SOS please Critique my web site

Welcome aboard Haitisurf,

We do ask that you participate and critique at least three other's sites before you request one for yourself. Not only does this help others by having a fresh pair of eyes look at their site and offer new ideas but it will help you gain some ideas for yourslef and read what comments we usually post!

hi haitisurf
Theres a horizontal scroll bar at 800*600 and I'm not sure what the red circles are but they seem be in random places on your screen.
I know that some people have difficulty reading red text on black backgroung (Nav Bar)
Adding some cell padding would help to move the text just away from the photos. looks a bit squashed...
Gray sidebars look odd because they don't go all the way up or down the page and their not solid you have white gaps between them.
Change of colours on the top bar from page to page looks odd... and the sidebars dissapear...

The enter forum logo's need some work even if its just making the white the same colour as your background... also your haiti logo on the forum pages looks a bit tacky

Hope all this helps
DavidJaymz
(trying to be nice 'cos I know what its like when nobody has a good thing to say about your site )

I noticed that the second table (with the logo and the grey bar) was centered while the main content of the page was justified left. looks totally weird. and there was also some light blue lines about one or two pixels wide that were around the top part of the page. again, really weird looking. There's also navigational options everywhere on the page. All with different places to go. It confused the hell out of me (which doesn't take much). I would say make one nav bar on the left with all of your options to where to go. Put 7 or 8 options on it at most and then go from there. It just looks like the website wasn't storyboarded (sp?) or there wasn't an outline of content made before you really started creating the site. It looks like you created your top nav bar first and when you had more content and didn't have anymore room on the top, you decided to add a left hand nav. I think it needs a major rework.

Cheers
PUNKK

Hiya,

The top of the page definitely looks better 800*600 but even then it just doesn't do anything for me. The logo needs work as the 'classiest' part looks like not all of the letters are appearing properly and the stars just look add. The links on the right look like an after thought and should be with the rest in the main nav bar. Perhaps you could get a nice picture(s) of Haiti and make a banner incorporating your reworked logo to sit at the top of the page.

I don't know what program you have used to create the site but there seems to be comment tags galore in the code. I used Dreamweaver to clean up the code (no comments from anyone who doesn't like Dreamweaver code than you!!) and it removed 64 comment tags & combined 232 font tags.

All but your middle navigation tables are set to 780 pixels, then the navigation is 100%. Make that the same width otherwise on a large screen it looks as if everything else is lopsided.

The first thing that struck me was the pictures, they seem all fuzzy & some of them misshapen and certainly don't do the people justice. I'd work on them.

I also don't think that the red goes well with the maroon. Choose a contrasting colour to go with the maroon for your bullets.

The maroon box that houses 'Community' on the right is too big compared with the others and why isn't the red diamond next to all the headings?

Under the miscellaneous on the left entertainment is not in line with the others.

The colour of the rule3.gif looks odd as it isn't used anywhere else & it makes the line stand out for no good reason.

Stick to the same font throughout (make sure you specify a font) and I would say that a lot of people would actually find this text size very hard to read. Default on browsers is size three and I would say not to use anything below 2 and even then some (older) people may still find that hard to read.

You have got the content there so make some design changes and it'll be a very good site.

I took it to Dreamweaver also and got the same with the tags as Webmistress did. I also looked at it on netmechanic.com. There are so many extra tags that it would be hard to really fix without just re-doing the site.

Also your images are showing up really wierd. Some only show half of the image. May be all those extra tags playing tricks on my browser. All of your images look really fuzzy or distorted like you may have optimized them too much or incorrectly.

Your navigation is a little confusing. I didn't know where to start. There doesn't seem to be a starting point anywhere...just click where you may.

In the paragraph on the right side where you have "contact us" in big blue letters....you could make these letters the same size and get rid of the odd spacing there.

The layout throgh the whole site is not consistant. That may be because you haven't gotten to the other pages to change them....if so, disregard that comment.

I think with a little thought and careful layout planning, navigation re-work, change some colors and fix your images the site will be good. It has potential!

disastermaster

my .02 cents worth ..

the grey and dark red dont go together, I get a scroll bar at 800x600 as well, the red diamond and grey panels do nothing so taking these out should loose the scroll bar in 800x600 at least. The layout looks like its all there.

the links at the side, maybe align them to the left instead of center.

I think this is a sort of site you have to know why your going there for, i mean it has a lot of things on these pages but i was a bit set back as i didnt know where to go or for what.

i get a javascript error on the horoscope page, so am not sure if it loaded properly, but that green with red links are hard to red, also that page is 90% white space with one little box asking whats your sign.

the idea is there, the content is there, just maybe keep the same color throughout and fix one or two small things and it'll be great

Site looks good. I must be looking at it after you made some color changes. The only thing I would work on would be the grey box at the top. I thought it was an ad or something and almost ignored the links you had in it. Try losing the grey at the top all together. Maybe just leave it white. Anyway, Good luck!