http://209.12.144.34

I like the design and graphics. And the varicoloured themes for each page is a nice touch, except that it can get painful having to download new graphics on each click (56k).

It might help to improve the way the text is presented -- highlight key names, numbers and addresses.

The "Just a thought" and "get connected" images on the home page are prominent and visible, but don't at first appear "clickable". There's no visual cue like arrows or a button to show it's linked. Not a big deal, but still.

I didn't notice Worship Services info in the bottom-left at first... I don't know what priority that has, but if you want it more easily seen, then you might move it up to the whitespace under "get connected".

That's briefly all I can think of for now. Overall not a bad job.

Yeah, I knew the images are a bit large for dialup. I can probably optimize them some but doubt if I can make them a whole lot better. I tried to help it a little by using text for the navs rather than images.

The text presentation is still a little bit up in the air. It is all in a stylesheet so it can be changed easily.

I can add arrows and alt text to the JAT and GC images.

The Worship Services at the bottom of the page is not totally set and it will be on at least two other pages

Is it possible to get a different url? I read the url as either a tourist or an adult site url (or maybe both!), not a church.

It looks pretty -- I'd put a little more care into the typography that isn't text, too, though. There are some areas where it's out of line and seems to be dumped rather than placed. http://209.12.144.34/about.htm

Make sure you don't lose your constituents with poor accessibility. Make sure all your images have alt attribute values! The navigation on the side should really be in a list for better control, and of course *I* would like to see it validate. If you're writing it to HTML 4.01, you can easily get it to validate.

See: http://validator.w3.org:8001/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2F209.12.144.34%2Fabout.htm&verbose=1&fussy=1 for some helpful tips.

No, I can't give a different URL. I am not going to change the DNS record to point to the site until everything is ready. I set up a redirect http://cumcmemphis.org/newsite.htm

Actually about the text. On the about page it was dumped rather than placed. It was the last page that I did and wanted to get a little info on the design.

As far as the validation, I don't generally care too much about that until the final stages. I generally will add, alt, height and width tags and validate it as much as possible.

By accessibility, I assume that you mean accessibility to pages and not accessibility to disabled persons. If so, I haven't really addressed that much. My plans are to have multiple ways to get to pages and pages that cycle back to one another. In other words, you click on the minister, it shows a link to his sermons. You click on the sermon and it links back to his info page. Initially there were plans to use drop down nav links but it didn't seem to work well with the site in particular because there were about 15-20 ministries that would drop down over the text content. The navigation on the side will come out of a database so it will be in a list.

Besides the weight of the site, I not sure how well I like some of the background colors on some of the pages, particularly the events page.

Thanks for the comments.

Sorry, Mark, I meant the domain name itself.

I think the colours are very vibrant and definitely speak to a dynamic and active ministry.

I was speaking of actual accessibility, not usability, but that is also a consideration. If it's possible to use text links for the primary and secondary nav only, I'd say you're doing fine in that regard.

Quite a nice site Mark. However, I don't like the fact that there are different colour schemes for different pages, at first, I thought I had gone to another site.

Using a high resolution, there is a lot of "white space" to the right, maybe centre the content?

What about a change on hover for the navigation links?

Not too much to comment on - it is a nice site. Well done

I generally agree about the color scheme changes, but it seems like everyone seems to like the colors except for me and now you.

Yeah, tis the problem on a left centered site, all that white (or yellow) space on the right. I will play with centering it but I don't think that it would look quite right with the header image.

I thought about a change on hover and generally use an underline/color change but since I used the same style on all pages, I couldn't really come up with a good color to change to that would work on all pages. I will look at that again when I cut the pages up into parts and have a stylesheet for each.

Thanks for the comments.

Looking at the old site, this new one is so much more pleasing to me. I love the images, pictures, menus, and even the colors. I like the fact that each page has its different color scheme. For me, the site gives me a "happy" feeling, if you will. The other site doesn't do that for me. But, isn't that what religion is all about? Feeling happy, at peace, family, unity...etc. (The pictures help promote this as well). However, if you feel your members have slower connections, you may want to take into consideration of the previous comments. I have a fast connection, so it's obviously not an issue for me to view the site.

I like the fact that you have minimized the scrolling and have made things so much more simple. I do understand that all the text is not yet uploaded, I would suggest you keep scrolling in mind when uploading the rest of the content.

The only thing I find confusing is the title on each page. There's the two larger arrows and then the page title. I want to click on the arrows...thinking there's more to view.

