Busy — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 20:17:26 +0000

It's heaps better but still hasn't got that "you know you want to stay and look me over, maybe even come back and see me again some time .." feel to it

maybe change your font to verdana (although arial can be ok), use CSS if possible to set your basic properties like font style/size/colour
Still don't reckon that yellow is the right yellow, to me, the yellow, orange, red and blue (links) looks more for kids than for cooking, sure cooking can be fun, maybe it's just the design. Your inner pages look better than the index.
You need to take out the extra above the "Welcome to your online cookbook" as you have colspan in your second td tag.
Some pictures of the food would be good if you are able, (small ones) to give an idea of the dish itself, some people (ie me) get an idea of taste from a picture.
keep up the good work

easy fun recipes

Debspicks — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 19:18:05 +0000

All the banner ads are mine except the small one
for freewebs at the bottom

CptAwesome — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 19:05:53 +0000

Are the banner ads on that site yours or freewebs.com's?

tomkuegler — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 15:35:04 +0000

I couldn't re-itterate strong enough that you should get your own domain name and hosting.
I know you are not trying to make money, but frankly the cost of domains and hosting are so cheap now ($25 to $30 per year), it is hard to not to do.
I will usually not even visit sites that do not have their own domain name.

KGP — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 14:23:17 +0000

you should make the site for the user easier to navigate and find what he wants while maximizing the potential out of him/her.
that means to be able to profit from him/her the max possible.

easier navigation means higher paths, longer stays etc.

easy fun recipes

Debspicks — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 14:01:25 +0000

Thanks to all who have taken the time to reveiw my site

I have made what is to me alot of changes I'm doing this by hand
and I type with 2 fingers.The test page is now what was the old site.
I've added a note at the top of the page in the hope this tread won't be to confusing.
I'm leaving it there so new people can still see what has been
said here.
I've been making changes as you all have given ideas.

I have alot of space now to add to the site combining recipe pages was a good idea for me.When I do pay for this site I will stick with this host.
They only put that very small banner at the bottom for the free site space and are very reliable.

New home page:
http://www.freewebs.com/funrecipes/index.htm

Old site:
http://www.freewebs.com/funrecipes/testpage.htm

Again thanks all

CptAwesome — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 10:34:28 +0000

Well, since you are using free space, you probably don't have access to image upload, the site would look a lot nicer if there were even some minor graphics.

Colour is your friend, and one thing which is done commonly in food packaging, is colour coding different variaties of the same product, based on content, yellow for chicken, red for beef, green for vegetarian or even just healthy foods.

Don't use the default link colour, that just looks unprofessional, you'll rarely see links left up to the browser to decide the colour, and use some CSS to add hover effects, make the names bold, and interesting.

Once you have all that, yeah, getting space and domain are a good idea, the people I am hosted with, charge $5.95 (Canadian) a month, it's 100mb of space (far more than you'd need) and they work. Hosting is cheap, and if you get something like Google's Ad-Sense you can make some of the money back.

Megan — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 19:52:31 +0000

Thanks a lot for your enthusiastic participation so far, Debspicks. We really appreciate your help

Your site does need a lot of work. It's hard to know where to begin with this but I'll start with the colours. The main difference between the two designs is the use of colour. You are going in the right direction here with the bright colours but I think you've gone a bit overboard. Try to keep your colour scheme down to 2-3 key colours. Resist the urge to sprinkle them everywhere - those text backgrounds are particularly distracting.

I disagree with Busy about the yellow. Yellow is more of a "foody" colour than many others. If you read up on colour theory you'll find out that blue is an unappetizing colour. Orange - it's opposite - is appetizing. That's why you'll see a lot of restaurants and recipe sites with orange colour schemes. So yellow isn't a bad choice.

You have done a good job pulling the site together in the second version. You have a decent navbar and it's easy to get around the site - except when the links are broken! Check out those links and make sure they point somewhere.

I somewhat disagree about needing to model yourself after the big recipe sites. No reason why you have to go that far. Your emphasis on easy, fast & fun will help to set you apart.

One of the key pieces of any design is a logo. You don't really have one here - just text at the top of the page. You're headed in the right direction, though, with the clip art there. The egg timer is cute - you could use it (or something similar) along with your site title to create a cute logo. Just find an interesting font for your text and put them together in a graphics program.

I also agree with Busy about the advertising. I sort of feel like I'm wading through a bunch of garbage to find the good stuff in here Pare it down to only the ones that actually work in terms of generating revenue.

Good luck with the site!

KGP — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 14:48:42 +0000

to be honest i dont like the desing of your website why dont you take [URL=http://www.gourmed.gr ]http://www.gourmed.gr [/URL] http://www.allrecipes.com etc as a reference?

KGP — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 14:46:57 +0000

to be honest i dont like the desing of your website why dont you take gourmed.gr allrecipes.com etc as a reference?