The Beachside Resident is a newspaper for and by beachside residents of Central Florida. Three of us started the company about 10 months ago and are now on our 9th issue(32 pages). Advertisements are being bought every month and our audience is growing at a steady rate. I just want to get some feedback on our site even though there are some obvious areas that need work. Any suggestions will be appreciated. Also, if you like the writing and actually find some of the articles interesting, send us an email and we'll print it. Although we have several contributing writers, almost all the work is done by 3 of us who all work full time jobs(40 hours+) during the week so we are improving at the fastest rate possible, which is somewhat slow. Never the less, we are getting there. Let me know what you think.

Thanks

-Bohak

Overall layout looks okay, but I would suggest a user test. It's possible you'll find the change in header and background throws some percentage off.

In other words, try a more consistent header/masthead.

I think it's a terrific website. It looks great. It's got some excellent content. From my cursory checks it's pretty nicely crafted.

There are one or two apparant broken links. Try to get the record review for London Calling. Also there was something flaky going on with reading old "opinions" pages.

There are certainly some things I'd do differently. For example, I wouldn't rely on Flash for navigation. (It's a turn-off for search engine spiders, plus it's unreliable for your human visitors since you can't know what plug-ins they have.) Instead I'd replicate your main navigation bar with CSS. I wouldn't use image maps for anything. I'd use CSS instead of tables for formatting, and I'd use it more consistantly for font management. I'd update the copyright date in the footer.

For a little while I was homesick for Indialantic and Melbourne... but it's been a long, long time since I was a beachside resident.

Keep up the really good work!

I saw someone mention something in another post about putting a subject in every post but Im not sure what they meant.

DCrux:
I know what you mean and I agree, just kind of using an image as a placeholder till I setup a rotating banner, one that is not annoying. But in the meantime, Im gonna try and keep that area basic and non distractive. Thanks for the feedback.

CJacobson:
Thanks for reminding me of the broken links, and I'll post the London Calling review. I want to have mp3 clips to go with each article (in flash so they arent downloadable)but Im stuck on the whole converting to mp3's from CD deal.

I guess I gotta lose the flash nav if it is in fact detrimental to page ranking. My CSS skills are pretty green, so Im not sure when I'll get the time to set up styles for the whole site. But I would like to do that. If anyone would like to take on the task, let me know how much you charge and maybe we can work something out. Anything to make this site easier to manage. This company/community is very young so I would really like to set it up the right way from the beginning, but the time factor is killing me right now.

As for being homesick, I know what you mean, I grew up here but moved to Huntington Beach for 10 years, just moved back about 3 years ago. Now I miss HB, but at the same time its good to be back. I have BP doing an interview on Gary from the Scoobies for next month's issue if that brings back any memories. Im sure we have many mutual friends. Thanks for the compliments, Im glad you dug it, we're looking forward to seeing how well it does and how far it spreads. It seems to be a business that helps everyone out at the same time. Let me know if you'd like us to send out a copy.

Hope you guys have a good season this year, but then again I think Colorado always gets heaps of powder. Send us some photos and we'll print em' in the reader's gallery.

Take it easy.

-Bohak