Church website critique -- please??

[heitern]

ok. ive browsed threads and ive seen you guys critique other people's site, and all your inputs are GREAT!
anyway, ive designed a site for our church youth group and it is in process still, like i haven't gotten all of the contents yet.. staff page, about us.. etc. we put it up with the intention of slowly building it.
Anyway, critique please.
http://www.hvbcyouth.org

[EC]

I think it's off to a really great start.

[Crimson]

yeah- it is a great start. I would recommend a page where the youth can give testimony about how the group has helped them. . . Let them take pics you can add to the website. Let them be involved and have ownership in the site as producing an image they agree is good.

[Craig B]

I think overall it's pretty nice and fun.

Here are a few things I noticed:

• The flash piece seems out of place and unnecessary. It's nice, but it's in a different style and it has the URL of the page you're on in it (which seems odd ... if they're already at the site, why would they need the URL ... unless you're trying to get them to remember it through repetition.)

• this section is hard to read. http://img255.imageshack.us/img255/6289/picture1ea6.gif The text is too small and scrunched together.

• Will the photo area match the look of this homepage. If so, I think it would help the flow? For a second I thought I went to a different photo hosting site and didn't feel as though I was still on the same site.

• The background on the video page helps bring in the look and feel. The home page background might be too stark and white, but that's something you'll have to play with or you might be fine with it, and that's fine too.

All in all I think it's a good start. I think it's got a pretty good "youth" feel. A good combination of being fun and functional. Nice job.

[budafist]

I like the overall feel.

I feel like the header and the footer are too different. Top is yellow/brown and bottom is tan/red.

Can you choose 1 colour scheme for the website?

[John G]

24 bit png's don't work in IE6. Anything that's supposed to be transparent is a nice non-transparent shade of grey fyi. Don't see much past that and what Craig and Buda said.

Just a pet peeve that the footer doesn't go all the way to the bottom of my screen at 1600x1200 (acceptable, I just never liked the bottom of a site not "grounded" for some reason).

[heitern]

wow thanks!! these are all great crits!! i'll never get crits like these from the kids. lol good eyes.. will work on it and see what i can do.
Thanks all.