The only thing I hate about giving people website help is that there's often too much to say on certain subjects that I don't want to take the time to type... mostly because it's annoying to flip back and forth from the page to the comments I'm typing. 🙁
A person's eye naturally moves from top left to top right, then completes in a Z pattern across the page... not in a standard reading motion, but in a motion that sweeps the page and evaluates before reading begins. Keep this in mind ALWAYS when designing. The item in the upper left is the MOST important item. ALWAYS. the second most is in the upper right. ALWAYS. Then along the left side. ALWAYS.
Your picture in the upper left is BORING. it's a house. BIG DEAL. why does this matter? It's too small of a picture to tell if this is a nice house, your house, a house that is for sale, whatever. This is bad for two reasons. One, as stated before, this is the most important place on the page. I don't know what site this is, and my first reaction is to think you are trying to sell me a house or show me your house, neither of which I really care about and neither of which this picture makes me want to care about.
After I get past this image, I see about 5 inches of purely ugly caramel colored NOTHING. You've wasted valuable space with an ugly color. Why is it ugly? it clashes with the picture that my eyes just saw. I see green grass, a nice blue sky, a house I don't know anything about, and then this ugly color following it.
Move on a bit more, I see a tiny little label for the website called "The Villages". What are the Villages? I don't know, and nothing on this site makes me care. The font is boring and ugly. It's like something that my mom would make in MSWord and call a logo. The second line, because the font is so squirrly and accentuated, is barely readable. Is that "Cady Cake TC?" Is it "Lunly Loke FC?" I have to stare at it to see.
When I do figure it out, my first thought is "Retirement Village. I'm out of here." The plain-jane house that looks like my grandparent's house doesn't help.
The menu does not belong here. Usuability standards say it should be on the left side. I use top menus all the time, though. There are a few issues if you are going to do this. It must stand out from your header. Currently, it is the same nasty brown with nothing more than a 1 pixel "way overdone annoying 2003 black frame" around it. It looks like you've mastered tables, and that's great because they are the pinnacle of web design, but with CSS/DHTML prevelent, this type of menu is outdated. If you insist on making this blocky menu, you need to make the cells clickable, not the text. That pissed me off becaus the whole cell turned yellow, but I could only click the text. The labels are jammed to the left of the cells and the one for home is quite noticably smaller than the rest. It's almost like it's a label for the picture of the "home" above it, which really screws me up. Again, seperate it more from the header.
Welcome Message! WHOOPIDIE DO. That's what the home page is for. Putting a welcome message there makes every other page without that message vary in design. The body content must be the only item changing on a website or it alienates people.
I should slap you for using IFrames. Yeah, they're neat... but the ONLY and I mean ONLY reason to use iframes is when you absolutely REQUIRE that the interface for a page be a certain size on every page, but have a variance in content from page to page. Reason? A person's cursor must be in the frame for scroll wheels to work, AND it makes it look like the page really doesn't have much content, which makes me skip it. IFrames are a poor excuse for not using flash when you have a limited area and need much information. To top it off, IFrames are one of the most annoying tags because they don't work the same from browser to browser. Some browsers support them... some just started supporting them... some have stopped because they are outdated.... so just don't use them.
Currently, I have a box just over halfway down the page and an iframe that scrolls a whole half-inch, which annoys me. There's no reason for it. Aside from that, the same baby-poop brown is a horrid color to put text on for reading. off-white or a really dark grey w/ white text are the best.
The colors on your scroll bar stink. They mix with the content TOO much. That, and the track color is like a forest green which is not used in any other place on the site. The white is only used in the logo... so oddly enough, white does not go well here.
Less color is more. If everything has a color to it, I care less about the color and mostly just get annoyed. I see 4 different none-B&W colors here that don't match the picture in the upper left. 2... MAYBE 3 max. If you want more color, a gradient may work, but only change how dark a color is... don't go from like, orange to green or something.
Looking at the iFrames, I noticed the top corners are rounded, and the top corners of the main table are rounded. Why only these corners? They clash with the boxiness of the menu and the rest of the page? As a designer, I assume you used them because you found out a new trick. Stop that. All corners or none.
Please, PLEASE use lorem ipsum text when designing. Put some dummy pictures in, too. It REALLY helps define a page.
The black bar at the bottom sticks out like a sore thumb. The links don't match the titles OR the number of links, and the copyright apparently doesn't belong to anyone. For reference, always use "all design and content copyright © such and such company (start year)-(last year changed), current year. In your case, all three years are 2006, so 2006 is fine.
The background is dismal. This alone makes me think I don't want to move here. the single palm tree with a cloudy look around it makes me think "OMG, this place was just nailed by a hurricane." Thinking further, palm trees are too stereotypical of trying to sell things in Florida, and the picture at top clashes because I don't see palm trees in it. I'm not much for horticulture, but I believe that the kind of trees in the picture don't grow well close to the places where you would see palm trees like the one shown in the background because of the presence of saltwater. It makes me wonder if you are selling suburban property or beachfront property and confuses me.
I know I sound like a jerk, but I've had this stuff drilled into me for the past 4 years and it helps to be told how something makes a person feel than to just say "I don't like this"
Hope it helps, and I'll watch for updates. 🙂
