St. Louis Old & New Website

I've just recenty jointed the HTML Writer's Guild.  I have a lot of questions
and I would appreciate any critque on my website.  I am afraid it is starting
to get rather large and I am having problems with navigation and I think maybe
it needs a better menu and it is starting to bore me.  I'm no longer happy
with it.

The main purpose of this site to to make information available.  This website
has been up and running for some time, it's popular with people doing
genealogy in the St. Louis area since the information contained would be time
consuming and in some cases expensive for someone out of state to get access
to.  I have listed old streets, ward boundaries, cemetary listings, etc.  Work
on another cemetery site is currentenly being developed.This website is a work
in progress and will be getting even bigger.  Recently, I've had people
sending in donations which I am always careful to give credit to the donator.
It is getting close to the time where even the menu is going to have to be
broken down into smaller parts. 

In making this website, I've tried to stay with what I like when I visit
someone else's website.  One thing I do not like is to have to scroll down a
real long list of names until I reach what I am looking for and then have to
continue scrolling down until I can find the link back to the previous page or
the index page.  Unfortunately, I have that problem in my webpage.  That is
something I would like to fix.  Would putting the information in tables so
that I would have two columns be better?  I would still think that there would
still be a lot of unnecessary scrolling.  Would frames be better and where
would I find a good tutorial on frames.  I'm thinking of a menu on the left
and the info on the right, however practically every webpage that I see like
that, the writing runs into the separating scrollbar (if this is what this is
called).  I'd like to avoid that.

I think it takes too long to load up at first, mainly because of all the
graphics at the bottom.  Should I put them on another page?  

I'm aware that some people have lower resolution browers, etc. I received some
e-mail from people who do have problems and I would like to make an alternate
no-graphics site where just the information can be obtained.  Would just
"stripping" my site of graphics be enough and then changing the tags.  I don't
use many on the information pages.  Would it be all right to use a color
background for this alternative or should I just stick to the gray with black
lettering?

While working on my site I view it with Netscape 4.0 and Explorer.  Is there
another browser I should be previewing this with?  Where can I get a copy?  

The URL is:  http://members.tripod.com/~Vide_Poche/ 

Thank you,

Paulette  

HTML: hwg-critique mailing list archives, maintained by Webmaster @ IWA