mjulson — Thu, 27 Mar 2003 21:16:32 +0000

Here are my thoughts on it, for what it's worth.

I also like the dark blue as someone mentioned, which is surprising for me, as I almost always dislike dark backgrounds with light text. The primary detractor I saw was the black/teal menu bar that switches to red on roll over. It's a bit harsh. You might consider changeing the black to a complimentary blue with white text, and on roll over just change the font color to teal or something similar.

But I'm a techy, not an artist.

canada_dry — Tue, 25 Mar 2003 18:39:56 +0000

Quote: Originally posted by oce222
I didn't see anything at all... I'm guessing the server is down or something. That could be troublesome in the future... make sure your host is reliable.

Slight server problems, all is working fine now.

oce222 — Mon, 24 Mar 2003 23:54:53 +0000

I didn't see anything at all... I'm guessing the server is down or something. That could be troublesome in the future... make sure your host is reliable.

shootingstar67 — Mon, 24 Mar 2003 22:04:57 +0000

I like it.

SiteTechnician — Mon, 24 Mar 2003 18:49:43 +0000

Your home page takes 18 seconds to download at 56K. That's way too long for a home page. I'd shoot for 8 seconds.

Your logo, the aquarium pic and the award banner appear to be the culprits. You should optimize/compress/split these images.

canada_dry — Fri, 21 Mar 2003 21:49:38 +0000

Thanks! Karen!

Karen Cardinal — Fri, 21 Mar 2003 21:46:58 +0000

Great improvement!
Your changes have made all the difference.

Best of luck with the search engines and sales!

canada_dry — Fri, 21 Mar 2003 21:21:20 +0000

Ok everyone I totally re-done the navigation menu, and cleaned up the site quite a bit, please let me know what you all think of the layout now. I want to be sure it is ok be for I submit it to the search engines.

Thanks to all of you who gave me the great advice, it is greatly appreciated!

http://www.lifelineaquarium.com

Karen Cardinal — Fri, 21 Mar 2003 16:48:41 +0000

Ok, if this is your old design and your in the process of fixing these things, disregard this...

The first thing I notcied at your site was the long list of words put on your page for the search engines. I know you have it (sort of) phrased like a sentence, bit it's too small and reads too much like a list of keywords to be for anyone other than the search engines.

This is called spamming the search engines!
That is one of the most unprofessional things a webmaster can do.

If you actually talk about these things on your site, then the search engines will find these words in the text of your pages.

If you feel you must put them all together on one page, create a "Welcome to our site" paragraph that explains what the visitors can find at your site. Do not make your sentences look like a list of keywords though!

The other suggestion I would make is dump the side navigation completely. It's nothing but a repeat of the top navigation (which is directly above it). On your inner pages the side navigation doesn't expand to include any additional pages in that section, so there's absolutely no reason for it.

Other than that I think your doing fine.
You should get rid of the date in your top nav bar on your inner pages and make that spot a link to your home page.

Well, I've probably griped at you enough.

Enjoy what your doing!

Renegade — Fri, 21 Mar 2003 06:02:47 +0000

You site looks incredibly cluttered and slow loading. Try splitting up or cutting out some of your text in the content area.

The grey navigation bar colours doesn't seem to go along too well with the rest of the site and the same too for the balck navigation on the left, maybe another shade of blue would help?

In your source code you have:

<?php
...type5:hover   {color:#800000; text-decoration:underline;}
</style>



<style>
BODY {SCROLLBAR-FACE-COLOR: #0...
?>

You can get rid of the extra tags and combine them both together to give you this:

<?php
...
type5:hover   {color:#800000; text-decoration:underline;}

BODY {SCROLLBAR-FACE-COLOR: #0...
?>