Megan — Tue, 09 Jan 2001 22:45:14 +0000

CSOLS

You might want to run your code through a validator. It's working okay in netscape but doesn't seem to be looking the way you'd want it. I see a lot of errors in here (for example - why do you have table tags around your navigation links with no trs or tds? Why are you using that table tag to define css for your navbar? I'm surprised that this is working at all, especially in Netscape!.

As for the design, the first problem I have is that I have no idea what CSols is. Instead of just "Welcome to CSOLS" you could have "Welcome to CSols, makers of blah blah blah blah blah"

Your logo should appear on every page. You should also use a sans-serif font for your body text (verdana and helvetica are nice) instead of serif. Sans-serif fonts are easier to read from a screen, and they look nicer too (same goes for serif fonts in print material).

You've also got several shades of red and pinkish-red on here. Pick one. The bright red on top of that pinky-red for the mouseovers is particularly bad. Did you think about the colour scheme at all? The logo is very good, so I wold take the colours from that and use them with black and white instead of adding bright red and blue.

The one on Geocities:

I hope this will be moving away from Geocities sometime soon. Why am I clicking on a medal? I don't know what this site is about...

Now, the first thing I see at the top of the page is that this site is best viewed at 800 x 600. Do you think I'm going to actually change my resolution. Nope.

The problem with this one is that the nav frame and the body frame look like two totally different designs. Get rid of the frames and work on creating a design that unifies all page elements. Again, think about a colour scheme. The "Africa Star" logo thing is well done - start with that.

Overall, my advice to you is too look around at good design. Try http://www.coolhomepages.com - you're not going to be able to do stuff like that anytime soon, but take note of which techniques they use and which ones they avoid. You'll notice that frames are rare, and when they are used it's hard to even tell that they're there. You'll notice sans-seif fonts and clearly defined colour schemes. You'll see that pages usually have very well defined structure.

Good luck! I hope that you will continue to participate and learn at TWF!