www.marketstir.com

Well the flash banner is very swanky; personally I'm not a lover of Flash and it does cause a large degree of slow-down on my somewhat pre-historic work PC, although it is reasonable to expect a typical customer of this site to have better equipment, it should be taken into account as a concern. In addition, constant animation can be distracting and detract from the sites useability (see http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9512.html).

I also feel that the rest of the site doesn't live-up to the standard set by the banner, the main content (which for any user is the most important part) seems, merely to be an appendum to this overwhelming animation. There is no consistency between the banner, menu and content; the texture you have chosen for the page background looks particularly out of place.

The menu is quite useable (another thing I'm not a fan of is expanding menu drop-downs, but that is mainly just opinion), however, it is built with images and should therefore have a textual equivalant somewhere else on the page. This means that the page will degrade nicely when non-standard equipment is being used (e.g. a screen reader). Also providing textual equivalents will help Google bots parse the page, and helping Google is always good!

Potentially a very good site, but it does seem like you need to re-think the design somewhat, get into the code and rip it apart.

Your navigation menu works too slow.

Also you can't see the menu in the Opera browser, the scrolling text covers it.

Check your page with w3c validator and you will see many errors.
Get rid of them and your page will be faster.

You need a new make over! Get a template that fits your market, Your navigation menu is slow and the flash should be taken off. The site looks to plain and looks boring. You should use a white background instead and should add more content to the front page.

WoW. thanks for the comments. Never expected them to be so harsh, but hey that is fine. I posted my site in other forums and they liked the flash and the page layout, but everyone is different. Could you explain in more detail what i should change about the template? I am open to ideas as people have already helped me change the template to what it looks like. Simple and neat, but if you think it should be altered further i would like to know your ideas. "The site looks to plain and looks boring." if you could explain that further as to how i could spruce it up a bit to make it more interesting to you! that would be a big help to me. THANKs

IMHO it will be better if you will make your main textbox in same width as the top flash. And menu should fit this too.

Get rid of the graphics in your popup-menu, and better use rolovers.
If you want to keep your scrolling text, make it smaller and put at the bottom of the text, because its realy weird to read the main text when something is rolling over and over under it.

I have updated the site! What do you think?

Your top right home link goes to http://www.marketstir.com.com/.

A very simple looking site in FireFox. I'm not if I like the blue border around your text box. it seems very basic and kind of out of place. is it the same colour as the header text? it seems brighter?

Could you (or can you?) add an image so that when the flash doesn't show people still get a header? I've got flash disabled in Firefox and i just get a blank area at the top.

DJ

The new site looks much better, but I would tone down the blue border a little bit (lot's of B's!), and the "home, contact us, ect" links in the top right don't match the rest of the page. Try using Verdana (maybe Arial, not sure which you use) for them.

I hope i have fixed the above comments. What do you think? marketstir.com

That picture of a newspaper (index, left top corner) looks either small or ... maybe lonely