pcmedicplus — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 17:21:34 +0000

My first impression was way too much blue; Need to come up with a better color scheme. Small country village to me says fall colors. I bet in a bed and breakfast type of town, "Small town", they do their best business during the fall. I agree that the advertisements take the focus of the page. You need better graphics to pull them back to your point. What are you selling, what are you about, what are your services. I see none of this when I first hit the site.

Also Clean code is good code. Your posting on your main page but when I do a validation I receive Failed validation, 98 errors, That’s just the main page. This to me being a end user but with limited knowledge of Websites and Html is the first thing I check. It tells me that they put some pride in there work.

heebiejeebieclu — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 12:18:02 +0000

kasrak's right. It's all about improving the look of your site with nice images. Also, one of the biggest turn-offs to a sight are annoying ads, so as kasrak points out, you may need to rethink that one.

I have Norton AntiVirus, so ads aren't a problem for me

kasrak — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 21:01:32 +0000

Its a nice start. But when I first got to site, I though: eh. The only images on the front page are the annoying, blinking ads which makes me wanna hit the back button. You need to put some good-quality pictures right on the front page, in between the paragraphs to grab my attention. Also, try to get non-animated ads, they're distracting. Good luck with the site.

heebiejeebieclu — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 19:59:19 +0000

Quote: This really needs a lot of work

I'm not sure it's that far off. The structure and foundation is there, it's just time to spruce up the graphics. Have a look out one of my favourite sites to see what your site has the potential of looking like.

Now, you many not have the expertise to create some of those sites, and we all understand that. But if you take a look at some of the cleaner sites on that list, then you'll see that it's a combination of....

a clean look
text organized and layed-out effectively
some cool photoshop 3D and shadow effects
good fonts and good colour schemes

....which make the cool websites of today cool. And I wouldn't say that all of those things above are completely above your grasp, would you? The good thing about the current trend is that everything is nice and simple. A bit like like my good self, really.

Just think about how you could apply the above things to your site and you should be fine. You no doubt have your own ideas, but if you want some more specific advice on what could be done, just ask

Megan — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 19:42:31 +0000

This really needs a lot of work. The biggest problem is that there is no look and feel at all. If you want this to have a village feel you really need to have some good graphics, logo, and colour scheme. Try looking for old fashioned kind of fonts, and heritage colour schemes. I know paint companies will come out with heritage palettes so try there for inspiration (just increase the saturation some).

There should be some more inviting product photos and promotions on the front page. Read this article and look at the examples:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/great-homepages-really-suck

You might want to consider hiring a good graphic designer to work with you on this. I think it could make a huge difference in creating the kind of look and feel you want.

Good luck