Hi guys,
i need your help on whether to roll out my new design across the whole of my site, If you think that the new design is an improvement can you please let me know so that I can decide!

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NEW DESIGN
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OLD DESIGN
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Please can you tell me which you think is better and maybe why if you have time!
Thank you all so much,
Craig

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www.ecampsite.co.uk

I like the non-mystery-meat navigation on the new one. If you can just fix the weird border/multiple-line left side menu thing on 800x600, go with it.

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Toronto Web Design | Search Engine Friendly, Standards-Compliant Layouts | Walk on my Path (my blog)

cheers adam,
i appreciate your comments and also value them. Ill get back and let you know what happens soon!
Thanks again

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www.ecampsite.co.uk

Hi again,

I've just added a background to the middle, modified the left column so that the nav doesnt go across 2 lines, and put an image next to the navigation to draw the visitors eye towards that. Do these make it look any better???

Cheers

Craig

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www.ecampsite.co.uk

Much better. I like that rounded rectangle thing in the middle too, although the screws holding it down don't look quite right.

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Toronto Web Design | Search Engine Friendly, Standards-Compliant Layouts | Walk on my Path (my blog)

very interesting site - i love the simplicity about it:) good stuff!!!

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Hello Craig,

Your first page (index2.html) has improved a lot since I first saw it a couple of weeks ago. However, there are still quite a lot of things to sort out before I would consider it ready to go public.

Viewing in Firefox, at 800x600 the green box in the middle overlaps the navigation at left, almost in line with the 'h' of Camp Search, covering the ends of Featured Campsi... and Advertise your Cam..... and the corner of the search box. The top of the green box is also missing. At 1024x768 the green box is very close to the last letter of Advertise Your Campsite. At 1280x1024 it all looks very sp a ce d out and your inner pages don't work well at that size.

If it were mine I wouldn't risk an elastic site and would fix it at 760px width, fixed centrally with CSS.

Contrary to your claim, index2 neither validates for HTML or CSS. The page (as the others) also fails the Section 508 accessibility test at http://www.contentquality.com

The campsite index page (http://www.ecampsite.co.uk/campsitesindex.php) contains 344 HTML errors that you should address. At 1280x1024 on that page the over-bearing torpedo shapes are repeated at about 9/10ths of their length and it doesn't look good. I think I'd replace these with horizontal rules or different coloured table rows. The latter would best fit your scheme but tone down the colour a bit.

I would emphasise your inner pages' navigation too, make the text bolder (bigger) and encase it with a coloured band. As it is, it looks weak and insignificant. The navigation should draw attention to itself. If you did this you wouldn't need to use the clumsy and contrived arrows to signify what page we're looking at, you'd just use a diffent font or background colour. After all, that's what people expect. Having said that, I'm all for different ways of doing things but in this instance I don't think this is user-friendly. I'd also put the 'Home' link on the extreme left where users expect it and link the logo to the homepage too.

In IE your camp-facility symbols pop-up an ALT message describing what they are. The decent browsers like Firefox (100 million downloads!) Opera and Netscape etc. don't show anything on mouse-over. To achieve the same effect in the best browsers you should also add TITLE tags to the images.

You also have too many bad links to go public;

http://www.ecampsite.co.uk/featured.html doesn't exist
http://www.ecampsite.co.uk/square5.jpg doesn't exist
http://www.ecampsite.co.uk/square4.jpg doesn't exist
http://www.ecampsite.co.uk/square6.jpg doesn't exist

Fix the errors and design quirks and your site will be ready for the roughest ride of all! Don't forget to add META tags throughout!!

Good Luck

Thank you for all your comments, I have taken a lot on board and I hope you like the (very nearly) finished product!

www.ecampsite.co.uk

I especially like the search box on my site! That took some work, but I got there. I like the look and feel of my site now! How about you, do you think it is an improvement or a waste of time??
Cheers
Craig

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www.ecampsite.co.uk