Hello,

I think the biggest problem is the lack of consistency throughout the
site. Rather than using every bg image you can find, stick with one. It
also reduces download time because the image is cached.

The other problem I have is the way the poem indexes load over the
navigation. Look at it this way: once you've clicked on one of the poetry
sections, which is more useful to you: the introduction? or the top-level
navigation? Definitely not the intro - most people *might* read it once -
few will read it more than once. It would be far more useful to have the
top-level navigation available - that's one of the main reasons for using
frames, after all.

	Home page

If you're going to use frames on the home page, you must at the *very*
least include the <noframes> tag for people with browsers that don't
render frames.

I don't think the backgrounds work very well - they're rather garish.
Also, the purpose of a seamlessly tiling background is rather lost when
you chop it into little pieces by putting it into separate little frames.
The blue-red bg is also rather too busy. The text is difficult to read and
made more so by the small font and use of italics. I recommend you pick a
few colours that look nice together and stick with those, rather than
using the entire spectrum. Choose colours with good contrast, that won't
cause retinal damage to anyone looking at your site for more than 10
seconds!

Actually, looking at the content, the frames are rather superfluous - the
intro, links and copyright notice (which hardly warrants a frame of its
own) could easily go into one page with very little scrolling.

And the image on the main frame is broken.

	Love and loving

Once you've clicked there's nothing to tell you which section you're in. I
don't like the bg, but it's the best so far - it doesn't make the text
illegible. The poems themselves should be left-aligned rather than centred
which is difficult to read - your eye has to look for the beginning of
every line.

	Death and loss

Most of the above applies here too. The contrast between the bg and text
colours is good but the rotating skull is rather cheesy IMO.

	Thoughts...

The shell pic would look much better on a white bg or with the white
surround made transparent (although it may still keep an obvious halo on a
non-white bg). See Love section.

	Humour

The white text is hard to read on the light bg. See Love section.

	Submit a poem

-----------------------------
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http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Club/6620/frsubmitps.html,
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unterminated string literal.

 I'm not sure
..^
-----------------------------

Hope this helps!

Lynnsey

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********

On 8/31/98, at 2:16 PM, Shing Khor wrote: 

>Hi, 
>	I'd like to request a critique for this poetry site; it's been run
through
>this list before but I've done some changes; mostly deleting parts that
>caused error messages. Feel free to add any comments about the
>categorisation of poetry; and anything else. And I would also like to
know
>if any of you would think that a non frames version of this site could be
>made without multiple tables slowing the page down. That's all, thanks
and
>hope to hear from you soon.
>
>The Poetry Station
>http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Club/6620/frpoetry.html

Lynnsey Skliros
Mobile Telephone Networks

The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you
pour upon it, the more it will contract. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes

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