Grandmaster — Tue, 07 Nov 2000 16:23:10 +0000

Hello,

Your site is to dark, as the others say, to dark for a reading and learning site.

Your navigation bar is too big. You could try cutting it down by removing the three awards pages. I don't find that awards do that good in promoting a site. Mostly they are just traffic icons for the sites that is giving them away.

The guestbook, good for personal sites, but a webmaster learning site, i don't think it come as much use, if your looking for feedback, use a poll or such.

I think the webring doesnt work eather, as i said above, i dont think those work with a webmaste related site, as most of them only bring in 1 or 2 hits, if that.

Your site is a few pixels (maybe 5-10) bigger then 800 by 600.

Heres a quick review of your forum, make it match your site better, just try to intigrate everything together and it will make one solid website.

Site could be big. Good Luck.

Thanks

pe1234 — Mon, 06 Nov 2000 17:05:05 +0000

Thanks for your feedback about my site. It is very much appreciated. I'll try to play around with the background and text colors a bit... ultimately I'll probably have to start from scratch again, but that's ok... this is mainly for fun anyhow. I'm learnin'... slowly by surely:) Thanks again.

~John (pe1234)

Megan — Mon, 06 Nov 2000 14:54:36 +0000

Honestly, just by looking at the front page I wouldn't want to join your club. It looks to grungey and dark - not very friendly.

A couple of newbie giveaways

1. counter (most of the experienced webmasters use special services to do the stats in the background)
2. "best viewed with" (nobody is going to change their browser to look at your site, it's your job to make sure that everyone can see your site, not your visitors)
3. too many menu options (it's usually good to keep the number of options between 5 and 8 or so. If you've got more than that you should create groupings and separate them somehow)
4. animated gif's as bullets (I haven't actually made use of an animated gif for non-advertising purposes in a very, very long time. The pro's usually just use them for banner ads and such.)
5. black background (okay for artsy sites, but not for informational sites where people will have to do a lot of reading)

And there are others in there too. Since you are a site for newbies, maybe it would be a good idea to show your visitors how not to look like a newbie!

Anyway, welcome to TWF, pe1234. I hope that you will stick around and participate here. I cannot tell how much I learned about webmastering from participating in forums like this!