So I've gone through a great deal of pain in putting together a new design for this site. There are actually somewhere around 15 or 20 templates for various page types on this thing and making them all work well was a task. A few highlights IMO are: 1) ad placement - ad's currently appear in one of two locations rotating on a weighted random basis. More locations in the future along with associated images, but I wanted to get this design released and see how it affected things. My CTR has gone up significantly since the change from my previous placement which was not nearly as prominent. 2) CSS/Javascript nav menu - should work on any 4.x+ browser and degrade gracefully in others. Also should be safari compatible (hopefully ) 3) On page SEO - article pages should have all have decent keyword density, and the basics (h1 text, title text, keywords in url). 4) Color scheme. I like it. I've spent days trying to come up with decent color schemes and this is as close as I could get. 5) Style selector - from the menu there are three styles - wide for 1280+ screens, normal for 1024 screens, and Thin for 800x600 screens. Default is 1024, selectable from the nav manu. 6) page size - home page is 95K including scripts and images, but that's down to 39K with compression and just about 7K once everything is cached. I've done some things to enable caching of css based images in IE so page load times should be quick even over dialup - faster for repeat visitors. 7) digital point coop, of course . 8) Internal linking structure - lots and lots of internal links help spread spidering and PR throughout my site even though I have yet to put a sitemap script together. 9) general performance - I moved to a better server, consolidated my php scripts, installed some caching software. 10) category icons - some are good. Some need revising, but I think it gives me the ability to concentrate on textual content instead of trying to find images to go with my articles. 11) adsense in firefox - getting adsense to not flicker next to a css menu in firefox is difficult. I finally figured it out, but it's still a little bit problematic. Also firefox scrolling problem seems to be resolved. (where you scroll over it and get a white background underneath in firefox) 12) utilities - Link to this page / bookmark this page scripts on every page. 13) layout - 3 equal length column css based layout. As a programmer, I know I tend to focus on some of the more technical aspects of things and that often means that I miss some big things that are obvious to most people but I'm apparently blind to. It's already been suggested to either make the 800x600 layout my default layout or make the style changing links more prominent and at the top, but I'm struggling with the fact that 80% of my visitors are 1024 or wider and I don't want that text at the top of the page. I know that my search page is dead, and I've been thinking about replacing my tsep integration with just a google site search box. Here are a few links to check out: http://www.bkweddings.com/ - the home page Lance Armstrong Wedding - an article. (may as well give myself some anchor text here ) Wedding Directory Page Please be brutal. I really want this to be a good site and I'm interested in whatever feedback I can get. Also, please note your browser/os combo so I can make note of which browsers tested successfully.
i dunno if its my LCD screen or what but on this heading Weddings at BK Weddings .com the green part of that is hard to read on the yellow bg, like i said might just be my moniter, but my brightness/contrast are set at about 50%
Hi nevetS, very nice layout, but I would add an image of happy couple..and may be one colour, which is really stands out, but its only my opinion...it could be wrong.. I like layout webdeal
I had a look at your website and I couldnt really find something that I would change. One thing I would change is to add your digitalpoint affiliate code in your link. Ops I have just noticed that I cant add a comment on the ` about us` page.
Very well done and well designed site congrats. I especially like the menus cascading beautifully over the adsense ads. My mouse slipped off though and I accidently clicked an ad....(just kidding). How do you do the page compression?
Nice work... My only main suggestion would be to default it to 800x600 rather than 1024x768. Left-to right scrolling loses visitors - white space doesn't.
The contents seem good although I'm not sure the title tells you what the site is about. I like the table on the left, good use of ads as well. i don't think the beige background is very good... I would swap the bells for photographs, I think it would look more pro (like photos of Lance Armstrong...)