Redesign of Animal Portal

Firstly can you please help us out by reviewing some of the other sites put up here for critique.

I like the site, I too am on a fast connection so no problems there for me. The only thing that strikes me at first is the navigation is a bit confusing as you have the ones at the top then all down the side and across the bottom. Are they all links within your site?

The sub pages from the links down the side I assume you haven't redone yet?

On some of your colour codes you have forgotten the #

Where about in the UK are you?

Hi,
Thanks for replying. Will review some sites in a sec.....
Yes, they are all links within the site - there is so much on the site, but I appreciate it can be confusing, I don't know how to un-confuse it though!!
Does it matter that I have left the # off my colour codes??
I am in Radlett, Herts. Are u in the UK too then?
Anyway, thanks for your comments.....

Cute! I like it. Those graphics along the left side and in the interior area are really nice, although I think that the logo graphic and top navbar are too boring in comparison. It's going to be tough to create a consistent layout here, but I think it will be okay to go with different funky graphics for each section. It'll be more of an interactive, fun way to nativate the site.

Hi Megan,
Thanks for your nice, positive comments. I have added one of our sponsors banners to the top of the page, in hope that it will brighten up the logo/top navigation bar. I think it's added a bit of a life there. I am glad you used the word fun, because many children use the site and I think they will be attracted to fun, happy sites.
Thanks.

That's definitely an improvment! Fills up the hole there.

Oh yes, that works well there.

Loading time with 56k modem isnt to bad, since the buttons are all different its kinda fun to see what is going to display next, if they were all the same I'd say different

your search form at the bottom doesnt work on Netscape4.7, instead of any form all it has is: "Search : Web Audio MP3 News Pictures Video" in text. Looking at your code you dont have any tags, also dont have any thing for it to do, so it wont work in IE either.

the sub directory lines should maybe start with a capital, or listed as a list, at first it looked like one long sentence that was badly aligned, but closer inspection realise its the sections contents.

The font on your "fun page" is hard to read, maybe put a single line font inside the letters to stand out more.

some of your links, like articles should be higher on your list of links.

Hmmm, funny I didn't really care all that much for the graphics. I think that they look okay but I also think that they there are too many on the page. It makes the page a little busy. The other problem that it presents when you have a home page design like this one is that it is hard to replicate the look on other pages. When I clicked on the link, I thought at first that I was on a different site. I would definitely try to brand my site better by having a consistent look to all the pages. You should have:

• A Logo and a navbar on every page.
• Better designed pages. I would suggest to take away some of the extreme visual overload of some of the graphics on the home page. I would also suggest to improve/add graphics to the other pages.
• Text - Lose that 'hairy' text. It looks bad and is hard to read.

Nice Site...relaly colorful andattractive. and it download pretty fast. I think this is what i would call an ideal kid site cute grphics givingthta really warm and fuzzy feeling.

Who has done this design?

Apoorva

hey Kitten - great site - esp. putting dogs in front of cats!!

the hyperlink form has one more error - you misspelled "value" in the first option tag

the "rules" around the text across the top of the page don't display in Netscape - I'm guessing these boys are doing it

Thanks for all your comments.
Mairving, I have only redesigned the home page of the site so far, I haven't started changing all the pages within it yet, because there are literally thousands, it's going to be a nightmare! I guess I should make a start on that before it goes live then - aaaaah. I don't want it to look like a site with hundreds of links to other sites, so I appreciate your opinion. Cheers.
So, do you lot suggest a blue background to all the subpage to create the consistency OR creating the same theme on each subpage as the relevant button. E.g. for the Fun page = have a pink background like the button and the same font used on the button. And so on??
Oh decisions decisions !!!

Hmmm....I would be inclined to say have a different theme for each button and carry that theme to the corresponding page. That will make it fun for the kids in my opinion to have something different on each page. Kids like variety and it takes that to hold their attention. I know that consistency is a good thing in web design but this may be the exception. You could have each page different but still have something that is the same if that makes sense. AHHH...am I rambling?

I was looking at your site earlier and noticed that one of the pages had frames on it. Can't remember which one. I don't think I would use frames.

You most definatly have a lot of work if you have that many pages to edit. I don't envy you.

Also, just a thought here but the more I look at the blue background color the more it looks drab or something. Not sure exactly. Don't get me wrong it isn't bad at all. Just something about it doesn't compliment the colors in the buttons. Have you thought of using a white background since you have so many colors in the buttons?? Might be easier to work with.

Good luck!!! When you are finished i will let my 10 yr. old critique it.

I agree that you could in this sites case use different colours to represent each section but keeping the general layout the same will keep some uniformity to it. I actually like the blue as I think white would actually make the buttons stand out too much, oh now I'm rambling!!

Yes, I think it would be a good idea to use a different colour for each section - would contribute to the fun atmosphere of the site.

I also wanted to suggest that you look into using server side includes for your common page elements - it will just make future updates a whole lot easier to implement.

Hi again,
I don't know a thing about Server Side Includes..... well go to Webmonkey now!!
God, this is becoming a nightmare!! This is going to take me weeks to complete!

hey Kitten - I agree you might consider changing the background somehow - perhaps a different color or else maybe try to "break it up" somehow - that might help with the "drab" look - for instance, in yer table on the left containing fun, chat, etc., you might want to create some kind of "box effect" with a border that has a different color - I'd say the images themselves are doin' a good job creating a lttle variety as things are now - but that may be at a price, as mentioned above - it looks good, but there may be some way to make it better

SSIs are a relatively simple concept that can be a little tricky to implement - someone mentioned you had a framed page - SSIs work along the same lines: pages within pages - with frames, you create a frameset and write the code for each frame - for SSIs, you create a page like dogs.shtml and then other pages like nav.html or banner.html or footer.html that you display "inside" dogs.shtml with something like<!--#include virtual="/footer.html" -->'with this setup, if you wanted to alter footer.html somehow, you'd change just that one page - if you had written code for a series of pages containing the "footer info," you'd need to change every one of them - I'm not sure how you could break up yer front page to benefit from this, but maybe the other pages could use it

if you ever come across a little coonhound puppy that needs a friend, lemme know