Could you have a look at my site

DolanHost, normally I am not a huge fan of the orange that you are using but in this case it is okay. Somethings that I would fix though:

• Text - I think that you would come out better using black text instead of the orange that you are using. I would also consider adding a stylesheet to get rid of all those font tags and to make you links look a little more attractive.
• Margins - you need to get rid of the margins so that the orange goes to the edge of the screen. Here's how, in the body section add, leftmargin="0" topmargin="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0". The first two are for IE, the second two are for Netscape.
• Pop-ups - the popups on your site are particularly annoying since they loaded about 3 separate windows on me.
• Logo - you need to work on some kind of logo. Also the picture that you are using looks like a bunch of Americans at a college football game. It seems out of place as it has nothing to do with what I assume is your target audience.
• Frontpage Express 2.0 - it says that the site was made with FPE. I am impressed if that is the case since it doesn't look like it.
• Code - the code could use a good scrubbing. A lot of deprecated tags were used like font, center, etc. You also have quite a few nesting errors. You also have 2 tags.

I would say that you have a decent start but you need to scrub things a little.

Thanks for taking the time to have a look at it.

It was made totally in front page because i do not have a clue about HTML.

Text- I think that you could be right but then I would possible need to change the link colour to make the links stand out.

Margins- I deliberatly has the table indented a little but I will take that out and see what it looks like.

Pop-ups- I will get rid of them as I am moving them to my hosting company which is ad free.

The logo is the supporters of the team that the website is about. It a scottish soccer team. Thats why I asked for any ideas for half decent graphics packages so that i could make something better.

Dont have a clue about the code to be honest.

Pad your table cells so that text doesn't bump against the edges.

As for cleaning up your code, there are numerous versions of a free program called HTML Tidy which will do that. Just do a search for it.

thanks very much for all the help.

i will have a look into it tommorow.

I think everyone has answered the questions, except for the graphics package

To make, modify, animate ... then PSP (paint shop pro) is one I'd highly recommed, It does vectors, animations, effects, has browse option ... plus can add/use other graphic programs add-ons like photoshops, v7 comes with mouseover options plus a slicer (for slicing up images for web site tables)

photoshop is a good program BUT is very bulky, slow loading, a resource hog and costs the earth, where as PSP does everything photoshop does, loads fast, doesnt hog all the computer and costs a fraction of the cost of its rivals

I know the photoshop guys and gals will have their say on this , it comes down to what you prefer, these two could even be compared to IE and Netscape

To view, flip, change colors, resize/resample, make auto thumbnails, slideshow etc then iranview (freeware), also comes with a few basic effects..

There is a free older version of psp out there (v3 I think), could be at jasc.com (psp's homepage), it doesnt do vectors etc but is free and can give you an idea of what the basics are.
I personally have version 5 and 6 of PSP (was luckily able to upgrade to version 6 for $10 when I brought 5) and photoshop 6 and I use Iranview as my default graphic viewer (which can also play movies, sound files ...)as it loads in a split second and uses a 'next', 'back' image option to browse all that folders option.

DOH - I'm babling again. Good luck

where can i get iranview, or any other freeware versions of psp etc

try getting it here.

http://members.xoom.com/jbarta/psp312-32.zip

http://stud1.tuwien.ac.at/~e9227474/english.htm

might be dead links. But you can give 'em a try.

http://www.irfanview.com/

ALright, now for an actual site review! The first thing I'm confused about is your site title. "Arabs Online" - yet this is a site about the Dundee United Football Club? I'm confused. The site title could be very misleading to people so you should rethink that.

I'm finding the red/orange colour here to be a little on the bright side. Try to tone it down just a little. In a lot of these pictures the uniforms look more orange... okay, if you go to their offficial site the logo is there. Grab the colour from that crest. This will be easy once you get a graphics program.

I would also suggest putting a photo of a player or a game scene on the front page - maybe instead of the crowd photo at the top left. This do more to make the site topic readily obvious to visitors.

I agree that the logo needs to be improved. Try printing the site title in a more unique font, maybe overlapping the photo a little bit if you can. I can think of some cool photoshop effects with layers and masks that would look really cool but I guess you have to stick to with the tools you have to work with.

