Hey, man that's some harsh criticism. And I hate to say it but I kind of have to agree with them to some degree. I can't give you any specifics, but I can say the best advice I've seen posted here was the advice of screw3d regarding fonts (She just taught me something too!). I'm also not a fan to the "Vegas-style neon sign" animated text, and graphics, but that's an opinion.
I'd be more concerned with the fact that if you take a step back and look at it, it doesn't look(to the eyes) like you had any real over-riding "theme" in terms of colors, layout, ect. I'm going to assume that this is one of your first websites, if not the first. You've probably just learned a lot of stuff in a short period of time. Technically it seems fairly solid, but when you get a visitor to your site you want their attention/eyes to focus on one thing. Keeping periphery information subdued is important. This is where color schemes, layout, animation and framing, not "frames" but framing in the sense of outlining what information is truly important. Try to keep the information being given to the visitor down to 1 type of information per "page".
For example If I go to check my email I want all the information on that page to pertain to my inbox. If I go to a news site I want all info on that from page to pertain to the articles available, and when I click on an article I want all info on the main part of the article's page to pertain to that article.
When we hit a shopping site. The first page should be
Main Categories: (Housewares | Computers | Cat Food)
sub category: (PC's | Laptops | PDA's)
product: (P4 512MB RAM | A64 1GB RAM | iMac C2Duo 1 GB RAM)
product info: (Info about the manufacturer | Video Memory | Ect.)
Let's look at your from page for instance. We have:
Title Block White Background
Blue text
Animated .gif of a different font & color
|
v
Some random pictures
Same white background
|
v
3 Column Table
Same white background
News Scroller
Grey Text
Blue Text
Grey, and Blue Text
Black Text
Black text with Green Background
Blue Italicized Text
All text is of a different size/color/ect. no uniformity at all
By my count there's 18 ? 20 different types of text
On the page. Between Size/Bolding/Italicizing/Color/Background
There is a lot of confusion on the page. We can't start with any one area. So lets start by figuring out where the eye is drawn too once the page is loaded... well it's kind of drawn everywhere, because there's a LOT of movement. So unless important information is involved with the movement lets get rid of it (Like the animated .gifs) or throw it off to the far lower right of the page because that's the last part of the page our eyes scan. Like the news scroller I personally would get rid of this all together, but that's just me. I can see why you would want it in there, but it should be moved.
So now we have only 1 moving element on the page, the news scroller, and we still have:
Title Block White Background
Blue text
|
v
Some random pictures
Same white background
|
v
3 Column Table
Same white background
News Scroller
Grey Text
Blue Text
Grey, and Blue Text
Black Text
Blue Italicized Text
All text is of a different size/color/ect. no uniformity at all
We're now down to about 16 ? 18 different types of text
On the page. Between Size/Bolding/Italicizing/Color/Background
Our eyes are pretty cool we have high detail in the center of our vision, and low detail, motion sensitive vision on the peripheries, this makes ?busy? stuff easy to ignore and ?empty? stuff more drawing to the eye. So we want the busy stuff, like menu bars for instance on the ?Borders? great we got that part right! The pictures however ?push? the eyes away from the center of the page, which ironically is where your brain wants them to look. So, honestly, the best thing to do is get them out of there. Put them in the ?Photo Gallery? that's what it's there for. What does the parking lot have to do with important ?Etz Chaim Sephardic Congregation? events? OK so now we have...
Title Block White Background
Blue text
|
v
3 Column Table
Same white background
News Scroller
Grey Text
Blue Text
Grey, and Blue Text
Black Text
Blue Italicized Text
All text is of a different size/color/ect. no uniformity at all
We're still at about 16 ? 18 different types of text
On the page. Between Size/Bolding/Italicizing/Color/Background
OK Great... ish now our brain wants to look at the Important stuff the table in the middle of the page, but what part of the table to look at?
The brain says ?The middle table.?
the eyes say ?No friggan way! Look at all the cool colors, patterns, shapes, and movement going on here! Let's look at it all at once, like we would a field of grass, and wildflowers! With millions of individual blades, with just as many hues of brown, green, blue and yellow.?
This is a problem... so let's try to keep the various fonts down to 3 or 4 on the whole page right now there's like 12 or 13 just in this one table. If you're keeping the news scroller in fine but we want the page to ?framed? accordingly
_H_
| x |
_F_
_H_ = Header ?framing?
| = border ?framing?
x = ?meat? of the page
_F_ = Footer
the right border, or the left border are optional.
The footer is optional
So we want to get rid of either ?Warm, Friendly, Traditional? or ?Shabbat times for Indianapolis, IN 46260?... I'd say ?Shabbat times for Indianapolis, IN 46260? Probably belongs on the menu bar. That eliminates 7 different text types in one fell swoop! And now we have only 6 left in the table itself. And we're now laid out so it's set up in the standard fashion, everyone has grown accustomed to reading in. So lets get the coloring/size/bolding/italicizing ect. Of the page text down to 3 or 4 types.
1 for the title block
1 for regular info
1 for important info
1 for whatever... maybe extraneous info, or something else you want
This way the visitor can quickly scan the list of items in the important text type, and decide which ones interest them, and then they can drill down further by reading the details in the regular text type. This also allows them to ignore the ?Title Block type? and/or the ?Whatever Type?
OK so lets talk coloring...
_H_
| x |
_F_
_H_ = Header ?Darker?
| = Border ?Dark or Darker?
x = ?meat? ?Lighter?
_F_ = Footer ?Darker or Darkest?
The lighter the color the more drawn the eye is to it, I'm going to go out on a limb here and I'm going to say that very few people are going to type ?etzchaimindy.org? into their browsers by accident, so the title block doesn't need a lot of attention. The borders should be darker than the body because we want to ?highlight? the body, after all that's where all the important stuff is right? Obviously the footer(if you even use one) should be darker than the body as well. Again the whole point is to push the eye to the center of the page by making it the path of least resistance.
What colors should you choose... that I can't help you on I'll trust your judgment on it. I personally am terrible with color schemes, and frequently deffer my choices to a member of the fairer sex. Ask your girlfriend, or your sister, or whatever. I know it's sexist, but most guys suck at color schemes.
Good luck,
-manno
, but I'm gonna be harsh anyway.
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