~~~ This site is approved ~~~
Your page doesn't work at 800 X 600 resolution which is the most common setting.
Try reducing the size of your graphics. You have over 100K of graphics on every page except the main page and it has 70K of graphics. Granted some are cached like your rollovers and the header graphic but their size can come down some. It will greatly reduce the load time.
I didn't like the centered text in your News. Centered text is hard to read and even more so on a dark background. Make your text a little larger so it contrasts more with the background as well. Many people dislike dark background because small text is hard to read. Arial Narrow is a small font to begin with. Good thing is you didn't use absolute point sizes so the visitor can resize the text on the fly.
I am really beginning to hate the Hypermart popups. It didn't matter that much when they were a standard 468 X 60 but now the window is about 240 X 400. Takes up too much screen. I know you can't help that but you might think about embedding their ads in your pages so it goes away.
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Wayne Luke
WR Moderator ICQ 29015947
I think there is a design problem in that you go straight into a page telling people what you have been doing to the site rather than what the site is about.
I agree with the last poster too about the site being too dark. I'm looking at it at 1024x768 and it's really hard to read the text.
I reckon you need to define exactly what your site is about and try and put a little more content in it.
I'm tired of giving ppl one site addy when they ask for my home page so i decided to make a home page for all my sites!! So my site is about each one of my sites.. there is a link from the "SITES" page to each site! and it also tells a little about each site!
I just revised my site too!!!
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~Alex~
-http://the-outpost.hypermart.net-
[This message has been edited by Sniper (edited April 26, 2000).]
Nice font colors selection, but could do with lighter shades with your dark background. "The Outpost" pic is a bit too dark...even on my monitor with full gamma and brightness. The buttons looks a bit blur...perhaps you could save it as GIF instead of JPG(reduced image quality for compression), and the rollover effect is not that smooth...try making the alignment of the images accurate to the pixel.
I think the counter at the bottom(with the link www.thecounter.com) is not working...if that was what it meant to be.
I think most visitors to your site would not get a clue of what it is about...perhaps you could put some sort of brief introduction in the Home section to roughly guide us along.
It loads pretty fast on my cable modem...cant be sure about those on dial-ups.
- I think you should change the font to Arial or something like that. It would do a lot of good (but then again, I just don't like the default font).
- The counter on the bottom of the page doesn't work. I think you should just take it out. Counters don't help. Why do you think big sites don't have them
- The graphics are to big, I personally rarly have anything bigger than 15k. There allways are ways of cutting down the graphic size.
- Otherwise, I like your sites color layout, and if you change the fonts, it would look really good.
The main page section looks good :-) but I do not really like the left hand navigation bar. Maybe it was just my browser but the images were very pixalated round the edges.
Nick
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<A HREF="http://www.teenfront.com
The" TARGET=_blank>www.teenfront.com
The</A> teen site on the web!
The background is very hard to read the text on, the logo is a little too big, maybe make it smaller. I would move the jumpdown menu to the center or next to the logo. I think maybe moving the hypermart banner to the bottom of the page would be wise. I would not change to the pop-up banner, however.
You really need to go for a more limited and well-chosen colour pallette. Just at a glance I'm seeing black, brown, red, blue, orange, purple, violet, yellow... It's really too much and makes for a disorganised and unprofessional look.
Try sticking with an absolute maximum of three well-chosen colours (in addition to black and white), and make sure you use the exact same shade of each colour every time you use it (for example, your site would immediately look cleaner if the text, buttons, and "Current News" headlines were all the same colour, and reusing those colours to make the logo would really start to make your site look good).
I've noticed many of your graphics are in JPG format despite using only one or two colours (to which GIF's are very well suited!). Take your background (BG.jpg), for example. A two-colour GIF file would ensure that the horizontal lines were all the same colour and would look much cleaner, with about the same file size. The JPEG version that you're using now uses slightly different colours for the different lines, which makes your background look uneven and is quite distracting to look at.
As others have mentioned, you also need to improve the contrast between your background and your text. The light blue fades into the dark gray (the horizontal lines don't help) and makes your text really hard to read. Consider a brighter blue, a darker background, or a bolder font.
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