Thread: Web development review / critique please

Hi,

We've recently had our website rebuilt by a web developer. As I am a designer not a developer, I can't really see if the programming has been done to an acceptable level or not. I would just like to know whether the CSS has been well written, text styled properly, and everything is as it should be for SEO etc. The site is an eccomerce site built using wordpress as the cms.

I had some problems with the developer throughout the build, so unfortunately I don't have much confidence in them.

I'm not looking for a critique on the design, just the back end programming please.

You'll see that all the correct content has not been added yet.

The site is here: Bear Graphics

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
D

Looks fine to me. Perhaps a little more semantically meaningful mark-up would have been good (for example, use of paragraph tags) and this empty h1 seems a bit odd;

Code:

<a href="http://www.beargraphics.co.uk/index.php"> 
	<h1 id="header"> 
	  </h1></a>

...but it's generally OK.

like your logo :D

Yeah, the logo is awesome :)

Code's not great, a lot of it however looks as if it's due to a lot of plugins being used in wordpress. Nevertheless, the basic code before the plugins isn't brilliant, some unnecessary and not at all semantic.

Hi,

Thanks for all your feedback.

@Corrosive thanks - I'll ask them to look at the H1 tags for me

@NUGFX @Tony Hardy - thanks!

@chris_17 - thanks - would you mind telling me in more detail what the problems are?


The site seems very slow to load - does anyone have any idea why this is? My developer doesn't seem to...

Bear Graphics

Thanks all,

D

The page load I'd imagine would be simply the javascript needs to be minified and images optimized, especially with the amount of plugins being used. Code wise I guess it comes down to developer interpretation.

Nevertheless, here's a few of the things I found, tbh they're pretty basic things to do:

- Old Doctype.
- No logical heading structure, h1,h2,h3 etc.
- Some tags aren't closed such as the favicon
- No Alt tags on some images
- No paragraph tags

A lot of it is semantics and best practices, web standards etc. However if a user viewed your site using a screen reader I can't imagine the problems they would have.

In fairness, wordpress plugins add a lot of junk, and it's often more hassle going into the plugin and trying to fix the problems that others have made.

Hi,

Thanks for all the help so far. My developer assures me the website has been tested and is ready to go (when I've finished uploading content in wordpress) - would somebody please mind having a both quick look for me to see if everything looks good?

Bear Graphics

many thanks.
D