Review: Al Gore Support Center

The load time is SLOW! It seems a little cluttered to me. But over all I like the layout and the colors.

Forum: I love the color but those snowflakes drive me crazy!

Can you please tell me what seems cluttered. I don't see anything obvious that seems that way, but I might be missing something. The slowness is expected from a campaign/candidate site.

Also the snowflakes are just for the holidays, but the members seem to like them.

the link buttons under the banner seem very small and the load time is slow on dialup

I think you need to change the colour of the links, they are to close to the text colour so could be confusing. maybe do something to the white linnks as well, maybe use text and underline on hover or if you can get your load time down (banner is BIG) add mouseovers to the images, or even just a simple little dot or point next to the link names to show they are links.

You could snaze a few of the pages up with images (keep the sizes down), example on the about AL page, maybe dig up a pic of him as a children, or young man, make it more personal.
Also noticed some of your links (left top) go to other websites, and these sites are totally different, one link (about tipper) even had clinton in the url, aren't these guys rivals? remember I'm not in USA so have no idea.

It looks like its missing something at the very bottom, maybe some text links? copyright notice even.

the forum looks cluttered (snow flakes dont help) but i think its the white header links, change the colour of them and it should break it abit, also changing the link style (under/over on hover) should be kept the same throughout the whole site. apart from the banner there isn't much the same in this and your main site

I think I've reviewed this site two or three times before so I might be repeating myself a lot here. The one thing that really bothered me when trying to use this site is that the tab navigation on the top actually goes to another site. That was completely unexpeted. Perhaps it would be better to do that as a sidebar with a "at issues2000.org" header, so people know what to expect.

There is a lot of clutter in the main content area there. if you look at it you've got five different sections of text. Perhaps you could find a way to streamline those somehow. Like instead of having separate boxes for each new item at the top, you could put them all in one area, like most news sites do with headings and intro blurbs.

I notice that you've improved the formatting of your text some but there are still areas with large blocks of text. Read up on how to format text for the internet. People don't like to read word for word, they like to skim, so it's important to keep things short and scannable, with short paragraphs, bulleted lists, and headers to break things up. On the Myths page, for example, you've got a few paragraphs under "The Buddhist Temple Incident" that are as long as my screen. Nobody is going to read that.

I was surprised to find that the "GSC News" link went to the forums. Also, the tipper link goes to an external site - maybe you could just link that from the Al bio instead of having it as an item on the navbar.

I like the navigation on top and i think the picture and quote ads a nice touch, however as others have mentioned you need to do something about the load time

I would make the site to reflect al gores personality, you have enough graphics and load time to choke a T1. make the entire site less than 40K, try building the site without graphics first. then sprinkle them in slowly.

The issues people have highlighted regarding load time is attributable to the ridiculous amount of images in use i.e. There is no need to use images for the sidebar menu as no rollovers are used and the font could be replaced by something more generic (Verdana IMO) using plain text.

Looking at the code of the site - less bulky than I expected - I noticed that you have negated the use of your external style sheets preferring to use the "style" attribute of the element instead, this is both a waste of space and will cause coding problems in the future. A good reason for using CSS is the ability to seperate code/content from layout, there is little reason to use it (even if your page does validate according to the W3C) if there is a continuation of the superceded practice of defining layout within element declarations.

Upon closer inspection I can see you have used third party software to create the sidebar menu, I have no experience of the product used, but for the reasons explained above, it is recommended you create the menu by hand (I won't even begin talking about the use of deprecated tags! )

With regard to the content itself: I will be outspoken in saying that I like the way the first page of the site appears. The content is easy to "skim" and it's quite easy to get an idea of the purpose of the site itself. However, Megan is correct about the "Myths" page, which should be broken down into headlines and sub-pages (the news site of the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/ is a good example of this practice).

Overall the site has promise, but using third party tools is always going to be an issue. You need to learn to code properly, clean up your HTML/CSS, change the content so that it's readable, and use less images!

Hope this helps.