Does my aviation website look professional?

[fca767]

I don't understand why people aren't joining my forum. I've tried posting on forums and using google adwords but it doesn't seem to work.

Does my website look poor?:o

www.aviationcafe.net

[Centauri]

Does my website look poor?:o
In a word, yes.....

Poor choice of colour combinations makes it VERY hard to read. Combined with poor and non-logical layout (due in part to horrible coding), the site does not look at all professional.

Regarding users registering on your forum - you have only just got this thing up and running. Be patient, you won't get huge membership overnight....

Cheers
Graeme

[fca767]

Hi thanks for replying. I have changed it all to Blue to see if it looks better but i am still wandering about the link icons and the overall pages. I am happy to be given as much negatives about it as poss to make it better:p

[jaylaw1]

You may want to actually try giving this page a title.

<title>Aviation Cafe</title>

Really simple and really quick. Will go a long way towards looking more professional.

[fca767]

I thought i had one:p

[ray326]

You have a "join the forum" line but no obvious way to do it. Make that a link to the sign up page.

[Michaelttkk]

I'm not very good in layout and page color and stuffs but I think it would be easier and better to read if you'd change the text color on the index page. I don't know if it's becoz of my browser but the font color is too blur to read
the navigation link design is good.

[fca767]

Thanks guys:) I have just gone about a HUGE change by asking permission off an aviation site to use their photo and i changed the photo's color to make it more vintage looking and well it looks good but i will just keep going back to it to see what changes i can do.:)

[scottrickman]

Hi, Centauri is correct, there is only one word for it ... Yes. Web design is ultimately about personal choice but there are some simple guidelines so that most people won't have a extreme reaction! Firstly remember that not everyone will view your site in the latest version of Firefox, they may be using IE6 with style sheets switched off and javascript disabled, that's their choice BUT your site still needs to work - it's called graceful degredation. You should really re-work your HTML, here are your current validation errors (http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http://www.aviationcafe.net/). Don't just fix the validation errors but try to make your markup symantic. Yeah, yeah you may say why bother? Well it helps with SEO, SEO gains traffic and traffic means members! Secondly, get some content on your homepage; this is the first page that robots will index and they ONLY index content, not images and they index content as though it is a properly formatted document (headings, paragraphs, lists, etc.). The highest priority is usually placed on the <title> element then <h1>, <h2>, etc elements, it doesn't matter (for SEO anyway) how these elements are styled (as long as they are visible, don't try to fill your page with invisible content in a vain attempt to fool a robot - it just doesn't work) either. I could go on but these comments should get you started