george galloway dot com

Mandy · Joined: 07 Feb 2007

FYI, the major component is the images, rather than the texts. Whilst I find FireFox more memory efficient than IE, strange about a "crash", especially on sites without movies / streaming.

Though this subject of a crash might be better in the "tech" forum face mentioned in another thread

luke · Joined: 11 Feb 2007 Location: by the sea

faceless · admin Joined: 25 Apr 2006

Mandy - the site needs to be entirely re-designed. Simple as that. It's not a user-friendly experience and until it is there will probably be 80% of visitors who just leave without bothering to wait the 2 minutes+ it takes for the first page to load.

nekokate · Joined: 13 Dec 2006 Location: West Yorkshire, UK

For what it's worth, here's my constructive (instead of destructive) criticism:

The first page that greets visitors is absolutely huge. The impact is immediatly impersonal. I'd keep the index page (or home page, whatever people want to call it) minimal. A brief introduction in the form of a paragraph from GG, maybe, and allow access to the bulk of all the other information via the link menu on the left.

I'm sure most people would be very happy for the site to contain the amount of regularly updated information it does, and have a lot of resources for them to browse, but not all on the index page!

I've done web design here and there in the past, and in my opinion an index page for something like this ideally shouldn't even generate a vertical scrollbar.

As it stands, there's a link on the left designated "News", which is where all the news should be, but if you click on that link, the last update was January this year, because once you took over as acting webmaster, you set up a feed whereby what should be in the news section just started piling up on the home page instead, making it, well... too long.

Also, how about a seperate link for his TalkSport shows on the main page, just to make it reeeeally easy for people to get to them? At the moment they have to click on "Video / Audio" and then follow the link for the show archive, which isn't particularly prominently placed, and then be directed to another site altogether. That might seem blindingly obvious to us, but not everyone on the net is that savvy and I bet there are hundreds of people who listen to his show who would struggle to find the download.

EDIT - I just noticed there is a TalkSport link on the main page, but further down and not along with the navigation links, as was my suggestion.

Mandy · Joined: 07 Feb 2007

Thanks for all your feedback.

popinjay · Joined: 02 Jan 2007

A texter complained about it on GG's show tonight. Still no redesigning or shortening the pages though?

Mandy · Joined: 07 Feb 2007

Actually, there had been many changes since above thread, e.g. :

+Only 5 news stories from SN are on GG.COM

+Talksport logo is at the top right to allow quick link to the download page.

I did wonder whether the caller was "objective", e.g. he said something like half the stories on SpideredNews don't open. If he has an issue with SpideredNews, why doesn't he e-mail SpideredNews ? It isn't GG's site, so why is he e-mailing GG about SpideredNews ?
It is like complaining to GG that they don't like the 'Daily Record' web site.

I think same emailer offered his web design services last week (he claimed to bring it up to the 21st century). So he could be touting for business. George correctly said last week & today that he should e-mail in since we could always use extra help. But as far as I know, he didn't e-mail in.

popinjay · Joined: 02 Jan 2007

The length of the page is my main problem with it...

major.tom · Posted: Sat Aug 11, 2007 11:24 pm Post subject:

popinjay · Joined: 02 Jan 2007

Mandy · Joined: 07 Feb 2007

Popinjay : Are you the Pete who e-mailed in today complaining about the length of the page ? (or last week)

Are you on broadband ?
Are you able to justify the claim that half the pages don't open ? Which pages don't open ?

faceless · admin Joined: 25 Apr 2006

Mandy, bearing in mind my earlier comments, you do a great job with providing so much for nothing. If people had to pay for getting so much for what they get for free then maybe they'd have an argument - until then I wouldn't worry.

popinjay · Joined: 02 Jan 2007

faceless · admin Joined: 25 Apr 2006

I just got an email from the guy who used to run GG's site and he's back at the helm again... hopefully that will mean some proper updating and sorting.

nekokate · Joined: 13 Dec 2006 Location: West Yorkshire, UK

I've not even been on georgegalloway.com for about a month! I just gave up because there was never a single thing there that wasn't also here but better organised or better quality.