Well, I can help you out in a few areas. Don't take offense though, as the case may be we will disagree on some things.
1) Images:
Alot of your images are rather HUGE!
True, they are really high quality, but on the net big is not always better. For instance, the header image and the front page image(4x4 in the woods) combined make up a whopping 60+ kbs. This alone is 2 times more than what a webpage should have in total including all code. Then if we add the webpage background color, the gradient, that doubles it to 120kbs. This is far too heavy. What you need to do is comprress the images further. Or if they have never been compressed, compress them now. This will shorten the time needed to download your webpage.
Talking about the gradient background, here's a quick tip. It's actually a really good one. You know how you are using one huge image. Well, using css you can now reduce that huge image to a sliver of it's former self. This is what you need to do.
1) open the original gradient background image
2) cut it horizontally so that it's now only 6px tall(or whatever you choose).
So now you have a very short, but very wide gradient.
3) Using css, add this to your body declaration.
There, now if you have compressed the images, and sliced the gradient, you should be well under 40kb total. A good start.
2) Color:
Try to use high contrast colors for text. for instance there are parts on the black webpage where you use green for the text color. While it looks cool, it tends to annoy visitors because it's hard to read. In some spots such as headers it's large enough to be easy to read. So no worries there.
The menu is a little hard to read too, maybe it's the color used or maybe it's the size of the text. hmm..I think it's a combination of the two. Dark colors generally make it hard to read when they are used together.
To help you with colors you may want to do a google search for "color harmony". This is a general topic describing what makes a good color scheme to use for things like quilts and ads to websites and book covers.
It's good for dealing with legal issues internationally.
4) best viewed in:
Don't add that to any website you make. Especially for a professional website. It's a no no on the webdesign list of things not to do for various reasons. again, a google search will yield more answers.
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Well, aside from that you've done a good job. The header image is Fantastic! Is it one of your own images?
I guess the final tip I can give is SEO. Do a google search for this term too, it's basically a way to improve your search engine rankings through webpage tweaking.
I hope that was helpful, and not too mean or offensive. The thing is there is so much to say that I have to be blunt and to the point about much of it, just so I can get the most important stuff out there.
p.s
Some links still point to .html pages rather than .shtml pages. I got 404 errors. _________________ Providing small business with high quality affordable websites:
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gecko,
I chose that font for browser compatibility. I wont be changing it to some rare to find font.
webguy,
no offence taken at all.
As for the images... they are optimized in Photoshop a bit, but I will try and shrink them a bit more without loosing quality. Not sure how much luck I will have with that...
As for the green. There isn't any text that is green other then the address and headers?
Hmm on my monitor the contrast is great between the green and black... never noticed a contrast issue.
The color of the links have changed as well... they used to be blue. But I thought the rusty... orange/brown color was a more harmonizing color combination. Black background with earthy colors (green, brown etc.).
The gradient could be done that way yes. It is actually one image that is set in a fixed position, so the rest of the site is scrolling over it. I didn't use one slice of the image because its more then just a gradient... I used a scanline overlay... so it would be hard to slice it in a manner to repeat that pattern nicely. I will definitely give it a try though.
Thanks for your suggestions appreciated
PS: the shtml issue was because my host wasn't hosting SSI files properly. I was trying to work around the issue, but I had some troubles.
I canceled that webspace and moved it to a host that fully supports SSI, so that should all be fixed up now.
Well, while photoshop does a decent job, it's far from perfect.
Do a google search for pegasus jpeg wizard.
It costs about $30 but it will give you the best quality hihgly compressed images of any product I've tried to date. It's an awesome tool!
Of course, if free is your bag, you can do a search for gifbot + netmechanic.
They have an online image compression program as well. It's not as good as the pegasus tool, but it does a fine job just the same. _________________ Providing small business with high quality affordable websites:
Alberta Custom Websites
Keep up todate with latest virus scares, google, microsoft, linspire and more:
Web and Technology News
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