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I'm a newcomer to HTML trying to develop a new site for my company. There's a prototype below.

http://www.technomot.com/index_3.html

I think it works OK but some of my more...er.. senior colleagues think it isn't obvious that you click on the rocker covers to find out more. This is despite the fact that I've put instructions at the bottom and in the title field of the background image.

What my colleagues want is for the rollovers to cycle automatically, in sequence, so the user's eye is drawn to them.

Any thoughts?

Norman Hadley
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    i suggest you optimise your images for web use currently takes far too long to load! – Treemonkey May 27 '11 at 12:17
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    this kind of navigation is out of trend for more than 10 years. – erenon May 27 '11 at 12:18
  • actually i looked at your site and it seems your webserver is really really slow. – Treemonkey May 27 '11 at 12:21
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    Google "mystery meat navigation" for reasons why you should not do this. What you are trying to do is a usability nightmare and is going to do nothing but frustrate users. For kicks try it on a touchscreen device where there is no such thing as a mouseover. As a general rule, if you have to give users instructions on how to use your menus, you need to change your menus. – Brent Friar May 27 '11 at 12:35
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    Ok, don't take this personally, but you should seriously consider hiring a professional. Your product is clearly not on the lower end of the expense scale and a single closed deal would probably cover the cost of a well built site. This site is going to cost you sales. Your website needs to inspire confidence when a potential client is considering your for a job likely to be tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. – Brent Friar May 27 '11 at 12:43

3 Answers3

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it is not possible for them to automaticly cycle using css alone, id suggest you take a look at jQuery.

http://docs.jquery.com/Main_Page

Treemonkey
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Chances are this will through uses off when they go to navigate, as the cycle will still be rolling, unless you set it to cease on hover. As someone's already point out, this can't be done in CSS alone, and as two others pointed out your page loading time is VERY VERY slow.

I'm running a 10mpbs fibre optic line, and most sites load within 2 seconds. Yours took a good 15, which isn't long in the grand scheme, but is very noticeable to visitors whom attempt to access your site.

Fireworksable
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  • Thanks for feedback so far, hard as some of it is. Can someone give me a bit of a pointer as to how to increase load speeds? Backdrop is currently a 250kb JPEG. If I understand correctly, I need to either degrade image quality to reduce size, interlace (would it need to be a PNG in that case?) or get a web server with more horsepower. Sorry these questions are so basic. – Norman Hadley May 27 '11 at 13:07
  • I've dropped the image quality by 50% in GIMP so the file sizes are typically half. The server is a nothing-special PC with 1GB RAM and Windows Server 2003 but I suspect the limit is defined by our broadband connection. Speed checker suggests we have a measly 409kbs upload speed. If I have to install on an off-site server, that's OK. – Norman Hadley May 27 '11 at 13:38
  • Unless you have a data center at your work, you should absolutely not host a business website on your own server. Too much can go wrong and chances are you have very little redundancy if any at all. Even $3/month hosting is an order of magnitude better than doing it yourself. – Brent Friar May 27 '11 at 14:18
  • @Brent Friar, @Treemonkey and @Fireworksable . Thanks - will look into remote hosting. – Norman Hadley May 27 '11 at 14:40
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I'd suggest not splitting half of your navigation between the header and footer, while the content is between the main navigation. You are also going to run into a headache using a fixed height layout, because any content you have that doesn't fit into your content area, will require scrollbars within the content area, as opposed to standard scrolling via the browser. This site design is going to cause huge problems for mobile users also.

jslumar
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