Just about ready (I think) to launch a revamped website, but if there is anyone out there who’s bored and has a bit of time to give it a quick test drive and sanity check it would be much appreciated. Particularly spelling and grammar, but also any broken links and stuff that just doesn’t work for you. I’ve tested on Firefox, Chrome and IE8, but interested to know if it works with Mac OK.

Lavatrax Test Site

Cheers!

Looking at it on a Mac and it seems to work and look fine. However late in the evening, a couple of glasses of wine, tired eyes and the light grey font is hard to read.

Looks fine, but I agree about the light grey on white background being hard on the eye.

Cheers guys, was a little unsure about the grey text, looked good at first, but the more I see I’m thinking that good old fashioned black is the way to go.

Any views on the photo gallery style? Not quite decided if I like it yet (hence the unregistered trial version!)

Looks okay apart from the grey font the others have mentions.

Also a couple of the bikes didn’t have their tyre logos lined up with the valves.

dogsbody, not dogs body.

Link to DH routes goes back to the same page, but doing the same on XC routes gives more info??

Agree about hard to read text.

Wasn’t keen on the pic fades tbh

Dogsbody done. Cheers!

There are a few grammatical errors in there but it still reads ok. 😀

Grey font could do with being a bit darker, but not black. Background could do with a little bit of very light colour in it. The green font doesnt show up very well either.

Rest of it is grand though.

PotDog, it all seems to work OK. Well the limited wizz round I gave it.

In general I quite like it, much better than I’ve come to expect from similar outfits.

I do have a couple of negative comments, just for ballance.

I’ve no idea what lightflow is, but there is a message in the gallery moaning about lack of registration.

If I hide the slide show, then click a button on the top bar it annoyingley reapears.

The blog page has a completely different layout to the main pages, I felt a bit disorientated, and you can’t easily return to the main site.

Like I say though, in greneral good work. Out of interest how long did it take you?

Photos on the whole look good, not sure about the font choice in the main menu to the right. Underlined ticked and in green just seems a bit fussy. But am being hyper critical ‘cos you asked for an opinion. If I navigated to it I could find the information I would need to keep me browsing so on the whole good effort grade B. More pictures with the local ladies might even get you a booking!

@RichPenny, dodgy link sorted. Cheers.
Pic fades seem to be a bit of a personal preference thing. Hence I’ve included a little button (bottom right of pics) to hide or show the slideshow.

The El Mirador apartments have a good sized lounge with americal style kitchen and breakfast bar.

americal? American?

Change the text, gave up reading it after a while.

Surrounded By Zulus – Member

There are a few grammatical errors in there but it still reads ok.

Grey font could do with being a bit darker, but not black. Background could do with a little bit of very light colour in it. The green font doesnt show up very well either.
I was going to go with red for the links and menu buttons, but then decided on green for a change. Was worried that red is a bit “rude” as in you don’t right letters in red pen!

UrbanHiker – Member

PotDog, it all seems to work OK. Well the limited wizz round I gave it.

In general I quite like it, much better than I’ve come to expect from similar outfits.

I do have a couple of negative comments, just for ballance.

I’ve no idea what lightflow is, but there is a message in the gallery moaning about lack of registration.

If I hide the slide show, then click a button on the top bar it annoyingley reapears.

The blog page has a completely different layout to the main pages, I felt a bit disorientated, and you can’t easily return to the main site.

Like I say though, in greneral good work. Out of interest how long did it take you?

As mentioned a minute or 2 earlier, I’ve not quite settled on the lightflow album so I haven’t shelled out my 20 quid to buy a license yet, just in case I decide I don’t like it. But it does look better than just embedding a picasa web album, that’s for sure.

Blog page is work in progress, I’ve not yet found a way of migrating the old blog from WordPress into Joomla to fully integrate it. I’ve not spent much time on that element yet, but I don’t think that Joomla does “blogging” quite as well as WordPress does, I may look at stripping out the header logo and stuff and then putting it in a joomla wrapper to see if that works for me.

Will have a look at slideshow thing, maybe there is a setting somewhere I need to check.

So far I’ve been working on it for about 6 to 8 weeks, but only on and off as time allows. Hardest thing has been getting my head around using a CMS rather than just doing stuff in Dreamweaver.

Cheers so far guys, some good stuff!

Lose the slideshow on everything but the home page. Every time you click on a link on the right you then need to scroll up a whole page before you see anything. It also counts against you for SEO

While we are on SEO the slogan “Bringing you the best of Tenerife trails” is an image with no Alt tag. As a minimum put the text into the Alt tag so search engines know what you are trying to tell them. Even better bin the image, put the text in as an <H1> and style it with CSS to get the same look as the image.

‘Route grading system’ is similarly split up into different bits that won’t help you.

Pictures should be clickable so you can zoom in. So, for example, you know there is a route profile but you can’t read it.

But overall as others have said it looks very nice and it works in IE9 as well 🙂

EDIT:…and you are called Lavatrax but it doesn’t say that in text that a search engine can read anywhere on the home page 🙁

(On a Mac, since you mentioned it.)

I like the slideshow. However, the option to close it doesn’t persist when you move to another page (or even refresh) so I’d either bin that or fix it. Oh, and some of the transitions look a bit amateur but that’s a pretty minor thing for me.

