Site review needed

I was going to say that your swish animation was too slow, but it looks like you've sped that up a bit.

Overall the site is not bad really. One thing your should avoid is centering paragraphs of text. It makes things difficult to read and is generally unprofessional. Another thing is that your front page is too long, as is the history page and probably others. On the front page, for example, it would be nice if the message from the chief was above the fold.

You've done a good job with the navigation - I usually like to set my sites up that way too.

I'm not really a big fan of flash or animation in general, unless, of course, it's an animation site. Personally, I think it's been overdone and doesn't serve a real purpose, just increases load time and makes your visitors have to wait through a splash page before they get to the site. Also, the intro page has no meta tags (necessary to get indexed at some search engines) and no text to index at all. You will probably not get listed (or your ranking will be very low) if you submit that page to search engines.

Also, take advantage of "alt" tags to reinforce keywords. So instead of just "Engine 901 at a parade..." I'd use "Friendship Fire Department's Engine 901 at a parade..." because it gives another instance of the words "fire department" and could help the site rank higher in a search on those words. Alts also make your site more accessible to visually-impaired visitors using a text reader.

The drop shadows on the logo are too dark for my taste. Also, I would consider putting all three words on one line. This will save some vertical space. But definitely keep the logo on every page. It gives the site an identity.

You could also save some vertical space by having less space between some of the images where there are big gaps inbetween.

I would do away with the words "mission statement". I cringe whenever I see them. (It's not just me, Flanders & Willis said so, too, in "Web Pages That Suck - Learn Good Design by Looking at Bad Design," which just happens to be my bible for the web. Seriously, it's an excellent book.) Just include the text.

The blue text on the red nav buttons is kinda hard on my eyes. One thing I like to do is "grey out" the current page so that it's not a live link to the page you're already on. I keep the button in a slightly different color so you know where you are in the scheme of things but aren't tempted to click on it.

I'd consider making the column with the nav buttons a fixed width instead of 25%. At 800x600 I'm getting nearly half an inch of black on either side of the buttons. Then you can make the right column 100% and it will still scale regardless of the visitor's resolution settings. Also, I'd probably add a narrow center column as a gutter so that the text in the white has a little room to breathe.

The brush1.jpg on brush.html is 154K. I would think you could get that down a bit. (I didn't check out any of the other article links.) The images on the main pages seemed to be well optimized and downloaded fast.

Also, brush.html is showing up with a grey background in the version of NS I'm using because you haven't specified a background color. With the nice dropshadows you've done, it would obviously look better on a white background. The page is untitled.

I would lose the auto-loading music in the guestbook. (Personal pet peeve.) I received an autoresponder after signing, which is a nice touch. However, I would include the URL in the responder. "Come back soon!!!" Well, I can't unless I bookmarked it.

Overall, it's a really nice site. It has a very professional look, it's consistent, the navigation is easy to follow, it loads pretty fast on a dial-up, the images are excellent. Great job!

Thanks Gizmoid!

I have made some changes. The new site address is friendshipfd.org

I fixed the column with the nav buttons, changed the logo, narrowed the center column so the text can breathe. The backgrounds for the 4 really big pics have a background color now. I didn't realize that I had left that out. Removed music from the guestbook. You were right. It wasn't appropriate. And the auto respond now has a link on it. Oh, and I will fix the alt too.

As for the blue text on the nav buttons...well, the text changes from black to yellow when I mouse over the buttons. I am using IE 5.0. I do need to work on the nav buttons they are a bit plain and too big. Got any suggestions?

As for the splash page....I want to keep it. I am working on adding some images that fade in and out. Kind of a quick peek of what is inside maybe. Maybe instead of having "enter" at the bottom of the splash page it should say, "Skip Intro"?????

I really appreciate you taking the time to look over the site. You were a big help to me.

Thanks again,
Dixiegirl

>>As for the blue text on the nav buttons...well, the text changes from black to yellow when I mouse over the buttons. I am using IE 5.0.<<

Well, I'm using NS 4.5 and the text is blue, visited color is another shade of blue, active color is red and no mouseover change at all.

As for the buttons being plain, there's not a lot you can do with text in a table cell except maybe make one button graphic and use it as the background in those cells. That shouldn't take much download. Otherwise you can make individual graphic buttons for each but if you want a mouseover then it means two buttons for each and you're talking a longer download time, although once the first page is loaded, they would be in cache so subsequent pages wouldn't take as long.

I noticed an odd spacing before the last line of the first paragraph on the home.html page. I saved this bit of info from another forum somewhere and don't know who to credit it to. I haven't used it yet, but I know I have this problem on some of my pages so saved it to check into. (If the person who gave this tip out originally is here, please post so I can give you credit!)

"Ever wonder why that last line of a paragraph or table tag has an unusual space before it? Its not spaced like the rest of the lines? This happens for one of two reasons. The ending (/p) is not present or the (/td) tag is on the next line of code. The (/td) tag should be at the end of the line. Once you bring it up to be at the end, viola, your spacing is now fine."

(edit) I forgot that even though carets work in the preview, they don't work in the post, so in the above paragraph, please substitute carets for the parens. (/edit)

Yeah, I think "Skip Intro" would be better than "Enter".

I hate to tell you, but 99.9% of the time I hit "skip into" on pages that have them. I did make a point to watch yours and it was very good. I use ISDN so it didn't take too long to load, but I don't know about people with slower connection speeds. The intro looked great though.

The rest of the site was just great. It looked clean, professional, easy to navigate and I liked your graphics. I was very impressed.

In fact, could I link to the kid page for my site? At shopToyland.com I have a KidLinks page and it would fit very well in the Safety category. Let me know please.
Deborah

Nothing in particular worng with your site. The only thing in would do is to remove your splash page. It is not needed and I am sure most people just skip over it...