www.heavymetalnation.com

[pharmer4]

OK, i've got my site working again, and i've just re-hashed it a little.

I've taken out almost all the frames (juat 2 now, one on the bottom for links and advertising, and the main one).

Please make any comments or suggestions

Bear in mind i am a rank amateur - i don't know php or even how to write css properly - just html, and enough xml to do rss feeds.

also, my picture editing skills leave a lot to be desired, hence the top pic is not all that great.

anyway, let me know what y'all think.
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[drath]

I think you should work on a color scheme more. It looks like you are doing the monochromatic thing, yet you have those blue sidebars? I think you should either remove the blue sidebars and make them match the site, or incoporate more of that blue into the site (although I personally don't think it can ever match).

All of your pages are "Untitled Document" in the title.

The large text seems to really bother me as well. I think just because there is huge text versus tiny text right beside it.

I also really don't like the frames thing. Frames are dead in web design, unless they are used stylistically in my opinion.

The "Home" buttons leads to a 404 page that you cannot even read without highlighting the text.

I know i'm being quite harsh. But if you get some honest criticism your site will be great in no time. You don't even really need to change that much for your site to look a lot better.

My site was also monocrhromatic at one point. I was having a really rough time trying to make my site look any good at all. I realized that I can't have a monochromatic site that has as much text as I do. There was no contrast in my greys. So I decided to add a lot more contrast into my design. And even though my site (http://thegamersjournal.com) is still rather basic in design, it looks a lot better now with the darker greys and cyan.
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[pharmer4]

Firstly, thank you for the feedback!

[Desbrina]

to fix the frames problem i believe you need to change the title in the index page, i got the same problem when i used frames.

The blue navigation is ok, but it might look better if their a bit darker.

The problem with using a font that isn't common, (i haven't even heard of it till now) is that most people wont have it, and when they see the large, partially unreadable font then they will just be turned away

One thing that i've noticed which looks bad is that the two black side panels dont line up with the title, one starts before the title image, the other ends after the title image. If you dont understand this i can screen shot it for you
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[pharmer4]

[moridin]

To increase your liking among search engines, might I suggest that you loose the frames and use the include() function in PHP instead. The results are the same, just without the ugly frames.

Content is important for both human and nonhuman popularity. Furthermore, have you considered making it more user friendly in terms of width? Even if you have a monster screen, the majority of the worlds population does not.

You can also try to fix your HTML errors as well as saying Bye Bye Embed.

Your website looks a bit like an attempt at a content management system. Have you tried using a CMS for everything?

[wayforyourpride]

The site is looking good and I read through the other reviews and I'm happy to see that people are being honest with some of the stuff that stands out. I'll try not to repeat what everyone else said (I'm pretty sure you don't need to be told what's wrong several times through).

I looked at your site in both Firefox (my main browser) and IE 6.0 (out of curiosity) and found they look remarkably different. I'll start with what I see with Firefox.

I know it's been mentioned, but you'll really want to find a way to change the title of the page (even with frames). More and more people are using tabs to go from page to page and without a proper name, you leave your site open to simply be forgotten. I checked in IE as well and the title still shows up as "Untitled Document".

I understand that you like the font, however it is common practice to use web-friendly fonts to avoid troubles like yours. There are times with web page design where you have to make the choice between what you want done and what the masses want/need. Just something to think about. If you're interested, The Internet Digest has a short little article about the best web-safe fonts to use.

The width of the frames are too large. Although the standard size of computer screens are growing, you still have to take into account that some people are on smaller screens and horizontal scrolling can be a pain.

I see that you are using tables to sort your main page. Over the past few years, tables have been abused and overused. The table tag was never meant to align images and huge amounts of data, rather it was meant for tabular data. Div layers or something of the sort may suit you better in the end. Of course, it all comes down to a matter of preference. I don't like tables, therefore I avoid them at all costs. I know there are some out there who live by tables, and that's their choice.

From what I've read, the frames have been addressed and to answer your question about an alternative, without using CSS it may be difficult to break away from them to do what you want to do. However, if you're worried about having it load on every page without having to actually code it on every page, you can use PHP (although you have no background in it) or you can try Sever Side Includes. They work like PHP includes in some sense. I'm not certain if the lifeless SSI, but it's something to looking into. Google around a bit and see if you like it any.

The ads on your page just about killed my computer (but I'm multitasking like crazy, so I can't really fault you there).

Okay, onto what it looks like in IE. While in the middle of writing this up I realized the reason why the pages look so different is because I don't have flash installed for Internet Explorer, therefore it refused to load the rest of the page.

Oh, and is Evanescence considered heavy metal? Just curious, lol.

So in short, you're off to a good start. Had you not been using frames, I probably would have liked it a lot more. Frames can be hell on a browser though. What I suggest is for you to keep experiment and playing around, you'll find other stuff to works for you. Keep up the good work.

And for a side note, Java is a computer programming language. JavaScript is the web-language (kind of). I'm pretty sure you intended to say that you don't know JavaScript, which makes more sense than not knowing Java. It kind of drives me nutty when people get it mixed up, but it's not a huge deal or anything.
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[pharmer4]

i am taking from the responses here that i need to learn more coding languages, ie PHP would be good, learning how to utilise CSS would also be good.

The biggest issue i have is i don't have the time to do such thing, unfortunately.

Screen width, I guess that is an issue - I use a widescreen laptop - I can set Dreamweaver to show the most common screen resolution i suppose, but i actually like it like it is.

And evanescence fits in, mainly because while the domain name is heavymetalnation, the mission statement of the site is to include anything from rock onwards into the heavy areas, so they make it in.
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