Critique Me

[jhawes]

Please let me know what you think about my gospel group site.
www.reuniontrio.com

[MandyJay]

Hi,
You have worked hard on the site. Have you thought of having a logo made and placing at top of each page?? Apart from the fact I think logos get remembered as you have different colored page for each link, if a Search Engine calls up one of the pages people may not instantly recognise it as being yours, though of course once they start reading it is obvious. But a logo will stand out ... just a thought.

Your links seem to change order on some pages which made me think maybe some had been left out or I was missing being able to see some pages. For example on the Products page .... you have

Reunion Home Schedule News Photos Link Studios Bios

Understandable you miss out the link for the page you are on, but then on the Links page you hvae them in this order:

Reunion Home Photos Studio News Schedule Products Bios

I just found that a bit confusing

Page Size - that may need an eye keeping on it. The Producst page I am not sure you have compressed your images, even the thumbnails some are over 60kb and should only be around say 13kb max for thumbs. Your whole page comes to a minimum of5.45 MB ... yup thats megabyte. Even on my broadband connection the page took a while to download, for anyone on a dial up, I would really think they would just leave your page and not bother, which could mean losing sales. I did not check the size of other pages though.

Finally some fonts were in Times New Roman, that is really a font for printing not web use as is a jaggy hard looking font, maybe consider changing to say Verdana or Arial?

I think if the navigation were sorted and the file size of pages, it will make a good improvement.

MJ
:happywave

[GWDGuy]

My 2 cents would be to make each page "themed" the same.. By this I mean I find it easier to go through a website when all the pages use the same color scheme as well as same size fonts on each section such as navigation and body text. When you change the background color on each page you then have to change the font colors and MY Preference is to see a site more symmetrical in this aspect.

I also see some of the pages load really slow even on my DSL.. The worst was this one >> http://reuniontrio.com/products.htm some of the images could be optimized and make that load really must faster.

The content is great, lots of text to really tell what is happening so that is all very good.

Again just my two cents which is not worth much sometimes.


Robert

[jhawes]

Hello Robert,
I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to look at my web site. You had some very good suggestions and I will make some changes. I know this might sound like a stupid question but what do you mean when you say I should optimize the pictures? I am just starting out in FrontPage and web design and I have yet to learn a lot of terms.
Thanks again for looking,
Jerral

[MandyJay]

Optimizing is same as compressing, trying to get the file size of the images as low as you can but still maintain quality.

MJ
:dance:

[GWDGuy]

Yes yes.. MJ is right on the money of what I was going to say. You can do this in FP but if you use an image optimizing program such as PhotoShop or www.spinwave.com you can reduce the file size on an image without losing much clarity (if any) and it will make your page load much faster.



Robert