Critique for MidEast Dispatch

I'd be grateful for your comments on a re-design I'm doing for a
semi-commercial site - a news service focused on Israel and the Middle
East, aimed primarily but not exclusively at the Jewish community
around the world.  There are a few adverts on the site, and the news
is largely politically oriented, though not entirely so.

A few notes:

The site is frames based.  I will be putting in no-frames and text
only coding once the design is agreed, but it's not there at the
moment.  Once I do, I hope the people on the list who use no-frames /
text only browsers will help me with critiques on those aspects as
well.

Criteria specified by the client - the name of the service and the
adverts should be visible at all times;  the latest news should be on
the front page;  the pages should look as uncluttered as possible.

The pages look best at 800x600 I think, but I've tried to make them
degrade reasonably gracefully at other resolutions.

Some of the banner ads don't look perfect at the moment - these will
be redone.

I've only done the archives for 1 and 2 April 1997 - the rest will be
converted en mass once the design is agreed.

The writing of the news articles themselves is not under my control,
but please feel free to comment on readability of other pages.

I've validated some but not all of the pages on the W3C validator - so
far all but two of the pages I've checked have validated, so there
shouldn't be any nasties lurking in there - please let me know (and
accept my apologies) if you do find any!

The (temporary, for comment) address is
http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/dms/mideast/

For comparison, the original design (not mine) is at
http://www.iipub.com/

All (constructive!) comments will be gratefully received.

Many thanks in advance for your time.

Donna
--
dms(at)zetnet.co.uk
"If you don't have the time to do it right, where do you think
you're going to find the time to do it over?"

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