I already submitted my website for review here and got some good responses.
I followed most of the tips I got here, and I'd be very glad to get some new tips about the lay-out, but also about the performance.
I recently added a javascript menu, making it very easy to go to a specific page, dedicated to a distillery. As distilleries are the topic of the site, and as there are many of them in Scotland, my menu is rather long (there are about 100 items).
I tested the site on several PC's, and most of them seem to give no problem (after the very fist caching of the buttons...). However, on my own PC Internet Explorer 6 , SP2 seems to "hang" after a few pages, and the only way to go further is to Stop and resume the communication again.
I have also tested it with Mozilla. Mozilla gives just no problem, it is very fast, and everything looks OK. The only problem is that Mozilla does not seem to support CSS styles and just ignores the layout of the page...
Does anybody have a suggestion? I'd like to keep the menu.... It is designed with Fireworks 2004.

address of the English version:
http://www.whisky-distilleries.info/index_EN.shtml

Thank you for any comment and suggestion

Hi! i've tested with IE 6 and netscape 7.1 and works OK. It's a real huge page, so don't espect to loads fast. But te site is really great. Excellent content, and so interesting. In my opinion&taste the site don't look very profesional, but contents are amazing. This is the most important thing.
You must improve your SEO work, it isn't so good as the contents. I'will learn a lot with your site!

Have a nice day!

__________________
Guillermo Manzi
www.northwind.com.ar - Northwind Posicionamiento web seo

Thank you very much for having checked my site, gsmanzi.
You are completely right, I'm not a professional in website buildings, and I tried to put the accent on the content of it rather than on other important aspects.
As I still have lots of content to add on it, I guess I'll do some SEO work later on. I agree it has to be done. I recently lost one point in the Google PageRank (from 4 to 3), and I do not really understand why... I'll have to find out what happened. Because I also suddenly got less visitors since nearly one week...
Anyway, I'm happy you liked the content, and I hope you will come back often. It contains about 160 pages (in 2 languages, so a total of 320) and it still is in development.
I understand from your comment that the problem could be in my own settings of IE6...

Have a nice day too.

Don't worry about Google, there's happends very strange events such "google dance", "sand box effect", "Florida dance" that many sites looses too much. If only lost 1 point and don't lost any income link, probabily it's only a different data center and not have update your site yet. Those strange events get mad some SEO experts!!!
And be sure, your site was added to my favourites.
Have a nice day!

__________________
Guillermo Manzi
www.northwind.com.ar - Northwind Posicionamiento web seo

Some of your pages are very long and require lot of scrolling down. The pictures really weigh down the pages and make for very slow loading time. You could break them up fairly easily think.

I don't care for the pop-out menus (not just yours - I don't care for them because I'm forever clicking the wrong link, or over shooting the target by moving the mouse a tad too much one way or the other. Darn cookie crumbs on the mouse pad!)

Another thing about mouse over menus is that they aren't easy to use if you don't use a mouse, and ADA accessibility is an issue more and more these days.

Tab through your site - it's an intersting exercise. If you can reset tabbing order perhaps you should. The mouse is all over the map -literally.

My screen settings are 1024 x 768 and your page truncates on the right hand side and makes me side scroll to view the colored buttons there.

I have an idea, maybe you could place those buttons horizontally along the bottom (or top) of shorter pages. You've got a very educational and well thought about site. Shorter pages would make more pages but in the long run it will be easier to navigate, I think.
I did it with most of my pages and people seem to appreciate it.

Pat

http://www.papersnowflakes.com

Thank you Snowflakegirl for your comments.
The length of my pages is one of my dilemmas.
On the one hand it could facilitate navigation, but on the other hand it would multiply the number of pages.
The structure of each page is the same: history and comments about the distillery (some of them are more important than others) followed by a discussion about the bottlings of the distillery. For some of them there is just one, for others, more than 10.
So cutting systematically each page would really multiply the number of pages, oblige the visitor to click somewhere in order to get the bottling info.
My experience is that the visitors do not care about the length of some pages, as they are pleased to see in just one shot the bottlings. This is the information they want to see. I'm not sure they would click "blindly" just to check if there are more bottles.
Anyway, my problem is that my Internet Explorer hangs after the 4th of 5th page, since I added the menu aat the loading of the page. If I multiply the pages, I'll multiply the hang situations....
I fully agree with you that I could optimize the pages in order to be shown properly on a 1024 x 768. I already done some efforts in that direction, but apparently not enough.
I used to use a single table for my menu on the right, and this has unexpected results sometimes on the display. This is one of the reasons why I changed it.
I do not really like the horizontal bar, as this will not improve the readibility, and it would look like a big bloc of buttons... The maintenance of the menu would also be much more difficult.
You are right also when you say mice are not always as nice... But here again, my site is an information site, and only the selection of (long) pages happens with the mouse. No need to keep mousing all the time.

I'll continue to improve the quality of the layout (but my first concern at the moment is the improvement of the content).

Thank you very much for your contribution and the efforts you made in order to help me.


http://www.whisky-distilleries.info/index_EN.shtml

First of all, thanks to everybody who helped me finding out the problem of www.whisky-distilleries.info
I applied some of the SEO techniques and the result is quite better now.
For instance, my site is now number 3 on Google.fr for the keyword "whisky", which is very good I guess.
On Google.com, it appears on the ninth page, which is not too good.
The pagerank has not yet been changed (I imagine this will happen soon, as I see the Google bots often (weekly) on my pages). I used to have 4/10 for my Fench pages. I do not really remember the pagerank for my English pages.
The ranking has fallen down to 2/10 for French, and 1/10 for the ENglish onces. This could explain the difference between google.fr and goole.com
My index page however has kept 4/10.

Here is now my new problem

My site is found easily on words contained in the title of the page or the name of the URL. So for instance, the words whisky, distillery, in combination with the name of a distillery gives very good results. But the rest of the page contents does not seem to be found anymore...
If I take a word string randomly on one of my pages, Google does not find my site anymore.
Example: "Legal distillation of whisky is rather recent" is one of the first sentences on the page http://www.whisky-distilleries.info/Histoire_EN.shtml, and typing this sentence Google does not find my page. Google finds lots of other pages, but not mine.

It looks like Google does not index the whole page. If I look on "site:www.whisky-distilleries.info", I see all my 400 pages are indexed. As all my pages are build with same kind of templates, the first lines are the same for nearly all the pages. Indexing seems to begin with the DHTML code contained in my navigation bars, and then, nothing else....
It really looks like Google stops after reading this buttons....
There must be something in my navigation bars which helds Google from indexing further...
My navigation bars are generated by Fireworks MX2004, and are put on the pages as Server Side Includes.
As Fireworks generates a complete html page, I have to suppress the <html>, <head>, </head>, tags. However, I left the <body ..> tag as this tag is also used for the onLoad instruction for the gif images.

Does anybody hav an idea on what is happening?
I'm searching the bug since days now, and just cannot find it...

Thanks a lot