The left sidebar also needs help. Put some padding in that table cell so the text isn't butting right up against the left edge. There are also too many options on that menu. Try breaking them up into related chunks. YOu may wish to separate it into static content (photo galleries, statistics, history etc.), interactive content (mobile madness, poll, downloads, travel info, guestbook), and site info (contact us etc. which is already separated). That might make it easier to use. Also move your 'latest news' right to the front page - there's really not a whole lot of interesting info on the front page as it is, and I imagine most of your regular visitors will be looking for the news right away. And get rid of the i-frame on the news page while you're at it.

Another problem with that left sidebar is the e-mail boxes down at the bottom. Regular visitors who come to check their e-mail are going to be annoyed about having to scroll to find the login form. Move that up to the empty red area in the top right corner.

Why is this site breaking my back button? That's really annoying. Get rid of the frames... I can't even see them anyway so I'm wondering why you've used them.

Another graphics package you might want to check out is Macromedia's Fireworks. It doesn't have the fancy photo altering capabilities that PSP and Photoshop have, but it was created for making web graphics. Try downloading trial versions to see which one you like best.

If you're wondering where the discussion between Busy and myself about PS vs. PSP went it will reappear in the graphics & design forum soon.

Okay thanks very much for alll the help everyone.

The colours I suppose could be toned down a little bit and a better name added.

I will do this soon.

For a graphics program try the free trial CompactDraw or Real-DRAW Pro at http://www.mediachance.com/. I haven't tried the other programs at MediaChance but there is a photo editing one too.

Or Paint Shop Pro as already recommended. The free version 3 program is hard to find these days. If anyone has a working link can you please post it?

Cheers,

Annette

pop on page load, =(

and then when i left it opened a gator.com page that i couldnt close or resize tried to set a ton of cookies and then opened a do you want to install this program

id definetaly get rid of that or if its the host look at a diff host that doesnt do that.

Right i would again like to thank the people that have cared to reply to this post.

I have now made some more changes.

I have toned down the tangerine a little bit.

As for the name that is what the site is known as and that is not going to change. This is the nickname of the club. But to improve that the page title is now Arabs Online- Dundee United On The Net.

Please take a look and tell me what you think.

dufc.cjb.net

Also could someone please suggest a reliable ad free (or minimal) web host. As the host that I am with has been experimenting with pop up and i dont know what he is going to stay with.

Well first thing is you definitely need to change hosts! I don't use free ones so can't help you with that one.

The site :

I get a horizontal scroll bar at 800*600

Do you really need all those banners??? They really cheapen the site I think. Don't keep them unless they make you lots of money!

The font you have chosen for the graphics is very hard to read, especially the top logo part & the badge looks awful - all jaggedy. I'd rethink that complete top part as it just doesn't do anything for me with the orange on white then on a black background!!

The middle frame bit with the news bugs me - too much scrolling required. I would just have the days top headlines as links to the full stories opening on separate pages and an archieve of previous days stories.

The two oranges (graphics & heading backgrounds) should be the same and they should be the same colour as the orange in the badge. I'm not overly struck on the colours but I understand that you are stuck with them!

I also don't like the scrolling text, very tacky.

The 'Search Our Directory' is very misleading as it isn't part of this site and looks to be DMOZ??? As everything open up within your frame set (why are you using frames???) you don't even get to see the address in the browser address bar!

Keep going

The banners are traffic exchanges and I am narrowing them down to one.

I am looking for a free host with minimal ads as ad free hosts tend to go out of buisness.

What I have saw is ad free hosting if I have a domain, so i am going to purchase a domain and move there. No ads except the occasional banner on my site.

I will tidy up the oranges so that they are the same.

As for the news I need to keep the frame as it is a remotely hosted script and it cannot be embeded into my page.

The scrolling text will be removed.

Plus the directory is dmoz but you can cuztomize it to look like your pages and that is to be moved from the main page to the links section very soon.

Frames? could someone care to explain, i thougt a frames were different pages then put together to make one page.

I have one I-Frame for the news and the rest is all tables. Am I missing something.

Eeek. I tend to think that this is worse than the old one although I don't completely remember what that one was like. You need to be more consistent with your use of colours first of all. Just take the orange from the logo at the top - right now there's three different shades on here and that's a problem (oops - this has already been pointed out). I also think that the font is rather inappropriate - it looks kind of halloweeen-ish, especially combined with the orange and black colour scheme.

You also still need some sort of photo on the front page of a player or game scene to make it obvious what the site is about, and the layout is still a problem as well. Too many ads at the bottom and that i-frame really isn't working well.

Well what could go in place of the i frame?