Prior reviewed site sorta completely redesigned....

Hi,

Your solid looks solid, but I must admit it loaded a little slow on my dial-up modem. You might want to run some of your graphics through Adobe's optimizer: http://webservices.adobe.com/optimize/main.html

Another thing, I had a hard time figuring out what your site's focus/topic is. Try to make this more clear to first-time visitors.

Lastly, try getting a logo of some kind, preferrably top left - that would spice things up a little. Nice job, though!

Yeah it does look good now, but I agree with Marc that it needs a logo.

Looks much better! I excpecially like what you've done with the headers (although I'm not sure what the purpose of the + sign is...)

I viewed your source and this is what could be causing a problem with the download speeds - you've got a lot of really badly improper nesting going on here - a whole bunch of html, head, and body tags. It looks like you're trying to include files that have this information in them when you really shouldn't be. It show up regardless but all that extra code must be affecting your download speeds. And yet FrontPage Did this ?!? Or did Frontpage just make the includes and you put them together?

The site is basically a presence/portfolio thing that I am doing in my spare time being that I quit my day job to watch my daughter grow up .

I understand the site topic confusion...I have not created a MAIN homepage with descriptions and that might be the problem. I have spent most of my time getting one area of the site up and running and once that is 90% in place, I will focus on the other areas.

As for the page authoring; all the templates are done in Frontpage, the data (body of each document) is either solely from a database (displayed as a table) or from my DOCS.DAT database that I place the html code into (these do not have extra tag info in them).

As for the extra tags, since I like to preview my template pages to make sure they look correct, the etc., tags are still in the templates. My PERL script allows me to do up to 3 levels of nesting: page, table, and record. If I take the 'extra' tags out, the templates display as text if not nested. For now, the extra tags will remain as I have not found a downside to them (more on this below).

The speed issue is mainly the speed of the shared server I'm on (1dollarhosting.com) and the fact that everything, even the homepages are pulled through a PERL script that needs to "get in line" for server processing. On certain days the pages load quickly, peak times are another issue. I don't know how many pages they (the ISP) hosts per server but for a buck a month, I'm sure they max it out.

As for the pluses: these are links to the submission forms for adding to the databases. I was trying for a "iconic" L&F. If you move your mousepointer over the plus, it has a ALT tag that reads something like "Sumbit a flying site", etc.

I think I found a icon for the Soaring area of the site though. I just need to give it the ol' "personal touch" and incorporate a logo.

Thanx for the input. If you see anything else that needs addressing, just let me know.

Text is much too big....

I also had a hard time figuring things out.

AKA where to go, what the site is for and what was there.

I have found a cool page on topics like Information design and such. It could help answer the questions of how to make a site more usable and understandable from a content perspective.

http://www.tbid.com/

Seeing that you have a ton of content on your sit maybe this will help a little.

As I stated before, the confusion is that I am dumping you into a sub-section of my site...I'm still working on the front page which will be more descript about the sub-sections. My intent was to get layout input.

As for the font size, it is set to NORMAL. Too many people nowadays play with size but don't stop to consider what this does at high res (>1024). I decided that the user can set their font size using their browser.

I'll check the site out anyways...my site is getting bigger content-wise and I'd rather be prepared.

I'll agree with the comment about "what was there"...I am trying to think of a good concise way to display available content without dumping everything on the user at once; as you stated before, there is alot there.

I still think that the text is BIG. I looked again and shrunk the text to 60% of the size and it looked great. Nice design at that size.

Sorry to make you have to repeat yourself. :blush:

I need to re-eval some of the font sizing anyways. I am going to have to make some changes in my CSS so I can use tags instead of attribs so that the formatting remains the way I want.

I checked out that site...the guy does good work...I think I may just need to do another set of templates with a different layout. I'm still going through the guys client list so this may take some time.