Site needing help

Could be me but I don't see a difference between canzine.com and canzine.com/index2.html except for the 2 extra table cells...

I've just looked and couldn't see any difference either!

Hi there,

It seems that you are just starting your venture, right?

The page does not have much to offer now, but looks somehow clustered and hard-to read.

If you are planning to add more content, you would have to plan your layout more carefully. It should be easy-to navigate, fast-loading, and attaractive - basically needs some colors and shapes to make it more alive.

Take inspiration from larger, commercial sites - they can teach so much about layout planning, etc.

For now, it does not look much professional - cause this is what every site has to achive to attrack visitors and sell them what you are going to offer.

Best Regards,

Enigmatic

Hi,

About the two being the same, sorry about that, last night I decided to use the new layout on the front page.

So you're recommending what I do is like totally redesign the page? I could maybe try doing this but don't know if I could handle a complete change as it would probably take me a week to re-upload. For some reason I can't connect via FTP so I have to upload one file at a time very slowly through an oline CP.

Okay, I've been fooling around with Photoshop and managed to come up with this: http://canzine.com/NewTCN/ as a start. I know I totally lack graphics skills lol.

Is it better or worse than the current?

I myself am a fan of well organized websites without a lot of graphics to spruce it up. Graphics are nice the first time visiting a website but after that, they just slow down the speed, especially if people are working with 56k modems. You may also want to try and organize your original page just to make it more clear so that people can instantly know what is going on as soon as they click into your page.
regards,
dave waters
http://www.supplychaintoday.com

Hi,

I was thinking of just doing something with the layout but too many people have told me they don't like it or it isn't professional looking.

I've decided I'll probably use the new layout I had just made, but not finished as I could really use a footer and such other elements.

I'll also be optimizing the graphic files to help load on bad connections. I myself have a baaad connection, and a worse connection to my server for some reason(I can't even connect via FTP, too slow, times out) so I can safely say once I get the site loading on my connection in under 1 minute, the average 14.4k user should be able to view it in .5 seconds.

It is next to impossible to give a review when there is no content on the page. The latest one looks better but you should really use your content to build the site. A couple of things that I would do with http://canzine.com/NewTCN/ at this time. I would take the margin off and let the graphics hit the edge of the screen. I would also put your side navbar in a separate table. That way you could pad the cells and get your text off of the edge without resorting to   .

New design does not look bad - it looks interesting...

Try to put some content within white pages (any text), to see how it will fit into your template.
Also, you may try to experiment with colors - the red you have used seems to be alarming. You could try variety of blue, black and orange.

Best,

Enigmatic

I've got some problems with your layout here. Things aren't lining up the way they should be in NS 6.1. There's a lot of bad spacing between the graphics at the top and I'm not really sure why.

The "TCN" logo confused me at first - I wasn't sure right away what those initials stood for. Maybe you should add "The Canzine Network" in smaller text below the logo just to make that clear. I'm also not clear about what this site is supposed to be about.

The graphics look good - nice use of 3D effects. I would consider removing the gradient from that narrow bar underneath the logo/ad banner part.

Yeah I just noticed last night I forgot to put "The Canzine Network" below the logo. As for the bad spacing, I've had so much trouble with NS I'm beginning to wonder if I should bother using my time on compatibility issues anymore. It took me hours to get them lined up in IE though it shouldn't have, I don't think I could bring myself to try getting it perfect in both. My stats show that less than 0.1% of my visitors are Netscape users. I dunno, maybe I'll re-install NS and give it a whirl. >:-(
Anyway, I put the new layout at canzine.com with the toned down red and CSS.

Thank you Megan for pointing out the Netscape problem, I was earlier too angry with Netscape to see the helpfulness of your post as well as the time you took to check the site and reply.
After a whole day of trying to fix the netscape problem, and almost quitting on it and making a new design I got more inspiration and kept going. Finally decided to use a Layer for the banner. Now everything works in Netscape cause I tested it and checked it and had my computer filled with Free AOL Crap in the process lol.
Feel free to check the site again to make sure. I also put a little quote below the banner layer.

Yup, that did it!