Opinions and Suggestions Please...

[namdesign]

I am still in search for a good web forum that offers some good advice and opinions :classic: I am hoping this is it!!

I have two sites that I have been working on. They are still in development phases.

I was hoping to get some opinions on the design aspects of the sites.

They are as follows:

www.hcrelay.info
and
www.egtownhall.com

Thanks for your help and I look forward to becoming activily involved in this forum.

[filburt1]

The first one is very inconsistent in designs and colors and hard to navigate therefore. The second one is better but still cluttered-looking.

[JR]

welcome namdesign,

i agree with filburt on the first one lacking a colour scheme but the basic design idea is good

the second one has a good colour scheme but i agree does look slightly messy and cramped together.

[namdesign]

How is this looking...Am I getting there on this site...

www.egtownhall.com

[JR]

i do like it but i still stick by my previous comments.

[namdesign]

Any suggestions...
The Client loved it so that is a plus
But I would like to here your suggestions.

[JR]

yes i like it, it looks better now you moved that picture and it does its job well i suppose.

[Mexican Hat]

Both sites are very well done. The first one seems like everything is move over the the left hand corner. Try spreading everything out a little bit more.

I don't really have any suggestions on the second one. I like what you did with the pictures. Maybe you could cut down on all the links. You sure have a lot of them. Anyway great work on both sites.

Peace :chinese:

[TheGAME1264]

A few things I'd like to add:

1) I like the overall layout of the first site, but it doesn't need to be in frames. Tables will do just fine.

2) "Graphics" that are nothing but text can't be indexed by search engines and are often harder to read than text itself (they're not as sharp.)

3) For the second site: I personally prefer if the submenus in a DHTML menu are lined up with their parents. I'd also move the submenus over further to the right.

4) If you know how, put your menu code into a .JS file in order to make your site more search-engine friendly (all that code can really screw up some of them.)

[namdesign]

Thanks for the last two comments. Refering to the comment made about using frame. If you looked in the code you would notice that the www.hcrelay.com or the other site for that matter, is not set up using frames. I really do not like to use frames in my work unless absolutly necessary. I also had thought about lining the menus up with their "parents" however if I did the menus were starting to get cut off in an 800x600 res. and I really wanted to optimize the page to that resolution. However I am editing the menus Javascript so that the rollover stays "lit" when you are rolling over the individual menus - (if that makes sence)...I plan converting all the text in the sites to HTML I am just waiting for final approval on the sites. Then I will work through all of that.

I wish I could get rid of some of those links on the second site. I can't it is a town site and they wanted all that info on the page. Nothing I can do - believe me I talked them out of a lot.

Any suggestions on getting notice by search engineens such as yahoo? I know that you pay a certain amount to have your site pop up as one of the first. Can someone tell me if they have done this before. I am also aware that once I convert all of my text to HTML and Create my Meta tags this will help greatly but I am looking for something a bit more than that.