Corpus Christi Comp Squadron Website Critique

[Major Carrales]

Greetings fellows,

Below is a link to our squadron's growing website.

http://cccaptx.tripod.com/

The purpose of this thread is to solicit feedback for the general improvement of the website.  It is maintained, at present, by 1st Lt Nick Lindsay, who is a Naval Ensign at NAS Kingsville in the town of the same name.

His goal is to make a fully functinal webpage for those members of the units to use.  Also to provide a useful introduction point for new visitors.

I have contacted some personnally via PM, thank you for the reponses.

Remember, this is not meant to be a mean spirited attack on the work that has been done here.  So, keep the rude or totally degrading topics/comments to a PM to me.

All other criticism needs to be public whereas to serve as criticism to help new web developers.

Thanks in Advance.
Sparky

[Strick]

Clean and Simple to navigate.   Good job!

[ThorntonOL]

It's very well done, but there are a few things that could be made better.
Have the little pop up or page that says you are now leaveing the site added for the Commander's Corner and change that link for one that says news or public affairs, the Commander's Corner is for news from the Commander, that way anything important to hear won't get lost in the regular news.
Other wise very well done and well thought out.
Don't worry, I've seen some pretty badly laid out sites. (I think most of them where my unit's trys at one, and we have one in the works I think.) and yours is definately NOT in that catagory.

[dwb]

I would ditch the scrolling text at the bottom of the home page.  Marquee text just doesn't look good.  That text doesn't add anything, and I'd just scrap it.

As a personal opinion, I don't like when web pages spawn new pages when it doesn't seem like they should.  Commander's Corner and the photo galleries all open in new windows.  I would rather see them stay in the current window, and just offer a link back to the rest of the web site.

It's hard to know right off the bat that this is a CAP web site.  The command patch is tiny and at the bottom of the page.  At least on the home page, it should feature more prominently.

I like the history page.  I like the basic layout.  The colors work well, and the information is current.  Even with the above suggestions, it's still one of the better squadron web sites out there.  Nice work.

[Phil Hirons, Jr.]

I like the use of Google calendar. I've seen too many site where the "upcoming events" happened 1 or more years ago.

I find the picture on the home page confusing. The squadron flag with a marina background? An airport would seem to be the proper setting

[jimmydeanno]

I'm not a web designer, but I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express once...but here's a few comments...

TITLE BANNER:  Enlarge the "Corpus Christi Composite Squadron" heading and somehow associate "Civil Air Patrol" in there. 

MARINA PICTURE:  If used, I would remove the text from the picture as it is redundant and says the same thing as the above    It also feels like it is floating there - it isn't grounded to the page and feels like an afterthought.  Perhaps using it as the banner picture instead of the blue box?

TEXT:  The welcome is fine, but the bold - times new roman isn't very eye friendly.  I also don't think that I'd put a "if you have suggestions on how to improve our site" comment in there, most sites have a "webmaster" link at the bottom near the "contact" link.  It just makes it feel middle schoolish, "this is our awesome sight, but we don't know if it's really that awesome."

MEMBER PHOTO:  Again, kind of feels like an after thought and is just free floating on the page - there's no indication as to why that picture is there, there isn't any content near it that has anything to do with it.

MEETING INFO: I'd move it up the page, make it less "gridded" and institutional. 

MARQUEE TEXT:  Ditch it, it was a novelty in 1998, same with the hit counter.

COMMAND PATCH: Make it larger if you're going to use it.  Perhaps surround it with the core values?

PICTURES PAGE:  Is this a place for your members to get photos of recent events or is it a location for potential members to see what is going on in the squadron and see members in action?  Instead of text links, use the most captivating picture from each album as the link with a description of the series under that picture.  It makes it more inviting, and again, less institutional.

I like the calendar and I also agree that the commander's corner and general news need to be separated and maintained in the same window if possible.

The only other recommendation that I have is to use the space on the page.  the page only extends to the middle of the screen, leaving an awkward whitespace that takes half of the explorer window. 

I hope this helps and I apologize for not citing more things I like about the page. 

[Major Carrales]

I'm not a web designer, but I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express once...but here's a few comments...

TITLE BANNER:  Enlarge the "Corpus Christi Composite Squadron" heading and somehow associate "Civil Air Patrol" in there. 

