please have another look

[Shrewsbury]

Ok, you people got me playing with my site.

here is the original

http://www.bodyelectricmethod.com

and here is a temp I have been messing with ( all functions not intact and only messed with home page)

http://www.oberlin.net/~laura/

see what you think!

Thanks

Jay

 

[Xue Sheng]

From and old ex admin POV, much better. I would be interested in seeing what the developers and designers think.

There are a couple of things that stand out to me but I could be overly picky based on my background. I will wait for the design and developer side to respond to see what they think

 

[charyuop]

I built in the bast a couple sites even tho they were nothing professional. I tended to avoid images like the one in your first site, where if someone doesn't have broadband internet would close the page before it is done downloading.
As per the picture itself it is a little bit blurry, but in the altogether the second version of your site has a very good look.

 

[Bob Hubbard]

Ok, the redesign is a big improvement over the older site. I gave up on loading the old one and I'm on DSL.

That said, there are a few points that stuck out at me.
- Navigation was at the bottom of the page. Best locations are top and/or left side.
- Look of linked pages was inconsistent with main page, and lacked navigation links.
- Overall feel is of an older style of webdesign, mid-90's. This could be good or bad, so take as just an observation.
- Site code is bloated, due to being done in MS Word. Some optimization could help tighten things up a bit.
- Site is lacking meta tags, and some alt tags.
- Theres alot of dead space around the central image on larger screens. Looks better on lower resolutions.

It's decent, and an improvement on the original.

 

[funnytiger]

Nice improvement!

I agree with everything Bob stated 100%.

For about a year I taught basic web design courses at a local college. You are showing very good progress as a beginner.

 

[Xue Sheng]

Ok, the redesign is a big improvement over the older site. I gave up on loading the old one and I'm on DSL.

That said, there are a few points that stuck out at me.
- Navigation was at the bottom of the page. Best locations are top and/or left side.
- Look of linked pages was inconsistent with main page, and lacked navigation links.
- Overall feel is of an older style of webdesign, mid-90's. This could be good or bad, so take as just an observation.
- Site code is bloated, due to being done in MS Word. Some optimization could help tighten things up a bit.
- Site is lacking meta tags, and some alt tags.
- Theres alot of dead space around the central image on larger screens. Looks better on lower resolutions.

It's decent, and an improvement on the original.

That about covers it, and then some

 

[Andrew Green]

Definately heading in the right direction.

Your best bet is to design a template first, a page with nothing in it, just the layout and navigation menus that will be common to all pages. This is the key thing, until you have that forget about making different pages.

Consistancy is important, you don't want people thinking they have left the site, or have to look for the navigation, shich should be visible, and very clear when you first load without scrolling.

Yellow text I don't like, nor the text on a textured background. Backgrounds are ok, but the text should be on a solid color, and a more neutral one, bright yellow is not the easiest colour to read.

The picture... I'm gonna be honest, all I think is Highlander....

One thing to look at is using a better editor, MS Word is not good for webpages, it produces horrid code and really just handles things poorly in general.

A free, but much better option is Nvu, located here: http://nvu.com/index.php it does have a few bugs in it still, but is well above Word for the purposes of webdesign. I even have a tutorial around somewhere I wrote for it to get a basic site template going if you are interested.

 

[Shrewsbury]

Thanks for the input.

My wife said I need to change the picture to, so I am sure I will.
I did nothing with the links so yes they need work.
thanks for all the input!!
Thanks for all the advice I will play around and get things up and let you know, and perhaps you will be kind enough to look again.

Thanks