully, it actually could be coded better. It has a horizontal scrollbar on my screen to begin with. That's a highly negative point for me.The site seems to load fast enough, at least. The code looks pretty old fashioned, but it does work OK. I really don't know if the site is worth $1,200. Is there any server-side code at all?

[jeffman]

It's certainly possible to design an attractive page using a table format, and this is attractive and useful.It's pretty image intensive, which bugs me as a matter of principle. But the images are pretty optimized: a lot of screen space for proportionately not to much bandwith.If you wanted to make a quick change to the list in the top right you'd see the downside to the plan. If it were an HTML list, you could change it in seconds. With the photoshop .psd file, it's a little trickier. But it becomes a genuine hassle if you have to contact the designer and make him edit it for $100/hourSo in the short run, if you're the designer, you've got a thing that will keep your customers coming back with more work. But if you develop a reputation for that, could be a problem. It is very typical of companies to have a site designed by a pro, but maintained by someone in-house. This site does not make that convenient at all.

[grindy]

I didn't tell him he got ripped off, those were just my thoughtsI just wanted you guys to look at it. for some reason he doesn't seem happy with it especially with the top right cornerit looks like links that go nowhere, when you put your mouse over them the hand appears but they are not clickable. that's what he pointed out to me and the ad on the right also its not clickable.

[thescientist]

is there any way to get the developer to go back and fix them?

[jeffman]

I didn't tell him he got ripped off, those were just my thoughtsI just wanted you guys to look at it. for some reason he doesn't seem happy with it especially with the top right cornerit looks like links that go nowhere, when you put your mouse over them the hand appears but they are not clickable. that's what he pointed out to me and the ad on the right also its not clickable.

That could be fixed with an image map. But that's a dorky solution to the problem I mentioned earlier. An actual <ul> full of nested links is what that thing looks like it should be.See, the more you think about a thing like this, the more you realize that structural/semantic choices have more effect than it seems at first. Visually, the thing is fine. But its utility and maintainability are compromised by lazy, unsemantic choices.

[grindy]

yes, it seems that they made the page so that it is better to pay them the 60 bucks an hour to maintain it then to have someone in house do the maintenance since it would be more difficult.a good business decision on their part I guess lol.I am going to let him read these posts and he can make the decision for himself.

[justsomeguy]

Those links work, they just all point to the homepage. The image map doesn't seem to include a region for each of the lines, but if you look at the URLs they point to several of them are defined and work.

[Skemcin]

There is a lot of good feedback here. If I were to expand on my thoughts on the site, again, I would say its not bad. I'd agree with what has been said here regarding the width, the links in the corner, and the fact that the source code could easily be written much more efficiently. The site could use a good proof reading too. The pre-approval and mortgage application forms will never get used by anyone with any sense of mind since the pages are not loaded with SSL. The Bio page could be dropped and the content should be merged to the homepage - or - the homepage should be re-written to be more about the business and services and less about him. The agents page, too, could go away, just more about Brett and nothing else. The real estate page does what exactly what I've come to expect from Realtors - dump them off to some proprietary MLS service site (which is where the Realtor ends up marketing people to, rarely to their own site - but that's a different story). I, personally, can't stand "Employment Opportunity" pages unless you have a legitimate position available - but like I said that's just my opinion. The contact us page has fields labeled as optional but are required and the validation (otherwise) is pretty elementary. On a final note, I would remove his personal e-mail from every place it exists because it will get spidered and spammed. Create and use an alias - preferable from his actual domain name otherwise you can tell right away he is a one man shop - hence why the opportunities page drives me nuts.Keep in mind, it is easy to criticize a web site, in fact I tell all my clients that I could criticize every web site I produced 5 seconds after I launched it. All in all, for $1,200 I think that's what you could expect. Not bad, but not great. He could milk some of these fixes out of the developer for no additional cost - but some of the underlying issues he will be stuck with.

[Mencarta]

Is there any way for the owner to update it without having to learn PHP or hire you? If not, a management center would be nice.