I'd really appreciate some input re: our site. I tried to do the steps mentioned in the Tips Before Submitting Your Site but found that being technicaly challenged as I am I didn't understand what the report was telling me! If you could speak to me in low tech words I might be able to implement your recommendations.

Thank you in advance for any insight and suggestions you can offer.

Marty Hollingsworth

First, the good: I like your logo and the image of cookies.

Now, the bad: your homepage is difficult to navigate, looks confusing, and is too wide.

People don't have time to learn different navigation systems for each website, so you have to stick to one of the old standards: left nav bar, top nav bar, or, less common but still kosher, right nav bar. If you have only a few links on the homepage, you can just list them on the page, but you have a TON of links on your homepage.

In fact, even after you've gotten some navbars, you should move at least some of the content, links included, onto other pages. The goal is to get the entire homepage to fit into one 800X600 page view, or at least to make it make logical sense if only that much were showing...that is, put the most important stuff on top so it shows up in a 800X600 page view, and only put extra details toward the bottom for the few people who will scroll down.

Also, the page is too wide; the right edge got clipped off in my monitor, and I'm not even using a laptop. No horizontal scrolling is a golden rule of web dev.

A cheap and dirty way to design a page is just to look at how your competitors are doing it, and do something similar. They're making their pages like that because it works.

Best of luck...hope I didn't sound too harsh...if you don't believe me, just try out the design with Adwords and see what the conversion rate is like once they're on the site. I frankly doubt it would be enough to break even. Too many people would get lost and hit the back button.

Again, best of luck.

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Thanks for the input. I'll try to implement some of your suggestions right away. I had no idea about the width of the page...looked at it on two monitors and it fit, so thought all was OK. Thanks again for the suggestions.

Marty