Review my site please?!

Can you let us know the url of your site please?

Sorry i thought you could click on the button above my name to get to my site, sorry! My URL is:
http://homepages.about.com/cutechic51/www.sclub7capital.com/

Thanks

I probably would have tried that website link first, but sometimes people want you to review other sites they've done, so it's hard to tell.

Overall it looks quite good - pretty basic, nothing to flashy.

The first thing you need to get is a logo. Look around for a unique font and then just write your title in that font using a graphics program. Put that on every page. Actually, I don't mind the way you have the small site title and larger page header there in the upper left. YOu could do that graphically with a special font to spice things up a little. Get rid of that little page description underneath there - it's not really necessary.

The next problem is your navbar - it's too small, I can't really see it very well. A lot of the text on the pages is too small as well.

YOu know, I can't really find a lot of things that are specifically wrong here. It's simple, but not too eye-catching. YOu ought to get a good graphics program (Paint Shop Pro is a good one) and learn to make some for your site - it will make things much more interesting.

Definatley get yourself a logo. I think that you can download a free version or trial of Paint Shop Pro. If you don't have a graphics program try these until you get one.
3Dtextmaker
Cooltext
I used them a long time ago when I first got started and thought that I had found a gold mine. hehehe

I am thinking that maybe your poll and guestbook thingy should either be centered or to the right.

When I look at your code I see an awful lot of tags that have no opening tag. For a quick check of your code you can use Netmechanic It will give you an idea of where your mistakes are.
Also noticed a few spelling mistakes. Always take your pages through spell check.

Text is a little small and I am sure you will hear from others about that. I can see it fine but there will be some that can't.

Keep trudging on. You are off to a good start.

good over all .. simple design..

i thnk the simplicity almost makes it boring in this case however..
more grafics, more color.. u have the content .. i think u should showcase the great lookin bods of this band more..

maybe some circles w/ band members in uhm?

well .. keep it up.. good site.. dumb pop band j/k

For your first atempt its good, displays the same in IE5 and Netscape 4.7
I think everything has been mentioned, you need a logo etc.
your url is a long one, making it harder for people to remember

Ok i have gone through and read all your comments. Firstly, i did wonder if my text would be too small, i will make that slightly larger. I will try and get myself a logo, i will use the links you gave me disaster_master! I will give it a try! I didnt get some of what you were saying about the things though. I will also try to make my nav bar bigger as megan said.
How would i make my URL shorter? When i first signed up with about.com to make my site, i thought my URL would be what i wanted it to be but when i published it, it was a really long URL. I would like to change that i will have to find out how. Thanks for being honest with all your comments, i will try and improve it.

Hayley

Hi Haley,
If you will go to netmechanic.com and look at the top left of their page you will see a section called "Improve Your Site". Just below that you will see "Identify web site errors". Click on the "Try It" link. When you get to the next page scroll down and you will see "HTML Toolbox Free Sample". Enter your URL and then click "Test Now".

After it has finished checking your site find the "HTML Check & Repair" and click on the link assiciated with it and you will see what I mean about the extra tags. I think you can just remove all of them and be ok.

Also, the image that you have on your page of the album cover needs resizing manually. It isn't showing up completely because you have resized the image using the width tag in your code. When you have an image that is 300X300 (which is what yours actually is) you shouldn't use your width tag to make it 130 width( which is what you have done) If you can't resize it let me know and I will send you one that is smaller. All of your images should have a height AND width tag.

I see that you now have a spinning logo on your site. It is better not to do animated anyting. A static logo would look much better and it will load faster also.

Don't give up!! With everyones help here you will have a good web site to show off.

I think what they are saying Haley is that there should be something like this:

before and to match each one of these
/div>

so that they are in matched pairs

I'm assuming a WYSIWYG type program was used to generate the site.
Is the unpaired /div> caused by the WYSIWYG program used to design the site?
Is it really causing a problem?
and what would happen if Haley just deleted all the /div>
from the code?
I'm curious because I had a look at her code and I didn't see a start pair

I am not sure but it looks like that maybe her intentions wer to use the div tag for alignment. Removing them will not, or should not change the look of her page since they are not being used. I don't think it will acutually "hurt" anything to leave them but removing them would clean up her code a bit.

Alright where are the experts on this matter!!!!

