Proofreading business website - please review Options

[Malaysiabound]

Hi all

My website predominantly aims to attract students from Malaysia for my proofreading and translation services.

Although it's been active for several years, staring at it on a daily basis has quite possibly fogged my view of it - and a freshen-up may be the order of the day.

All reviews gratefully received, please be as constructively brutal as you feel necessary; don't worry, I'm fairly thick skinned (too much fast food in my diet).

My site can be found at www.grammarproofing.com

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Phil

[Christian J]

Scrolling text is very distracting from everything else.

The translation services and Malaysian connection are not obvious on the index page. I'd suggest more information about the services offered.

The links at the bottom of each page:

Free Dreamweaver Templates | Cheap Web Hosting | Car Insurance Quotes

give a less serious impression, and might be regarded as a manipulation attempt by search engines. Apparently they are part of the web site template:

<!-- The following link and credit cannot legally be altered or removed without a valid website license key purchased from http://www.justdreamweaver.com/templates/license.html. License keys are only $19.99 and once purchased you are free to remove or alter the link. -->

--I'd consider paying that fee if you really want to use this template.

Some HTML errors can be found by running pages through http://validator.w3.org

[Malaysiabound]

Thanks Christian

All taken on board.

I only recently inserted the scrolling text. I wanted a way of highlighting testimonials on the index page, without taking up too much space - any suggestions.

I'm going to buy the template.

I'm still a fairly novice web builder (always learning). Most of today has been spent validating my code. Apparently I had a conflict between XHTML1 strict and some elements not being recognised, so I set the site to HTML5; which seems to have reduced the number of conflicts.

Thanks again, Phil

[Frederiek]

You need to fix those errors anyway. And fix the one CSS error (:focus none - parse error) too, while you're at it.

Are you aware that the suckerfish menu doesn't fit the 960px width? The contact us link is dropped below the rest. You may have to adapt the padding a little.

And I'd make the content fit between the menu and the footer, so there is no transparent space. At the top, the space is caused by the menu not fitting. And at the bottom by the empty #prefooter (.container_12), containing empty grid DIVs.

I'd reduce the width of the SELECT menu, meaning giving it a width, like 600px or even less, as it spills out of its container box.

BTW, it's 2014, not 2009 (copyright notice in the footer). A simple way to avoid that is by replacing the date with a little javascript snippit:

CODE

Copyright <script type="text/javascript">now = new Date; theYear=now.getFullYear(); document.write(theYear);</script>

If you are stuck in your learning curve, you can always ask any question in the forums.

This post has been edited by Frederiek: May 27 2014, 04:48 PM

[jimlongo]

BTW, it's 2014, not 2009

Don't burst my bubble, I was feeling so energetic this morning.

[Frederiek]

Sorry that 2009 is 5 years old.
Gee, that reminds me of… the number of years I (re)live in my country. Anniversary!

[Malaysiabound]

You need to fix those errors anyway. And fix the one CSS error (:focus none - parse error) too, while you're at it.

Are you aware that the suckerfish menu doesn't fit the 960px width? The contact us link is dropped below the rest. You may have to adapt the padding a little.

And I'd make the content fit between the menu and the footer, so there is no transparent space. At the top, the space is caused by the menu not fitting. And at the bottom by the empty #prefooter (.container_12), containing empty grid DIVs.

I'd reduce the width of the SELECT menu, meaning giving it a width, like 600px or even less, as it spills out of its container box.

BTW, it's 2014, not 2009 (copyright notice in the footer). A simple way to avoid that is by replacing the date with a little javascript snippit:

CODE

Copyright <script type="text/javascript">now = new Date; theYear=now.getFullYear(); document.write(theYear);</script>

If you are stuck in your learning curve, you can always ask any question in the forums.

Thanks for your review Frederiek

I couldn't find the CSS error (:focus none - parse error) that you mentioned. How do I find that please :-)

I tested the website in Opera, Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome and the menu appeared to fit ok. Which browser did you use.

I have tidied up the footer as suggested.

Reduce the width of the SELECT menu - do you mean the left-hand column?

Copyright dates are registration dates and therefore don't get updated annually.

Once again, thanks for your time taken to review my site

Phil

[Frederiek]

The CSS error is on line 46 of ticker-style.css:
46 .ticker-content:focus - Parse Error none

I simply passed the page through the W3C CSS validator : http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validat...arproofing.com/

I use Safari on Mac, which should be the same as Chrome, as they are both WebKit browsers.

As for the select menu, I talk about the one inside the yellow box in the right column on the home page. The menu is larger than the 610px (width + borders) of the quote div, or rather .grid_8 div, and spills out to the right. See screenshot.