Red Lavatrax Tenerife logo at the top is not especially good and the three social media icons on the right could use a bit more polish, too. The vertical alignment of those three icons is out as well.

Take the blog link out of the top menu and mention it in a sidebar? Link to open a new window as well I think. Disorientating to suddenly vanish to another site.

You’ve got two main menus which is a bit odd so you could think about your navigation again. The green text isn’t nice in the second menu on the right, but the menu at the top I like.

I didn’t like the photo gallery at all.

I’ve mostly just picked out the things I didn’t like. It’s fine really – content is king and you’ve got a fair bit of that. 🙂

Very quick look as I’m about to go to bed.

…on Chrome the main menu on the left is a serif font (in green) where the rest of the text is in a sans-serif.

Would look better all the same

As you change menu items on the top might be good to switch the pic at the top to be relevant to the item

Switching to the blog menu item gives a different LAF to the others – embed it below so it looks the same.

I zoomed in so the site filled more of the screen and this happened to your slideshow. Probably nothing to bother about but just so you know.

http://www.mediafire.com/imageview.php?quickkey=owpwy0od4hgn9yg

Pressed back as soon as I saw the checkerboard transition I’m afraid.

Cheers guys for all the input. I’m off to bed now, go to go ride tomorrow 😀

Have already changed a few things, but will look at others tomorrow evening!

Thanks again.

Good morning! I like it! I especially like the home page slide show. Not qualified to talk about the design of the site, but can make a few grammatical suggestions (well, you did ask!) 😀

Here at Lavatrax we stick to what we know best, the riding, so we don’t manage…..

Here at Lavatrax we stick to what we know best – the riding. So we don’t manage…….

So what type of Mountain Bike trails do we have in Tenerife and why should I go Mountain Biking in Tenerife?

Is OK, but I would use ‘you’ rather than ‘I’.

And actually, reading the next paragraph, I can immediately see several more minor and forgivable errors but am too tired to go through them all (e.g., ‘…islands…’ should have an apostrophe). Yadda, yadda.

There’s also a lot of extraneous text IMHO. You want to grab, and hold the reader’s attention and you could easily cut the home page text in half whilst retaining the meaning. Some facts are stated twice (OK so it’s for everyone / riders of all abilities – once is enough 🙂 ).

Overall though, it’s a solid, clean looking site. Easy to navigate around and well put together. The above ^^^ is just me being niggly, but it seems many STW riders are grammar pedants, and by extension, perhaps many MTBers too!

When the slideshow runs it displays the file name above the picture – OMG12345 for example. Be better if it showed something relevant to the picture – an opportunity for more keywords. There must be a way of doing this.

SB

I’m using a HTC Desire smartphone standard browser and things that I noticed.

The company logo is too complex ie not bold enough so you don’t really notice it, and it doesn’t stand out.

The large pics fill the browser screen initialy, good that you can switch them off but when you view a new page they come back on again, annoying as you need to switch off again.

There is no standard indent on the left of the page, just makes viewing a.little easier on a smart phone.

Really picky but the paragraph spacing isn’t always consistent.

The light grey font colour isn’t easy to read. However noticed one page on XC section is all black already !? Much easier to read.

This will sound all negative. It’s because I’m nit-picking – the rest of the site looks good.

Font – stick with serif or sans serif. I prefer classic sans serif fonts.

Colour – as above, especialliy the links in green..!

Punctuation – missing apostophes; better use of commas needed; other examples as those picked up by user-removed.

Style – If you would rather not be part of a group ride, we can provide you with your own personal guide. Please ask for more details might be better phrased in a more positive way; for example, “For those looking for a more of a solo riding experience, we are happy to provide personal guiding. Please ask for more details.”

Sub headings – even in the same size as the body text, something in bold to break up the sections ould be great.

Just the first two sections and things not covered above:

self-catering apartment (hyphen)

B&Bs (no apostrophe)

three and four runs (numbers up to ten are written in full unless there are other larger numbers in the sentence).

a full week’s (possesive apostrophe)

year-round haven (hyphen)

six-day programme (hyphen to avoid ambiguity)

also why don’t you use google analytics for the website?

Cheers for the further bits and bobs guys and gals. Gradually working my way through things. So thanks for the input.

@Foxyrider – Google analytics will be used, but have not put the code on yet, I have it on the “current” site and will be transferring the code across once I migrate the new site to be live.

If you were referring to the Extreme Tracking code on there, I have kept it as I like the quick and easy overview that it offers.

In general, I’m going through and adjusting the following right now: –

– Changing the text to be a dark grey
– Looking for a way to stop the slide show re-activating when you change pages
– Changing the link colours from Green, probably to Red
– Put the WordPress blog into a wrapper to try and make it a more integrated part of the site
– Gramatical changes as noted by the STW pedants 😉

Company Logo is not likely to change as I’ve used it for the last 5 years and it adorns business cards, riding jerseys etc. BUT….I may look at incorporating it into the slide show photos to see if that looks better and just loose it from the top left where it currently resides, although that means that if people turn off the slide show, then there is no company logo! Rock and a hard place springs to mind.
I’m sure I’ll not please everyone, but think it’s a good step forward from the old site that’s served well for the last 3 or so years.