>http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/8094/

Hi Peter

I took a little look at your site, and heres some
opinions/ideas/observations (all IMHO):

1. On all pages, there is horizontal scrolling at 640x480 - not desirable.

2. You counter image was broken.

3. I would remove the browser icons, or put them in the links page.
Nonetheless, good on you for putting the Opera icon there, they deserve it
IMO :-)

4. I would re-think your colours. You have a light blue (borders and
bevels), lime (title), purple/lavendar (menu options - by title) and (IMHO)
a hideous grey/green background (IMHO, solid colours look much better as
backgrounds).

5. The font's too are a little inconsistent. You have a sort of
art/cursive/decorative font in your title, a nice informal sans-serif for
the top menu-options and the main page text has been left to default (This,
I think, looks terrible. IMHO a sans-serif font looks best, I recommend
verdana at a fairly small size - it looks great. Arial also looks good).

6. I would move away from GeoCities - if I were you. Firstly, you risk not
being taken seriously, secondly their servers are not the fastest or most
reliable (as far as I could discern from being an ex-homesteader and from
others) and thirdly the geoguide is irritating and amateurish. A good ISP is
not very expensive - especially there in the US (I am envious of the low
prices :-).

7. The code looked good, you had ALT attributes in IMG and a doctype.
However, I found this in 'javascript.html':

</tr><tr></tr><tr></tr></table>

I think it was geoguide code - so your not to blame.

Also, in the title, you have &#38 for an ampersand - it misses the
semi-colon at the end, eg &#38; (You can also use &amp; - that is easier to
remember). IE4 was fine with this, but more primitive browsers might choke
(not totally sure on that one, but just something I noticed :-).

8. I noticed you had meta tags in your first page - but not in the others.
Unless you have a robots.txt working and excluding sub-pages, it is a good
idea to put the meta tags in all pages, as a search engine will index all
pages in your site, and thus to have them appear well in the search listing
is important.

9. Having a form asking for opinion on design and for feedback is an
excellent idea (and quite courageous too :-), though maybe a little farther
down the page? It just dominates the first page.

10. All links were live, and all images loaded. Speed was a bit slow - but I
got it in the end!

Well, my connection is lost and I smell dinner...so I'll end here :-)

A good site. It is a competive arena - webmaster resources sites, so I wish
you luck!

Cheers

Sebastian

Win95
MSIE4
600x800 (also looked at 640x480)
28.8 dialup from New Zealand

__________________________________
Sebastian de Raadt  sderaadt(at)clear.net.nz
http://www.rh.steiner.school.nz/sebastian
"The difference between genius and stupidity
is that genius has its limits"
__________________________________

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