MUG Website Feedback

[davidjearly]

What's a MUG? It stands for Mac User Group, and the website below is what I have put together for members.

I have tested in Safari (Leopard), Firefox and mobile Safari on iPhone/iPod touch. I'm quite pleased with how it displays.

I would appreciate any feedback on the design, layout, content and ease of navigation.

If you have anything else to say, then please let me know.

Here is the link: www.abdnmug.co.uk

Thanks,
David

 

[Makosuke]

The basic layout and look is simple and clear, so no real comments there. Two issues I noticed, however:

1) Your "Contact" menu is a mailto: link; this is very common, but I find it rather annoying, because you're generally expecting a link to take you somewhere if it's not explicitly marked as an email link. Instead, my email client pops up, forcing me to close the blank message and go back to the browser if I wasn't sure that I wanted to write to you or not.

I expect (and prefer) a "Contact" link to contain maybe some additional information in addition to an email address; maybe a physical address or phone number and/or a contact form. There are situations that I, at least, click a contact link to see what sort of infrastructure an organization has--are they giving me a full street address, or just an email link?



2) The scripts you're using for the animation on the front page are behaving erratically in Camino. At first it's fine, but after you actually play with it or let it run for a while, you start getting one of these two things:

When you mouse over them they stop moving like they're (I assume) supposed to, but when you move the mouse out, the animation only resumes if you're actually moving the mouse; it seems to kick back in after a while.

Or, they don't fully stop--it seems to flicker between pausing with a hand cursor and resuming motion very quickly, so it jitters and you need to aim for a moving target.

Also, they cause the rollovers on the menu at top to ficker rapidly, probably for the same reason. It works fine elsewhere.

As for why, I haven't done enough with JS to dig in and tell you, but I figure that if it's a MUG you probably have a significant percentage of Camino users.

 

[davidjearly]

The basic layout and look is simple and clear, so no real comments there. Two issues I noticed, however:

1) Your "Contact" menu is a mailto: link; this is very common, but I find it rather annoying, because you're generally expecting a link to take you somewhere if it's not explicitly marked as an email link. Instead, my email client pops up, forcing me to close the blank message and go back to the browser if I wasn't sure that I wanted to write to you or not.

I expect (and prefer) a "Contact" link to contain maybe some additional information in addition to an email address; maybe a physical address or phone number and/or a contact form. There are situations that I, at least, click a contact link to see what sort of infrastructure an organization has--are they giving me a full street address, or just an email link?

Ok, thanks for this. Perhaps I should change it to avoid user frustration.

2) The scripts you're using for the animation on the front page are behaving erratically in Camino. At first it's fine, but after you actually play with it or let it run for a while, you start getting one of these two things:

When you mouse over them they stop moving like they're (I assume) supposed to, but when you move the mouse out, the animation only resumes if you're actually moving the mouse; it seems to kick back in after a while.

Or, they don't fully stop--it seems to flicker between pausing with a hand cursor and resuming motion very quickly, so it jitters and you need to aim for a moving target.

Also, they cause the rollovers on the menu at top to ficker rapidly, probably for the same reason. It works fine elsewhere.

As for why, I haven't done enough with JS to dig in and tell you, but I figure that if it's a MUG you probably have a significant percentage of Camino users.

Well, so far over 90% of our users have been using Safari, with Firefox second (according to cpanel statistics). However, that doesn't change the fact that it's not displaying correctly in Camino.

I downloaded Camino myself to try it out, and whilst I am getting 'jitters' when I hover the navigation menu, the flow of the news widgets seem to be working correctly. I agree though that it is likely these that are causing the problems with the navigation menu as the other pages are fine.

The news feed is supposed to stop when you hover over them, yes.

Thanks for your feedback. I'll have a look at No.1 and see if there is anything I can do about No.2.

Edit: Any other feedback from anyone? I would be interested to see how the site performs in IE.

 

[Makosuke]

Yeah, Camino doesn't have anywhere near the marketshare it did in the pre-Safari days, but since it's a MUG it seems like it's worth testing for. And it's odd that it works more or less ok at first--it's only after the page sits for a bit that it starts acting up.

Also odd that it's fine in Firefox--I didn't realize there was that much difference in their Javascript engines.

I would be interested to see how the site performs in IE.

It's fine in IE6 and IE7 on Win, and surprisingly enough not totally broken in IE5 Win, even--the nav images don't display, but other than that it's useable (of course, with under 0.25% of marketsare even among the general population, I don't much care about it anyway).

IE5 Mac doesn't display any of the animation, but the news boxes show up as static links and it otherwise looks ok.


I did have one other question: Any particular reason that the forum link opens in a new window?

 

[davidjearly]

Yeah, Camino doesn't have anywhere near the marketshare it did in the pre-Safari days, but since it's a MUG it seems like it's worth testing for. And it's odd that it works more or less ok at first--it's only after the page sits for a bit that it starts acting up.

Also odd that it's fine in Firefox--I didn't realize there was that much difference in their Javascript engines.

It's fine in IE6 and IE7 on Win, and surprisingly enough not totally broken in IE5 Win, even--the nav images don't display, but other than that it's useable (of course, with under 0.25% of marketsare even among the general population, I don't much care about it anyway).

IE5 Mac doesn't display any of the animation, but the news boxes show up as static links and it otherwise looks ok.

I did have one other question: Any particular reason that the forum link opens in a new window?

Thanks again for the feedback.

My main reason for the forum window opening in a new window is because, technically, it leads to an external site where the forum is hosted and there isn't any links there to link back to the main site (it's a free forum).

Do you think it would be better not to have this open in a new page?

As for it working ok in the even the latest version of IE, I do find that pleasantly surprising. Given that some of the people visiting the site (going on the emails I receive) may be Windows users considering switching to Mac makes this a real bonus!

Is there any way that you know of I could alter the code in the news widgets to prevent the effects in Camino?

Thanks,
David