x factory uk site is live

[bigred5765]

just had a little nosey round, looking good guys,

[Belsten]

wheres the team ? I like clicking on faces, I said clicking

[Mike Hudson]

looking good

[Darren Boyle]

SSSHHHH........

We havent finsihed it yet, we have been working on it all night (I was supposed to be going to bed with a Lemsip!!!)

It is only up for a test at the moment, just checking ceertain things are working as they should, we have LOTS still to add to it over the weekend and its official launch over the weekend somtime.... We were trying to keep it quiet until it was fully ready, hard to now the cat is out of the bag.

We think you will all like it when it is fully finished

[Mike Hudson]

I'm sure it will be ACE from what people few have seen so far

[bigred5765]

it is how ever looking real good,

[glypo]

Wow frames. Takes me back to the days of 56k dial up....

[Stu]

Chris Long shirts still £10?

[Darren Boyle]

Wow frames. Takes me back to the days of 56k dial up....

Some love it (some hate it) you can NEVER please everyone

Chris Long shirts still £10?

The prices on this site are only ever the full RRP (since it is not a retail site) the offers can be had through all the dealers websites (wqhich is states to contact your local dealer for prices at the top of the page)
It is unfair for us to show our discounted prices on clearance lines on a "generic" site aimed at the whole public to view, for bargain prices see the local stockists (who will all be added soon)

[glypo]

Originally Posted by DMS Racing

Some love it (some hate it) you can NEVER please everyone

Who loves frames?!?!!?!

Web designers hate frames, people hate frames ( you can't link people to pages) and for that same reason Google and search engines hate frames. And it is actually easier to use SSI like the rest of the world has since the late 90's. And you can see how it messes up the site layout, when you scroll down the whole gradient is ruined and looks a little nasty.

If it's not too presumptuous I would like to make a few suggestions that will really improve the site (in terms of load and SEO). Firstly switching to SSI (you can do it in HTML, PHP or whatever you want). It is dead simple, and makes the page look and work like frames, but it is the server that processes it and puts it together rather than the client computer. This saves a lot of code lines (each frame in HTML has to have html, head and body tags, whereas SSI makes it just one page) so this saves the number of lines and makes the site quicker! And obviously this makes pages "linkable" and means search engines can actually crawl the website. Whereas previously people could only link to, or see, a page like http://www.xfactoryrc.co.uk/xfact/specials.asp this.

Secondly, the background image is massive!!! 30kb or so, and it's not the file size but the physical size (1280x1024) that is the issue and also how you have coded it and how it is done. Firstly, you haven't made the background vertical. If you use photoshop, it is best to make a vertical guide first to ensure you make the gradient vertical. This gives a stiching error like this:


(image above - may be slow to load)

And secondly it's not repeated correctly, so it actually repeats the whole image again which makes it look rather bizarre when you scroll down on big pages. Like this:


(image above)

I can see you have made the background fade back to black again but I don't think it looks too good personally. Although obviously if it is your intended look ignore this last comment.

So what I suggest, you can make the image much smaller. This will do the job, if you want to make it much smaller and mesh better and keep the current recurring gradient on scroll you could replace the whole massive image with this much smaller one:

http://img142.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bgiz8.gif
http://img142.imageshack.us/img142/1497/bgiz8.gif

Only 4kb.

If you want the gradient just fading to white and staying there, you can get away with a much smaller image:

http://img227.imageshack.us/img227/5370/bg2wy6.gif

And then in the body part of the css you could replace your current:
BODY
{
BACKGROUND-COLOR: #3399FF;
BACKGROUND-IMAGE: url(../images/background.jpg);
With something like:

BODY
{ background-color: #dfe1f8;
background-image: url(../bg2.gif);
background-repeat: repeat-x;
Oh yes, before I forget, it might just be because of the my contrast monitor but the factory logo does not blend perfectly into the header. This is just an error with the background on xfactory_header.jpg and is to change on photoshop or whatever you use. I have changed the contrast on photoshop to make this stand out more to explain my issue:


(image above)

Obviously you might be working on these things already, but thought I would suggest it anyway rather than just be negative. But honestly there is a reason frames died along with dial up.

[Darren Boyle]

Thanks for your comments, but the site is as is for now and we wont be making any changes for the forseeable future.

It might be worth adding that our site is desigend to work best with Internet Explorer and many of the said hitches may only be experienced on alternative browsers, but all of our test work has been set up aorund IE where it appears just fine.

[Lee]

It looks good on safari too.

Some people are just never happy

[bigred5765]

well said lee, and i agree if it isnt broke dont try to fix it

[pro4nut]

And i'm still a team driver !! yey

[Darren Boyle]

Of course

[glypo]

Originally Posted by DMS Racing

It might be worth adding that our site is desigend to work best with Internet Explorer and many of the said hitches may only be experienced on alternative browsers, but all of our test work has been set up aorund IE where it appears just fine.

In a world where Firefox users alone can be 5-45% of visitors, designing for IE along can be risky. Making a website standard compliant ensures it will work fine on any browser, and I think your website is fine standards wise.The issues are not browser based. There are no problems on that front.

Your background image is 1298x1024... so I assume you designed the website around that. So it means people like me with larger resolutions see the error, regardless of what browser. I suspect the image border error (which does exist, I even showed the rgb hex code of the error) is noticeable to me more than you due to the quality on my monitor and video card.

Lee - it is not a case of being happy or not. I was just trying to help. I said at the start I thought it might be presumptuous, and clearly I was. But there is a reason why DMS ranks so poorly on google, and that is frames. Google brings visitors, who have money. So rather than being unhappy as you suggest, I was just trying to help someone make more money - and I don't see how that can be be. My help was not wanted (or asked for in that matter, so I get why it wasn't wanted) but it's certainly not my loss for trying.

[General Accident]

Looks OK to me (sat in a carpark in Cardiff where its pi**ing it down) on me "3" mobi broadband.

[captain kirk]

Looking good .

and i use Firefox and it works fine on my computer