MARINA PICTURE:  If used, I would remove the text from the picture as it is redundant and says the same thing as the above    It also feels like it is floating there - it isn't grounded to the page and feels like an afterthought.  Perhaps using it as the banner picture instead of the blue box?

TEXT:  The welcome is fine, but the bold - times new roman isn't very eye friendly.  I also don't think that I'd put a "if you have suggestions on how to improve our site" comment in there, most sites have a "webmaster" link at the bottom near the "contact" link.  It just makes it feel middle schoolish, "this is our awesome sight, but we don't know if it's really that awesome."

MEMBER PHOTO:  Again, kind of feels like an after thought and is just free floating on the page - there's no indication as to why that picture is there, there isn't any content near it that has anything to do with it.

MEETING INFO: I'd move it up the page, make it less "gridded" and institutional. 

MARQUEE TEXT:  Ditch it, it was a novelty in 1998, same with the hit counter.

COMMAND PATCH: Make it larger if you're going to use it.  Perhaps surround it with the core values?

PICTURES PAGE:  Is this a place for your members to get photos of recent events or is it a location for potential members to see what is going on in the squadron and see members in action?  Instead of text links, use the most captivating picture from each album as the link with a description of the series under that picture.  It makes it more inviting, and again, less institutional.

I like the calendar and I also agree that the commander's corner and general news need to be separated and maintained in the same window if possible.

The only other recommendation that I have is to use the space on the page.  the page only extends to the middle of the screen, leaving an awkward whitespace that takes half of the explorer window. 

I hope this helps and I apologize for not citing more things I like about the page. 

This is good, keep it coming.  The marina photo is going to be replaced very soon.  In fact, I'm working on it this evening.  I may have some airport photos that would be better.  The idea of the marina wasn't even that it was a marina, it was supposed to be a photo of downtown Corpus Christi.

The "Suggestions" text is merely a temportary one during this phase of web site development.

[Major Carrales]

Thank you all for the suggestions, a good number of them have already been addressed.   Remember, however, that some of the differing opinions may mean that your suggestion has to be played down or set aside in favor of something else suggested by another.  Please do not be offended.

If I may also add, this is the sort of practice we should be doing on a resource like CAPTALK...instead of the gripes and back-and-forth on meaningless things we are actually doing something to improves something.   Instead of knocking less that proper webpages, we are working to insure one is in good shape.  Thanks.

[dwb]

May I suggest "Squadron Blog", or just "Blog", in place of "Squadron Happenings"?  Blog is a sufficiently common term now, I think people will know what it means.

Also, if you can find one, a higher resolution image of the TXWG patch would look less blurry than the current one.

[Hawk200]

OK, won't be mean spirited, but will pick nits a little. Here goes:

Your initial photo: A good photo, but not fitting for an opening page. Use an official type photo. I don't remember if CAP actually has criteria for official photos, but if they don't, then I'd go straight to Air Force photo standards. Basically, full Service Dress in a prescribed setting. Hopefully, the prescribed setting won't be something that is virtually impossible to do.

As to the photo, what is your actual first name? Thought it was "Jose". Use your actual first name, not a "nickname" or abbreviated name.

As to the content, put "Maj Joe E. Carrales" on one line below the photo, and then on the line below that put "Squadron Commander". It's a little detail issue, but it seems a little disjointed the way it is now.

CAP and TX Wing emblems: On the positive side, they're the same height, and almost the same width, so they look balanced. That had to take some work.

On the negative side, the TX Wing graphic looks fuzzy for some reason. I thought it was my eyes at first, maybe it's just my screen.

Meeting Information: Move it up a line. As to the content, I would change it to something like "We meet in the Signature Flight Support facility, located at 506 International Blvd, Corpus Christi, TX 78406. Our Meeting times are from 1900 until 2100, excluding holidays." You reduce six lines to two.

As for the "By the way:", I'd drop that. There are other locations in your site that can include that, it's not needed on the first page.

Join us Today! The Few, the Brave, the Vigilant--Civil Air Patrol!: I would drop that as well. The motto isn't something I've commonly seen in CAP, so I'm not really sure it's appropriate.

