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Dark Knight / Le Chevalier Noir
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---- Nous avons besoin d'un traduction français!
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I tried it on my tower machine and it took over 40 seconds. Same internet connection. Main difference is in operating system and memory and the number of cores.
Gary, you must have hamsters powering that tower of yours!:) From my perspective, the Hudson Boat Works web site was not particularly slow or fast loading. It and the other Resolution web sites were decently average. Once a connection was made to the server, the Hudson Boat Works home page rendered pretty quickly (under a couple seconds on a modest laptop with a mid-range connection to the Internet).
I used a web site optimization service to compare the Hudson Boat Works site against Amazon.com (http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/). The Hudson Boat Works web site stacked up pretty well against Amazon.com in terms of load times and the number of files that it loaded. That is a favourable comparison.
One big file that the Hudson Boat Works site loads is a well regarded open-source javascript library called jquery.com. This adds a bit to the load time. If instead Resolution had used custom javascript rather than jquery.com, they could have shaved off some load time. However, using jquery.com has a considerable number of advantages over home-brew code (superior cross browser support among other things). So everything being a matter of trade offs, I think Resolution made the correct decision here.
I checked out the Hudson Boat Works site on three browsers (IE, Chrome and Firefox) and I didn't notice any particular problems. From a technical perspective and in comparison to the bulk of mainstream web sites, the sites built by Resolution are fine. Perhaps not brilliant and ground breaking (like, for instance, the HTML5 demonstration site built for an Arcade Fire video) but solidly OK.
Web site look and feel is a tricky thing. Building a web site for a client means conforming to their branding. You might not like their branding but that doesn't matter. Their customers have to like it. That's the only thing that counts. What a web designer should bring to a web site is good organization. Web site designers talk about the information architecture. On a good web site, it should be obvious which link you need to click to get what you want. I'm not into rowing so I can't really comment in detail about the information architecture for Hudson Boat Works but it looks OK to me.
"Flashy" web sites are often demonized by web purists like Jakob Nielsen (http://www.useit.com/). Nielsen takes minimalism to an extreme. Personally I think that a "flashy" web site sometimes is appropriate. Again it is really a question of branding. Quite honestly I'd like to see one successful commercial web site that is sparse like Nielson's or a lot of the Linux evangelists. I think the purists go overboard in stressing utilitarian functioning over any consideration of aesthetics. But again every site has different needs depending on it's core business.
I don't know what Resolution is going to come up with for the CFC. But I'm hopeful and reasonably confident that it will be well designed and coded thereby representing the CFC well.
Resolution has already been picked, folks! No more point in complaining that they [in your opinion] suck. In future though, why not broadcast the candidates to the members? You can get lots of feedback, great suggestions, the governors can take it in, and then vote.
Now what Resolution will produce depends on their skills, but more so on how well they are directed. Assuming the company is not deficient in technical staff they can produce a website to any style.
Many companies just give the bare outline of what they want, and leave it up to the web designers to come up with a design. If we want something more specific, we simply must engage:
Get CFC people with a clear vision of needs communicating frequently with Resolution people to come up with a good design. If we want less flashy pictures, just ask. If we want more contrast or larger text, ask.
So who is/are responsible for keeping in touch with Resolution to direct the design?
I checked out the Hudson Boat Works site on three browsers (IE, Chrome and Firefox) and I didn't notice any particular problems. From a technical perspective and in comparison to the bulk of mainstream web sites, the sites built by Resolution are fine. Perhaps not brilliant and ground breaking (like, for instance, the HTML5 demonstration site built for an Arcade Fire video) but solidly OK.
Web site look and feel is a tricky thing. Building a web site for a client means conforming to their branding. You might not like their branding but that doesn't matter. Their customers have to like it. That's the only thing that counts. What a web designer should bring to a web site is good organization. Web site designers talk about the information architecture. On a good web site, it should be obvious which link you need to click to get what you want. I'm not into rowing so I can't really comment in detail about the information architecture for Hudson Boat Works but it looks OK to me.
"Flashy" web sites are often demonized by web purists like Jakob Nielsen (http://www.useit.com/). Nielsen takes minimalism to an extreme. Personally I think that a "flashy" web site sometimes is appropriate. Again it is really a question of branding. Quite honestly I'd like to see one successful commercial web site that is sparse like Nielson's or a lot of the Linux evangelists. I think the purists go overboard in stressing utilitarian functioning over any consideration of aesthetics. But again every site has different needs depending on it's core business.
I don't know what Resolution is going to come up with for the CFC. But I'm hopeful and reasonably confident that it will be well designed and coded thereby representing the CFC well.
Steve and Ed know their stuff, maybe they should be on the site review committee.
It’s great that the bis didn’t go to a one-man company, they’re eight people. And resIM make “award-winning” sites! I agree that the resIM site sucks, but I really liked their Perth County website, http://www.perthcounty.ca, it is way better than the crappy CFC site. I think a critical factor is how much time they have to work on it without being rushed, time to test the coding with the CFC database.
Ten years ago I went to school for webdesign and technical writing [where Nielson is God]. A good website needs to be made of a team of people with different skills, not just programmers but also a design artist, writer and editor. Sites made by just by artists can have too large page sizes, unreadable fonts and with no searhable text. Sites made just by programmers can have fancy bells and whistles obscuring information and slowing the download. And sites made by just by writers can have horrible colours and realms of text. Good design is to have only a couple of colours, and text in columns balanced with images.
The usual starting point is a user survey. I suspect that over 50% of the visits to the CFC website are players checking their ratings. Therefore a link to ratings should be on the first page, perhaps with a list of events just rated. Other possible content for the top page are links to FIDE events Canadians are playing in and a game (with game viewer) from a recent fIDE event or perhaps a historic Canadian game, perhaps with a photo and bio. Organized players may also be looking to buy books, computer programs and equipment, and look up their membership expiry date, rules and upcoming (national) tournaments.
It’s also important to have pages for other users: organizers, governors, people who are new to organized chess, people who want to learn how to play chess, parents wanting to know if they should encourage their children to play chess, people looking for chess clubs, chess teachers and potential sponsors of chess tournaments.
Photos are an important element. I think there should be a photo for every chess club, and searchers only need to see the list of clubs in their province, not nation-wide. It would also be nice to have a tournament photo with the tournament crosstable.
Technically, I suspect that over 90% of users are using current browsers and a high speed connection, but not those in rural areas. The site should still work on small screens and old browsers. Of course it should be coded to the latest XHTML. I don’t thinkVerdana is the end of the world; although it is not as clear as Arial for titles and Times for text, sometimes something different separates it from other websites.
Although I think that the CFC database part of the webite is not part of this proposal, another idea for more content and CFC member participation is to ask players to provide a photo for their rating page (as FIDE does), and also to have a list of all tournaments they have won and maybe ask the moves from their favourite game. Certainly a permanent list of tournaments won would be an honour for players as they age. Lawrence Day's list would be huge and would give him recognition for his accomplishments, which his falling rating doesn't reflect.
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