lambwatch

Hi all,

Apologies if you have seen my asking for critique elsewhere but I am keen to get as many opinions as possible.

My site is LambWatch http://www.lambwatch.co.uk and has recently undergone a design update to accommodate the changing content (or rather increase in content), such as navigation moved from below the page to the top and other bits and pieces.

I am more of a developer than a designer so I wanted to put emphasis on usability and accessiblity. Hence the implementation of "LiteMode" - in the bottom left of site, click the link there for what that's all about.

Cheers in advance and lookforward to receiving some feedback. Be as ruthless as you can! I am prepared! :O

Alex Rehm

Hiya,

Its a very nice and neat site with an interesting idea behind it.

A couple of thoughts really with respect to usability and accessibility:

• The background behind the text may make text difficult to read. Maybe it is worth keeping a solid or simpler background for purpose of legibility and use the lamb picture elsewhere (footer, expanding main page background, graphic on its own)
• I am not sure if the iframe-approach of a rigid site with a lot of content works for you. You have a lot of content going on, as such I would be considering scrapping the iframe idea and moving everything onto 'proper' pages to allow more content to fit in nicely and allow page-scrolling. Plus, iframes are and always have been an SEO issue.
• Direct-feed: I would be inclined to have a static image here with a "click to play". This would certainly speet up the page, especially in older browsers or browsers that do not use Windows Media codecs by default (such as offices, Mac's, unix distributions)
• Navigation: You have quite a few navigational items, some of which are probably more important to you / the users than others. For the sake of being able to expand your site more easily and for the sake of users finding information more accurately, have you thought about using a top and left hand navigation? The top navigation would link to all important pages (such as home, about us, etc) while the side navigation would link to ancillary / additional pages (such as competitions, DVD, etc)
• You are using alt-tags correctly in the gallery, so that's fine. My only concern is the lack of information on the gallery itself. As such, would it be worth adding a descriptive line of text below the images and / or also considering using thumbnails and an image popup a la Thickbox or Lightbox? Latter is just a nice touch really and may make displaying your gallery a bit nicer.
• 'Lite mode': I am not sure if that is really necessary. It adds Javascript to the page (which may not work if users have Javascript switched off - such as some office environments or older machines) and you could prevent it by caching content on your server to prevent auto-updating of certain information (such as the weather information).
• Weather information: Is this local weather where I am or where the lambwatch station is? Either way, do you think it adds value or is it just a gimmick one could do without?
• Footer: you do not have one, you could easily add a functional blog-like footer with all main links. This would prevent too much scrolling (if you choose to remove the iframe) as all direct links are available, and it gives you additional link-building capabilities.

I think overall you have a lot going on on the site with a great number of pages, which is a great thing, but I do feel strongly that the iframe approach - not only is it reducing the amount of content you could show to its fullet potential, but also is it an SEO issue. I am also not 100% sold on the idea of the weather system and the live-feed being active from the start for the above mentioned reasons.

Hope this helps,

ALEX

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Alexander Rehm - Web Architect
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lambwatch

Hi Alex thanks for the feedback! I have been thinking definitely now that there are too many links on the top so need to address that really. Just need to think of a tidy way of doing it.

The "iframe" issue isnt actually an Iframe - its an overflowing div so from SEO point of view its all good :P But I take on board your concerns about it hiding some of the content. I wanted to make the page "viewable" all the time on smaller older screens and allow people to alyways watch the cam while viewing the content and this is one of the reasons why I did it this way. Some pages, such as the open day do expand fully. Perhaps the news posts could benefit from being full pages. Ill have a think.

In terms of the weather, well, the whole site is a gimmick really so anything gimmicky I tend to like - the site is a bit of fun really when all is said and done and the weather is Local weather to lambwatch so people can see oooh yes it is rainy or ooh it is windy and stuff :P It can be disabled with lite mode.

Lite mode was designed by request by a minority of viewers on older PCs who had issues with the weather updating in real time and they have fed back with comments that it has fixed their issues so this is something I am keen to keep.

The background too is an issue which people seem to like and I have not had any concerned people yet. In the start the image was fully opaque and i toned it down a bit so it is a lot better than it was. But definitely somethign I need to think about.

Yes i agree with your points about the gallery - that was thrown together very quickly and does need work. I think I might do with that what i did with the competition entries.

an "image only" alternative would be something to consider definitely if my software could handle it In fact i think it does, ill have a look tonight Thanks for that!

Cheers for the feedback alex, all very welcome

Alex Rehm

Hiya,

You already have a 800 pixels wide layout, as such all the <div> would do in smaller windows is behave in a similar way as fully expanded (non-<div>) content would. Meaning you're not gaining or losing anything for this type of audience. Always remember, users are used to scroll and it gives them a feel of getting to content because the page physically scrolls. In an ifram / <div> this sense of physical movement is non-existant, especially if the background image is not moving if that makes sense.

ALEX

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Alexander Rehm - Web Architect
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lambwatch

You're right. But I guess it the ability to keep the webcam in view all the time which if the full scrollyness was there it would disappear off the top of the page if the whole page scrolled.

Have always tried to keep the streaming webcam as the "focus" of the website and i thought this might be one way of allowing content whilst being able to see the webcam...

A solution would be to have a "popup" camera woulnd't it then people can click around and keep the webcam on at all times even when going between pages...

Cheers alex.

Alex Rehm

Another option would require a bit more coding, but you could always have the webcam panel float next to where you are scrolling. Sorry for the self-promotion, but if you got to this post in my blog and tick the box saying "Allow comment box to float next to comments" you'll see what I mean. Effectively you could try to do the same, showing the web cam at all times (ideally as described above with a "click to play" option) and an option to not float it next to the text if a user does not want to see the camera feed. That way you wold not have to have the cam in a popup (which might be hidden when reading the page) and still display it at all times

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Alexander Rehm - Web Architect
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lambwatch

I like that very much

A colleague of mine and I are working on aredesign considering your points Cheers for feedback