Critique for: http://www.franceandus.com

Hello Siona,

Perhaps I just had a slow connection this morning, but I couldn't for the
life of me load a single one of your images.  Oh, wait, I take that back, I
see that the little image of the quill pen in the ink jar has just loaded
after 15 minutes.

Well, it doesn't really matter, since you've included HEIGHT and WIDTH
information in your image tags, I can still tell where everything goes.  

Information:  Lots of it!  It was almost an information overload when I saw
the first page.  Luckily, I see that you have navigation to the left where
I can go to seperate pages and narrow the subject of the content a bit.
Maybe having a little less information on that first page and a little more
"whitespace" might be a good idea.  It would help for those of us who are
just getting up and haven't had breakfast yet :-)

Colors:  Like I said, I can't seem to load any images, but it looks like
you've stayed pretty consistant with the colors of text you've used.  I see
that the scheme stays with (blue/purple), (violet/pink), and red.  If the
images match those colors, good job.  If they don't, it might just be too
many different colors for sleepy audiences.

So to sum up what might be changed:
a) Either remove some text from the first page or...
b) Limit the number of colors and different text sizes to 2. That way it
would be clear what is important and what is not.
c) If you are on a slow server (and it's not just me), then you might want
to try to optimize your images as much as possible.

I can tell you've put a lot of work into this.  It shows!  It looks like it
would be a really good resource for people interested in France.

Here's hoping you take my comments lightly,

David Gauer



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WWW:  ratfactor.com
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