My site is www.mccarthys.ca. It is a family based site where information about the family is posted and most important pictures of friends and relations. The various members and those who have connections with the site are often sending us material to be up-loaded. I am also about the alter the site with cascading pages. We shall see if that works. Positive or negative comments are welcome. Especially about loadability. I will do the same for you.

Mike

Being a family site specifically for family use you can pretty much do anything you want. I am on a T-3 and there was absolutely no lag in loading your pages.

A few things I would suggest:

1) Remove you frames and go with static pages. If your concern with the navigation is making changes to only one page as apposed to several, you can create an include in either .asp or .php depending on your server type and still use only one page for your navigation.

2) I would also suggest keeping your color palette to a minimum. Some of the color combinations created with the navigation and content pages are, shall I say, not too easy on the eyes. I would keep it down to three colors, one for navigation, one for main pages, and a slightly off color for special pages. But use a color wheel or online color selector to pick your colors so you stay within the same color range.

3) Whether you stay with frames or lose them, I would suggest adding a header element to the pages so people remember where they are. Aside from the main page, I would have no idea where I was.

4) Put a home page link on all content pages (if you stay with frames) this way if someone bookmarks an internal page or if a search engine spiders your site and lists content pages in the search, people will have a way to get to the home page thus being able to see the navigation.

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Is it really important people find it in a search engine? I think it's fine as is due to it's theme. If it were a business I would suggest pastels and not so many images with no frames and description and keywords metatags. Otherwise it's good, I don't know why you'd want to nitpick it.

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I think it might depend on what sort of internet access your family has. I'm in a rural area south of Ottawa where the only option is a 56K dialup (and actual connection speed is often lower than that) - for me, the page loads quite slowly with 4 large graphcs and two smaller ones.

For a family site, that's only an issue if family members likely to access the site don't have high-speed access. If that's an issue, then it's generally better to either use "thumbnails" where one clicks to see a larger photo, or to break up the pages so that there isn't more than one large graphic per page.

Other than that, as the others have said, it seems fine to me as a family site - the navigation is clear and straightforward and the layout is quite clean.

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