emoholic.net | please critique me!

I'm new to web design myself--but from a users stand point, I like the shadow effect on the mouse-over links. But the page is REALLY long.

Other than that, it looks nice.

Win XP Pro, IE6.0 1280x1024.

i know... i'm trying to fix this by finding either a cheap or free hosting service that will allow me to have my domain name and has msql data bases and php support. without that i can not have a blog, or i haven't found one that I can support. (All i can have is html ) But thanks for the suggestion! I'll try to fix it up.

Phil

Quite a few pages are under construction, so there's not a lot to review as yet. I take it Emo is some kind of beer? We all like quality, but a 100x100 pixel image that weighs in at 375KB seems slightly excessive.

Peter

I assume you are talking about the photos section.... i'm fixing that right now. Oh, and the site has only been online for 2 days. I started making it a little over a week ago, but i never posted it - college finals week is coming up. Oh well, I'll fix it as soon as possible

Hello, emoholic

The pages you have that say "under construction" I don't like very much. In general if a page will be unavailable for more than a few hours IMOP ditch the "under construction" page and launch the new content when it is ready to be put online.

Old Quote:
"Good sites are always under construction."

Another thing where you have "advertisements" Adsense is spelled wrong. You have "Adsence." Spelling is very important. I mess up sometimes myself with spelling.

The site in general I like besides the few key points I made. Hope this can help.

I fixed the ad thing... as for the under construction thing... i'll fix that early this week.

I made the starting page smaller by archiving last month's posts, does that help?

Isn't blogger.com free? Can't you do that without php? I thought that was the deal with them.

What is with the beer and the tagline? "Rehab is for quitters"????? What's up with that ???? Could be considered offensive to some, especially with the beer image there. If you had something else to illustrate your point it might be more acceptable.

I'm finding a lot of discord here in your font choices. If you're going to use a sans for your logo and for your body text they have to be the same font. Otherwise, they should be very different fonts. I think this might work better if the body text was just a little smaller. I usually like verdana at about 80-90% of normal size (and learn how to use CSS to control your fonts!) Then the differences might not be so noticeable. I tried switching my font settings to use Georgia here instead and it looks really good. One of the rules of typography is that you don't use two different fonts from the same family in one design. So you wouldn't use two different sans-serif fonts together. You would replace one with a serif or script or something else.

You've also got a lot of variation in font sizes here. The navbar text shouldn't be smaller than the body text, for example.

thanks for all the input, i'll work on that a little later tonight and tell you when i've finished.

Were the forums on my site a good touch?

Forums can be good and bring lots of returning visitors but wait until you have a lot of people coming evrey day.
If your forum is empty it dosent look good you alwys want to give the impression of a professional page with lots of hits.

good point, what is the best way to drive traffic to my site? I did it before when I had buckscenter.com (the only way that you can see that now is by looking at archive.org) but that was so long ago that I have long since forgoten.

I also think that sometimes webmasters put forums in without thinking of what people are going to talk about there. Chris is right - there's nothing worse than a dead (or dead looking) forum. You might want to start with a blog script that allows comments. If and when you start getting a lot of comments, then you could consider adding a forum. And when you do, it must be customized to fit the look and feel of your site rather than using the defalt template.

If your starting out and dont want to spend alot of money try this website (i dont know what this type of website is called i think its called a link exchange)
Its free but you can chose to spend money if you want http://www.clickthru.com
The only problem with this is most of the people who come to your site stay there for about 30 secs and only stay on your home page.
Oh and I know this annoys some people but your site is veiwed from a frame.

Thanks, would i be able to incorporate blogger into my website?

would i be able to incorporate blogger into my website?

yes you could get a blog and link to it.
That would bring lots of returning visitors

Also, do you think expanding the number of writers on my site would help the overall vibe of the site. I just added a friend with a blogger account (thanks megan)

Yeah this website is kinda quirky, the pictures ought to be smaller when you click on them, the downloads are a nice touch though.

Thanks, I'll take that into consideration. I personally wanted the website to appear quirky, well, mainly because that I how I am in real life.

Your banner at the top of the page is very professional looking. I'm not sure you really need to build a full scale website for this - it's basically a blog!

~S

Thanks! I made it in about 20 minutes... lol. And you are right, it is a blog. But I never wanted it to be just a blog

I finished it for now, now i'm just working on finishing the content.

Interesting... I see the fontage has been made a little more pleasing to the eye! Overall the design is very stark and simplistic, not necessarily a bad thing for a simple blog but not "clever" enough for a portfolio item IMO. So it's clean and easy to read, has all the right things in the right places but lacks inventiveness.

More specifically I hate frames, very few designers use them anymore due to accessibility issues. Also splash screens are rather pointless and annoying, they stop the user from getting what they want - content! In particular the splash screen will antagonise repeat-visitors who'll have to click past it every time.

Exelent navigation
Best use of a frame i've ever seen.
I supose you could have done it with javascript but this is easier.

I also think you could lose the splah page.

since youll be transfering soon, could you please post the url for the new one and ill help review that one. Black text on white background looks like notepad eh?

I like it. good job!

Doh, site must be down, got 500 - Connection to remote site failed error