Please review my new site

[rkolling]

I would appreciate it if you would review my site. I have tested it thoroughly using Firefox 3.5.3 and some using IE 7. I am having some problems with my marquee in Opera and Safari.

My site is www.robertkolling.com

Thank you

[donatello]

I was going to suggest an image slider like the ones you can build online quickly at Slide.com (http://www.slide.com/) - since your page appears to be a personal webpage and not a corporate site...

Very moving personal story. Best of luck.

[rkolling]

Thanks for the tip. I am now using it. www.robertkolling.com

[schrewkathy]

Try to use another color combination, it looks old.

[TheWebdevmonkey]

I like the design actually its really nice
*--------------------------------------------------------------------*
http://www.wannabemac.webs.com/

[rkolling]

Thanks a lot - i appreciate your taking the time to look it over.


Bob K.

[donatello]

Looks like the Slide embed fixed your marquee image problem. :)

[rkolling]

Yes it did - thanks.

[slaughters]

Interesting story.

A lot of text on one page, or just a lot of scrolling up and down, can be a little intimidating to the average reader on the web. So, one thing you may think about is breaking up any page that is more than 1 or 2 pages of text high into multiple pages with some kind of "next page"/"prev page" navigation on them.

Actually I would probably do that, but also provide a "print copy" link that someone could click on to get the entire section in a pdf, or plain text for printing.

[rkolling]

Those are very good suggestions. I will begin working on them.

Thanks!

[rkolling]

I would like to update the site (already) with something that doesn't look os old and boring and plain. It is just a personal web site, but it needs some pizzaz. Maybe some rounded corners, textured margins, different colors....something. I do not have much Photoshop experience and no Flash experience (nor do I have Flash). I have Dreamweaver CS4 and Photoshop CS4 and would like to find classes for graphics, both to learn for fun and to beef up the site. I am working on my VFW web site and it is boring and would like to develop a personal site for my wife, but I want to make it interesting.

It doesn't need to be commercial quality, but my site bores me to death. Maybe I have been looking at it too long.

Any suggestions?
www.robertkolling.com

[criterion9]

Check out lynda.com for Adobe tutorials. They have a huge mother load of video tutorials that you can access for free. Paid members get downloads and stuff and its not very expensive for a year's subscription either. They also have a bunch of other tutorials from MS Office to Javascript and everything in between.

[svidgen]

I would drop the background image on the recipe pages. Also, the plural of recipe is recipes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recipe

[svidgen]

Oh ... otherwise, I think it all looks [mostly] fairly suave.

[rkolling]

I added a link to a pdf file in the 3 longer pages (I'm still re-writing the Holly & Jim page). I also changed the background color for you to look at. If you thinks it looks good, I will change the color somewhat of the nav bar and the header backgrounds.

Thanks for all of your help.

Bob K.

[slaughters]

I would like to update the site (already) with something that doesn't look os old and boring and plain...You really don't have to know a lot of photo shop. Most of the designs I like tend to just use few photos. Mostly for a top banners, and then focus on colors and a balanced use of white space for a pleasing design and page layouts

Here are a few examples:
http://www.merttol.com/articles/web/color-and-accessibility.html
http://www.tajloro.com/
http://missionchamber.bc.ca/
http://www.designerstoolbox.com/designresources/
http://stansight.com/WordPress/

Mostly just colored fonts and spacing, with a sprinkling of images.

Laying out a page - how many columns there are on a page, where the header are footers are, etc can also do a lot to "jazz" up a page. Most page layouts now days use CSS to specifiy where everything is. For those who are new to CSS there is a pretty basic CSS Layout Generator to be found here:
http://csscreator.com/version2/pagelayout.php

You can also fined some pre-canned page layouts by doing a google on "CSS Layouts" or visit a template site to see how many different ways there are to layout a page:
http://www.templatemonster.com/category/clean-style/