Made the site a lot more professional, don't ya think?

I would definitely change the colour scheme. Brown does seem rather dark and depressing whereas a blue-ish grey colour might be more soothing.

I agree that the mouseovers are a problem - they don't really seem to coordinate with the rest of the design. Your navbar also has too many options on it - break these down into several categories (like explaining migraines, treatment etc.) Wait! that's not a navbar those are just links to other sites. Maybe you should make it evident that that's what it is - even moving the "good reading" header into the table with the links would work.

The site title could also be improved - just write the site title in a unique font (probably something scripted in this case) and make it a graphic.

Webmistress is such a great web site critiquer that she is able to give a review even before a thread is posted. Wow, I am impressed. Not sure what caused that one, unless the original post got hung up somewhere.

You knew that someone would say it, so here goes "the site gave me a migraine".

But seriously I would agree with most of the other points about the brown color. I always hated brown. When I was a kid, I had blue eyes and my older brother had brown eyes. My mother always dressed me in blue and him in brown. Until I was about 21 years old, I don't think I had ever worn brown. So what does that have to do with your site. Absolutely nothing. Just thought that I would tell you that I am always against brown. So as long as you are not my brother, lose the brown.

I also thought the text was a bit annoying being bold. I didn't like the mouseovers either. They were actually even more annoying to me than the brown. Gray and red on a brown background. Yuck.

The other major annoyance was that every link that I clicked on actually opened a new window and went to another site. It looks like most of those links were on another of your sites, but at least the top links need to be on this one. You may even separate out the links under a section called Links: so that people will realize that they are not your own. Also you used the target="_blank" code, actually it wasn't closed properly but it worked. The main problem with using that is that every time a link is clicked it opens a new window. So you can have a whole litter of windows that have been born. I think target="display" will use the same window, even though it may be behind your current window. You could also use a short little javascript OpenWin statement.

It also looks like you designed your site to be somewhat professional. Don't take this wrong but you spoil that professionalism some by having Pooky on the home page. I would do that maybe on an about page.

The site looked bad in Netscape. Your table on the right hand side has some cutouts in it. The Links at the top was in large red letters and of course the mouseovers didn't work.

The code need to be scrubbed up a bit too. There were things like this:

'
Notice there is an opening "font-size then you have "Verdana;Times Roman". You need to get rid of the extra ".
Also a lot of nesting errors which probably cause the table to sag in Netscape.

Quote: Originally posted by mairving
Webmistress is such a great web site critiquer that she is able to give a review even before a thread is posted. Wow, I am impressed.

Well thank you, I knew that my mind reading skills and crystal ball would come in handy one day! hehe

Thanks for all your input and I am definetly going to take heed of the suggestions you all offered. trying my best to make it a place people take seriously and will return to for information. grateful to you all, thanks and be well, jhona

I agree with everyone here, but let me add one thing...you have too many links on the home page. Try to keep it between 5-7 links on the homepage and have the other links branch off of that.

That's all.

Brooke
:snow:

I do agree that there are too many links for reading on the front page, and it is only going to get bigger! This is driving me crazy, trying to re-design the site, was up til dawn last nite and nothing made me happy. then I remembered the old adage, keep it simple stupid. think that is what I will do but how does one do that and still make a site attractive? I'm counting on you guys to point me in the right direction. so soon I will ftp up a new look that will hopefully look professional but not overwhelming. thanks for your replies. means a lot.
jhona

Have a good look through the postings here, they will give you a good cross section of sites and may give you some new ideas.

Look forward to the new look.

I finally came up with a simple yet professional look, taking the very long list of reading links off the first page. boy, it can be a lot of work but hope to have it up by thurs or fri. thanks for your input
jhona

Let us know when it's ready & we'll be queuing up to look at it