On the same note, I would take the "How do I join?" link on the left side, and change it to "Join us today!". Probably smacks of social engineering, but it's a common recruiting technique.

Command Shield (at bottom): I'd drop it altogether. At first visit, we don't really need to show everyone all the little details that they will inevitably see later if they come to a meeting.

As to the mandatory "non-endorsement" phrase, I'd change it to black. As grey, it almost looks like you're hiding fine print.

That's the first page. The above changes should put everything within a single window, without needing to scroll at all. Personally, I hate having to scroll on the first page of anything. If the main page holds my interest and has links that expand to specifics, I don't mind that. But the first page should answer the initial questions: who, what, where, when, how without me needing to lift a finger.

Hopefully, I don't seem too harsh. BTW, got a guy here from that neck of the woods. As soon as you put finishing touches on the site, I'm gonna send him a link. Hope he'll come on board with you, he's good people, and I think that this is something right up his alley.

[N Harmon]

Overall it's a very nice website. Here are some things to consider:

• Stylesheets (CSS) make maintaining a consistent very easy by universalizing layouts and rendering and simplifying web pages themselves.
• Having the browser resize images according to an IMG tag's width and/or height attributes usually results in poor image quality. Having pre-sized images created using a graphics program, or using a server-side CGI to resize the images is what I have found works best.
• While we do live in a very graphic-centric time there are still people out there who browse the internet using text-only. For them it is very helpful that images have good descriptions. This is done using the alt attribute.
• CAPR 110-1 mandates that CAP websites:

  [...]set forth the name "Civil Air Patrol" and immediately thereafter identify the name of the sponsoring unit on the main page of the site.

  Now, I have not gotten a whole lot of clarification on what that means (some say that "Civil Air Patrol" followed by unit name have to be the first words on the page, others say it just needs to be there somewhere). But the primary mention of Civil Air Patrol on your page is in the logo on the front page. This would be unobservable to a text-only user. A good fix may be to use the alt attribute to spell out "Civil Air Patrol". Or you may consider putting "Civil Air Patrol" at the top of the page.
• Links to non-HTML documents, like PDF or Word document files, should be noted with what type they are. I like have a tiny icon for this, like say....  Ocean County Grant Application Guidelines

I think what you have is very good, and most of my suggestions are just tweaks based on what I have found to be best practices. I am a big fan of the website "Web Pages that Suck", which includes a laundry list of things to avoid when building a website. It's been a good guide for me, and I recommend it any time I can.

One last thing, you may want to feed your websites through the W3C's Validation Service. That will help you identify potential problems. I usually do that right before I go live with a website.

[N Harmon]

Oh, another thing....you may want to consider that your target audience will include local government officials who may be interested in CAP's operational assistance. A good idea would be to include the NOC's contact information on your contact page:


Civil Air Patrol National Operations Center
Toll Free: 888-211-1812 | FAX: 800-555-7902
DSN: 493-7299 | DSN: 493-4242
opscenter@capnhq.gov

[RiverAux]

Looks good.

On the How do I join page I would reverse the order of the suggested actions so that the first thing is to come to a local meeting.  The last things you want them to do is to contact NHQ first. 

[Major Carrales]

We have already been puting into effect the results of the feedback that you all have given.  This is great, thanks everyone.

Having effective unit Websites is a great thing.   Maybe we can take this to a new level in unit looking to get a website.

[ColonelJack]

Sparky,

Since everyone else has already mentioned the things I'd noticed on your website, I will just limit my commentary to:

GREAT WORK!   :clap:

I'm not a website designer either, nor have I ever stayed at a Holiday Inn Express.  (I'd have used that joke if nobody else did.)  But I do know that a website that makes it easy to find my way around is one I come back to.  And you've got a winner on that score, my friend.

Jack

[Pumbaa]

Sparky

The website stinks... Worst one of the bunch....  I hate it as much as your newsletter...  Maybe even more than that photo of you with 'that' coat!

I dare you to come up here in the cold and talk to me!

[N Harmon]

Woah. Alright you two.

[Pumbaa]

hehehehe....

More like



Just showing my Bro Sparky some lov'n!

[Major Carrales]

Ouch...Pumbaa, that smarts    What next?! Chew my ear off?

[SarDragon]

Nope, steal the grommet out of your service cap!