BiCon 2002 web pages

[ciphergoth]

I've been spending a little while obsessively tweaking the BiCon 2002 web pages, and I'd be interested to know what people think of them. Questions to ask yourself include

• Is it easy to see where you are and navigate your way around the site?
• Is the most important stuff the most prominent, the easiest to find?
• Does it all load fast enough?
• Was there anything confusing or misleading about it? Did you find yourself taking any wrong turns?
• Does it work OK with the browser you prefer?
• Are there any little irritations (or big ones) that I could fix?

but any comments you have on how the site might be improved would be most welcome. Thanks!

http://www.2002.bicon.org.uk/

Comments

[djm4]

YAFIYGI:

/book.html - the pricing table could probably use alternately shaded columns to make it a bit more obvious which price goes with which income bracket. Pricing error should probably go immediately below the table rather than at the bottom of the page (since it's then nearer the information to which it applies).

Typo:

"...say a little about this year's event"

You could offer an on-line booking form, and get people to send cheques separately. I know the risk is that they don't send the cheque, but you can pester them by e-mail until they do, and a lot of people find web forms less hassle than printing something out and writing on it. It's a bit easier to transfer the info to Excel, too.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

YAFIYGI - eh?

Shaded columns: I tried, and couldn't make it work. Eventually, I found that what I'd done worked under IE, and I've stopped trying - if anyone knows how to make it go under Mozilla, let me know.

Typo - fixed.

On-line booking form - planned. Trickier though!

[djm4]

"You Asked For It; You Got It" - WYSIWIG as implemented by, f'rinstnce, raw TeX.

Don't know what will and won't work for Mozilla, but putting bgcolor="#dddddd" (say) as an attribute in a {td} tag works on most things (although it's very hard to persuade Netscape-derivitives to reduce the spacing between cells to zero).

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Ah, I used the more sophisticated COL tag stuff. I can't be arsed doing each individual column.

And Mozilla's rendering is pretty much unrelated to Netscape 4.x...

[lovingboth]

I suspect it's officially ok for people to pay on the door. We'd get pissed off if someone then didn't turn up and didn't pay though, especially if they booked accommodation...

... hmm, time to check out NoChex et al.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I don't think it would be officially OK to book accommodation and pay on the door.

Last year's team got a Kagi account, but never used it; dunno if it can be passed on to us. I'd need to do some CGI scripting to make this go, though it's not that hard. Mission number 1 is to have a form you can fill in, submit, and then print out, to save all that tricky pen-wielding stuff. Then I'll adapt it to do Kagi.

[alienspacebat.livejournal.com]

It's looking good, not easy to get lost, loads fast (although I cant really say that as I have adsl) and is nice and clean and easy to read.

Only thing I might suggest is a previous next type link between the section pages as I'm sure a lot of people will want to flick through all the content

[djm4]

Either that, or a 'quick access' set of links at the top and bottom of the page like this:

Home | About | Booking | News | Venue | Helping out | Links | Contact us

with the appropriate text for the page you're on unlinked, to give an instant visual clue to where you are.

[alienspacebat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, good idea. I kow it's lazy, but hitting a back button is a hassle - it involves moving your mouse off the main area of the page.

Interestingly enough we were taught about this in a marketing course I did a few years ago - web pages should aim to keep a users focus of vision on the centre of the page - what you are trying to sell - if they have to drift up to the back button to navigate then they spend less time reading the actual page and concentrating on your text.

[djm4]

That's one reason why I love Opera's 'gestures', and am constantly trying to use them when I'm saddled with MSIE. Dragging right with right mouse button to go back and left to go forward becomes intuitive really quickly, I find.

[skx.livejournal.com]

I love Opera's 'gestures'

I don't know if you use Mozilla at all, but if you do it can support
gestures too:

See here:

http://optimoz.mozdev.org/gestures/

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Done. And web users are right to be "lazy" - it's our job to make their job easier.

[babysimon]

You might want to put this at the top as well - lots of sites have it there, and it can get lost at the bottom. You can never have too much navigation.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Tried that, looks confusing. Now navbar is at the top and bottom is just a "home" link, which seems to be quite nice. With the navbar at the top, clicking through all the pages is really easy.

A single quibble and one small button pushed.

[aegidian]

http://www.2002.bicon.org.uk/contact.html
http://www.2002.bicon.org.uk/about.html
http://www.2002.bicon.org.uk/book.html
http://www.2002.bicon.org.uk/news.html
http://www.2002.bicon.org.uk/venue.html
http://www.2002.bicon.org.uk/help.html
http://www.2002.bicon.org.uk/links.html
- could stand to gain a border="0" element to the logo, it looks cruddy on some browsers (Mozilla, iCab)

- looks okay in IE 5, Opera (Mac OSX versions)

http://www.2002.bicon.org.uk/about.html
- I flinch slightly at the emphasis on partying. For a couple of reasons,. Number one is that a number of first-time (and old-time) people are party-shy and might consider this an excuse to not come. Two is that I would prefer to play down that element while negotiating with the venue for the next BiCon (personal preference). If it were down to me (and I appreciate it ain't) I'd change it to "meeting up with other bisexual people" or "getting together and having fun with" or something like that.

Re: A single quibble and one small button pushed.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Done the border thing. I'll discuss the partying thing...

Impressions, thinking aloud...

[adjectivemarcus.livejournal.com]

I'm with Giles on the partying. Is BiCon 2002 organising parties? As opposed to 'social events'? Previously parties were things that happened in addition to the socialising, after the ball or disco. Have you got spaces booked for parties?

You can guarantee a party to all the attendees? I mean, sure you can promise them there'll be events they can attend, but promise them they'll party?

And why is that word in bold, drawing attention away from the other things that happen? Are they dull and secondary?

Re: Impressions, thinking aloud...

[djm4]

Um ... what Marcus said. It's possible that I'm just being an pompous, uptight asshole, but the joint emphasis on 'discussion' and 'partying' on that page feels somehow wrong to me. I like to party, but not everyone does, and the word has slightly too many 'getting a bit drunk and rowdy' connotations for me to be happy with it as an informal synonym for 'socialise'.

Hmmm. Re-read previous paragraph and realise that I am being a pompous, uptight asshole, obviously. I'm just not sure that means I'm wrong.

Date

[(Anonymous)]

Am I the only one that managed to skim right past the date without reading it?

It's not on the about page (where I assumed it would be) but is on the main index page. I only actually found the date by pure accident when I skipped back a few pages.

Gordon

Re: Date

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I have gone mad and put it on *every* page. It's by far the most important information on the site. Thanks for writing!