crits plz

[Big Gabe]

latest site Ive built
www.albritonfarms.com (http://www.albritonfarms.com)

[Quirk]

there is so much information on the bull page, try to create a hierarchy and make it easier to read...

[Quirk]

Also, have you experimented with using image slide shows or other methods of displaying your images? Right now it is a little bland and people don't like to scroll down. The buttons are also distracting to me...

mainly I would say at this point you need to focus on the typography since you have a lot of text, and look into ways of displaying photos.

[MD]

I hate the colors.

Hate the header - I don't like how you have presented the logo, It looks half assed and slapped in there. The way you erased and gaussian blurred the edges looks terrible. There is also some weird cows grazing repeating picture behind the header.

http://www.albritonfarms.com/images/headerbg.jpg

The rollover effects don't work on Home and About Us ... maybe that was intentional for some reason?

I agree with Quirk about the bull page ... something has to be done to make it readable or at least scannable. Unordered list or table maybe?

[Big Gabe]

I hate the colors.:confused:


It looks half assed and slapped in there.
it was:(
The rollover effects don't work on Home and About Us ... maybe that was intentional for some reason?
not intentional will look into it....:confused:

anything positive?

[Danger_Mouse]

Are you here to just hear good stuff? ha!
I kinda like the wooden nav bar. I think your text is too big in it though, but like the roll over effect. You have some great images throughout the site.

I have to agree with other comments though. Try working on the header first, MD is right, looks like a quickie.

The only time its good for that much scrolling on a website is when surfing a good porn gallery.

This just looks very in the works and in progress.

[shalom_m]

Concept not bad, but needs a lot more work.

But first get rid of the frames (bad SEO) and then center the pages.

[Big Gabe]

Concept not bad, but needs a lot more work.

But first get rid of the frames (bad SEO) and then center the pages.
what is SEO?

[MD]

Search Engine Optimization.
Doing certain things will get you bumped farther up the list on google, yahoo, etc.

[Big Gabe]

:D thanks! I didnt know that!

[embersyc]

Frames are terrible and always have been, but for far more reasons than just search engine optimization.

What happens when someone does a right click/bookmark on your site and ends up just bookmarking a frame, suddenly your page is ruined to them if they aren't smart enough to figure out the index address.

[nicholaspaul]

Whoa...

Ok, first of all, whatever you do ...DONT GIVE UP!

There are a lot of negative comments up there. Telling someone that their work sucks is not constructive nor asked for.

What has been said about frames is right, though. For search engines to properly find your site you need to be using coding techniques like CSS. Some people still use tables, but for ease of use and simpler editing, I would recommend learning CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). It may be a steep learning curve to begin with, but once you've got the basics down, you'll fly along and you'll wonder how you got on without em! Just Google CSS TUTORIAL and you'll find tons of help.

As for the text, I would definitely break it down into bite size chunks. Think of a magazine layout, and how data is arranged. Bullets, indents, sub paragraphs and bold titles all help break things up and make them way more enjoyable to read.

As a first step, I'd recommend laying it out in Photoshop first. Keep things simple (no really, the best sites always are) and it will be easier to build, maintain and update.

[nicholaspaul]

Something else I just noticed... you might want to reduce your filesizes. Some of those pictures are over 90k. Now, if you're on ADSL / Cable that's ok, but they still take a while to load. Using Photoshop's 'Save For Web' command, I got them down to about 20k and still look good.

It's all about the user experience. If you can make the site load quickly,make it easy for people to find the info they want, and make the site look good in the process, you'll get lots of happy visitors.

I also wanted to say that you got off to a good start, with some punchy graphics. The navigation is on the left - nice and easy to use - and the banner is certainly eye catching.

Lose the frames, sort out the text, reduce the graphics and make the navigation even simpler (without the graphics) and you'll be well on your way.

[Big Gabe]

^thank you:)