Love the site.
Good Luck.

The old site as you can probably tell even without viewing the source was done in FrontPage. It has been mostly done by volunteers and most pages are static so that they don't get out of date.

The purpose of the site is really threefold. One is to give current members the information that they need. Two is to give visitors to the church information that they need. Third is to give people that will never visit the church info that they need. I would like to have a balance of all three. That happy feeling that you have is a good start for all three.

As far as the connection speed, we have a mailing list of about 2,000 members. About 25% of those are on AOL, 10% Hotmail, and about 35-40% are either cable or DSL. I have looked again at optimizing the images and really can't get much better unless I cut the top banners in pieces, which I don't really want to do since they would download at different times.

Yeah about the title. That is a little odd. I will probably end up replacing that with something else more along the lines of what is in the banner images, if it doesn't add much weight.

Thanks for the good words. The biggest job really will lie ahead in coding the site. I dislike updating sites so I will give each ministry the opportunity to update their own pages.

I like it! The only thing I really have to say is that I don't particularly like the colour for the 'events' page as it seems really washed out compared to all the other vibrant colour choices. Plus I think it's odd that the header section is much higher on the index page compared to the other pages and I think the smaller headers are a better size, the bigger one makes the index page feel overpowering for some reason.

Thanks, WM. Yeah, I will look at changing the yellow on the events page. The problem is that the designer sent me psd's for all of the pages but they were flattened so I can't easily change the color. I will see if I can get the layered version to do so.

As a general rule, I don't like it when I click on a page and the nav's are in different places on the next page which is what happens on the home page. The design of the home page also makes it slower loading than the sub-pages which the goal is always to make the home page load as fast as possible. I do doubt if I will be able to convince them to change the home page from it current look to the look of the secondaries though.

Thanks.

Overall this looks really good. I've noticed a few things though.

I agree with Suzanne about the typography. Those smaller graphics on the left side of the home page are a problem. The alignment is often off and even the spacing between the three images isn't even.

In Opera the upper right white curve doesn't line up with the box below it. There's a little jag there where they meet. That happens on every page except the home page. I also think it looks odd on the home page where the two curves meet at the bottom. Might be better just to straighten that out.

Page titles should say more than one word. Remember that this is important for search engines, so putting something more about who the page belongs to and what it's about would be helpful both for your rankings and SE users.

The idea of changing colours from page to page is really nice and adds a lot of dimension to the site. However, this is something that should be abandoned if it causes a serious problem for loading times. A site like this should probably be as accessible as possible. In that regard, the page text is very small and will probably be hard to read for a lot of people. I would imageine that the older crowd would be an important part of the target audience, so font size and adjustibility is an important thing to keep in mind.

Grrr, I looked at the code to fix the Opera bug. It looks like the problem is when the designer save the corners, one was saved at 35x37 but the others were saved as 37x37, 38x37 and 39x37, which causes the break. I will standardize and fix them.

One thing bad about Opera is it's cached images. I dumped the cache but it still showed the same old images. I told it not to cache images and it still showed the old images. Finally I added height and width the image and that fixed the Opera spacing problem.

you need to use width and height on all your images, a little jumpy while loading on dialup (I did notice you said you will add them later).

Only thing that I can pick out is the top banner name being to low, looks kind of misplaced or cut off.
Maybe make the index banner same height as all the other pages and use coloured link boxs (link background colour same as the pages colour) so it blends a little since you cant have same colour throughout.

How internet savey would the people of the church be? would they know about underlineless links ? some links have underline on hover, some dont, and you also have images as well, could get confusing for the older or unknowledgable folk. as a helpful bonus could use title="link description" or title="click me i'm a link" on each link.

does look good, doesnt make me want to go to church but does make me feel watched.

I like the colour per page concept and especially the fact that they all flow from the stained glass. Unfortunately, I think that this comes off as a little strong. What might work better, imo is to use a consistent colour as a "base" - likely the blue of the cross/logo - and accent the scheme with each of the different colours

ok, i might suggest that you dont make all the other pages differ from the home page or the other way around. it seems to change to much.

The site looks very nice, and the different themes for each page is a nice touch. My concern though, is for your users coming in via dial-up. It may a slow visit for them, because they would have to pull all of the graphics back down after each visit.

Also, you really need a domain name. You've spent a lot of time on the site, but you'll end up cutting yourself short if you just use an IP address, because a lot of people won't be able to remember than, or even understand what it is.

Overall, the site looks very professional though, and the themes blend together nicely.