Please review my site - the Catz Meow

First welcome to TWF.

Now its good that your site is a blog site, its a good starting point for beginners, the first problem is that it seems your site loads quite long, Try using a thumbnail sized pictures of the cats for the front page rather than using the bigger size and let the browser resize it. I think that is where the loading time is being eaten up.

A better logo related to cats together with the text would greatly help your site, as for the blue theme, generally everyone likes blue but it could be anything else which would greatly help show your personality.

Your site is very readable, but also very long, a blog link for dates can be good, you can show only the recent three, then a put a link for the rest. The Navigation Menu at the side could be better if not animated,

The google search bar could be at the left or right of the body coz it takes up too much space at the top, adding up with the space occupied by the banner, your content will not be readily seen...

I think thats all I could comment for now...

Thank you for taking the time to look at my site. Your suggestions are very good ideas.
The photos on my front page are as small as trellix allows. But I have larger photos on another page so I will change them.
thanks again
Carol

I think everything has already pretty much been said. Although it seems to load fairly well for me.

The problem I have is with the program used to create the coding, it's pretty sloppy, and has repeated lines. It also has not installed a chrset, or doctype for your page. This is bad when you go to promote to the search engines.

Usually steve is worried about website promotions, you should visit either his site or mine, look at our codes and at the top of the codes we have meta-tags for search bots (the one usually used by google to index your site so that youll be available in the search engines) these are what is usually called keywords. Now the char set and the declaration way on top are for your sites Validation, That way your site is identified by any kind of browser...

I would recommend making more room for the text. It can be annoying to be reading and shifting lines after every 8 words. Perhaps that space between each cat isn't necessary. If you have photoshop I recommend making an oval like shape instead of your straight edge angle at the top left, make is similar to the logo atop this forum.

Thank you all so much for the help and the great tips. I added some meta tags for robots to one of my pages. Should I add them to every page?
Thanks Again

You should have different meta-tags on different pages so that youll have greater chances on search engines with different keywords on your pages. In my experience, my most popular page is not the front page but on one of the content, coz the keywords i use there is frequently searched by individuals...

I do, I don't know that it's necessary but that way you have all bases covered. I know I usually end up with all of my pages listed on the search engines. This is the robot tag you should be using, .
I find it's better to use individual keywords separated by commas rather than key phrases like you have. You can group the words together, and the engine still thinks it's a phrase, but separated your keywords have opportunity to build even more key phrases.

I have different meta tags for each page,also have keyword meta tags for each page. The only problem is site builder won't allow me to use html in my descriptions. So I used a web gem and inserted the robots tag right under the title on my kitten names page. Do you think that would do any good?

If you can't get in between the head tags, I doubt that it would do any good. I see now what you are on. Its much like I started out on MSN they have do's, and they have don't do's.

I stayed with MSN about a year while I tried to make sense out of HTML, which looked kind of like a Chinese cook book to me. I really could not see how anybody could make anything out of that mess. But I eventually caught on.

Then I went to Angelfire, where they have some things that make it a little simpler for an amateur, than the open web. That is what I would do if I were you. Get some basic HTML information, download a free editor, there are several. Play with it until you learn how to build a simple page. Then move on up to the web. There is a big diffrence, on a web server you have control of what you want to do. It's a whole lot better believe me!.

Where my site is now you have to create your own virtual server, and subdomain. I just learned something new. You also have no help from the provider so everything has to be transferred, and edited by FTP.

Thanks Steve. I wish I had known all this before I started.But I guess you have to live and learn. I was getting pulled up alot in google,aol, and Yahoo untill around the first of June. Than my site took a major dive. I think because I wasn't updating enough.
However, even at the time I wasn't being picked up by other search engines.
Thanks again for all the help
Carol