I don't think there is much more to add to what's already been said.

I take it you have to have the top banner-ad as a condition of using the free space? Going back to a previous question, you won't be able to get a shorter address unless you buy a domain name and use that with a host.

There is nothing bad about the site (apart from perhaps the spinning logo thingy!) but I think the first page could be laid out better. The navigation at the top is confusing at first sight. Narrow it down to seven initial links at the most - even if it means creating new pages as mini links pages - like news, pictures, about the band, discussions, merchandise, contact me.

The thing that spoils it for me is the way that the left column goes on much longer than the right one.

cute_chick51,

You've gotten some good advice to work with here, so I'm just going to mention the URL length.

http://homepages.about.com/cutechic51/www.sclub7capital.com/

I *was* going to mention the fact that if you use the correct default naming convention for your host you could eliminate a further layer, but I tried "backing out" of it and see that the exact same page comes up when you use just:

http://homepages.about.com/cutechic51/

Voila! It's shorter already!

Okay, I lied, I can't help but add some further comments...

On the bios page, you are again resizing images via your html. This contributes to longer download time because the actual image files would be smaller if you sized them correctly.

Also, I note that you have "borrowed" images that are watermarked with another site's URL. Granted, on a "fan" site you're probably not going to have all photos that you've taken yourself and I have a feeling that the geocities site owner probably didn't take the photos, either.

I haven't tried the other free logo service DM mentioned, but I'll give a big thumbs up to cooltext.com. You can select the font, the style and the colors you want in a matter of seconds. You'll probably wait in the rendering queue for a few minutes, though. But the results can be quite nice!

Never heard of this band before (guess my age and ignorance of popular music is showing) but they look like fun!

Good luck with your site, Hayley!

If the long url doesnt bother you then no worries, but if the length does become an issue you can use 3rd party redirects, sorry brain went to dinner, cant think of any of hand, but you end up with something like goto/cutechic or similar, some of these are pay ones, other ask you use a graphic with there name on it, some are free.

God there is SO much to do and change! I never thought making a website would be this hard! I am still confused with some peoples comments, it will take me ages to change everything! Thank you all for giving me your thoughts though, you've all helped a lot

Disaster_master i am going to go to netmechanic and do what you said. If i get rid of them things what will that change? Im still not quite with you

cute_chic, like anything in life, the more you do the easier it gets, hang in there

webpages are made with HTML, HTML uses tags, 90% of these tags use a <> (start) and a (end) tag, you have extra end tags but no begining tags. Missing tags confuse the browser as its not sure what your trying to do, IE will guess, where as Netscape will either ignore it, or choose the next tag which oftens ends up in nothing displaying.

example:
this is a linksmaller font
new link ....

the "newlink" above wont work, as the first "link" doesnt have a end (closing) tag, so the browser looks for an end tag which is the second link, so everything form the first will be a link going to "link"

also where they start and stop can cause problems, the correct layout is:
<1><2><3>text is wrong
<1><2><3>text is right

tags shouldnt overlap one another, tags can be nested (used inside other tags) but must start and open in the order they were used.

Busy did you sleep last night. hehehehe You confused me and I know what you are talking about.

Hayley, removing the tags won't do anything to your page because they aren't really being used. They are more or less just in the way.

There are masses of free url shortening companies out there... One that I have used in the past is [url=http://www.cjb.net[/url]

They work quite well but it may be tricky to get the name you want as usernames are going fast!

doh!

Quote: Busy did you sleep last night. hehehehe You confused me and I know what you are talking about

thats two booboos in one day (other one being the flash idea)

cute_chic, if my last post confuses you, pretend you didnt read it , just fix the errors netmechanic points out to you, if it says things like, a closing tag for xyz was found but no start tag was, then delete that closing tag.

No i actually understood that post thanks busy, i understand what you mean now! I will take out all those tag things that arent needed, hopefully that will be one thing made better! I will keep working at it, it jst seems i have so much more to do to my site now.
Oh flipper i visited cjb.net and got a shorter URL for my site so big thank you to you ! Its now:

http://sclub7capital.cjb.net

thank you for the advice on that!

Hayley

no worries! Glad I could help...

Quote: Originally posted by cute_chic51
No i actually understood that post thanks busy, i understand what you mean now!

So someone finally understands Busy.

Poor Busy