Suggestions to improve my site appearance, please

[Doug Stewart]

Over the past several months I've created a site
(www.france-property-and-information.com) with a lot of content.
Unfortunately, the visual appearance is terrible, largely because I have less
graphic design capability than a rock. I've used the existing theme "Blank"
as it downloads quickly and seems to work best with many navigation buttons
with long names.

Could some kind soul made a couple of suggestions on how to make the
appearance of my site less terrible. I don't know HTML, Java, etc. So the
suggestions need to be fairly basic. However, I'm hoping some simple changes
will make a big improvement. Unfortunately, I can't seem to come up with them.

My site is www.france-property-and-information.com

Any suggestions will be received with great gratitude.

Doug Stewart

 

[Typewriter]

It doesn't look bad; it looks okay. Blue might be better than yellow, unless
you're trying to warn people of something. :^)

It falls apart a little at the botton: the space between the bulleted items
should come out, for consistency. The "link to" lines could be broken at a
comma -- put in a <br> -- so that the link stays on one line when viewed in
browser.

(And a good practice for anybody is to insert a no-break space -- " "
without the quotes -- between the last two words of every paragraph, which
prevents one-word lines verboten in typography . . . )

(Sorry, I don't know anything either -- except about type design issues . .
.. )

 

[Rob Giordano \(Crash Gordon®\)]

Whew...pretty dang vanilla.
Buy me a house in Collioure and I'll redesign the web for ya!

You need some images, a color scheme..most of your basics are there, you just to decide what you want it to look like...what should it feel like..what message do you want to convey to your viewers. This should all tie in visually too.

Do some surfing for other sites similar to your's get some ideas, then mess around with some designs.

 

[Guest]

"Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist."

What if you open the index page | Save.As | menu.htm
Then create a new page with 1 nice photo small enough to open fast and one
catch phrase with a menu | Click | menu.htm

This site is not professional but mostly an info site but the index is
colorful and loads fast and is diff than a generic white page;
http://military.accaw.org

And you may want to test with most of your font in size 10.
Or the footer in size 8 and centered.

You may want to test by adding a colorful photo on each page.

You will find much more info at:

=======================================
Regards,
Gary 'Doc' Adams
Louisiana @ 314.479.8201
(e-mail address removed)
~ Read to Learn - Write to Think ~
=======================================

 

[Robert]

Hi Doug, I think I would eliminate all the Text dialog you have on the intro
page. Since is is all duplicated on the link pages in the menu.... Keep the
Menu on the right. change the color from Yellow to a more subtle color sky
blue maybe.... and put a very nice French country side picture as your
background to on your intro page to complement the menu color.... just my 2
cents worth

 

[MikeR]

The yellow doesn't show in FireFox except as a VERY thin line left and right of
the buttons, but I don't know how to fix it and still use the FP hover stuff. It
could do with a little prettyness, but it's really clean, so I wouldn't tart it up
too much. The icon is a nice touch.
MikeR