Please review my sites:
www.auxiliary-police.org
www.auxiliary-police.org/nassau
www.auxiliary-police.org/clarkstown
www.ovpoa.org
Let me know what you would do if it was your site.
Let me know what you like & don't like & why.

Thank You,
Glenn Kearney
President & Webmaster
NYSAAP


<Mod edit to comply with Site Review Rule #1 - Syren>

Hello Glenn

If I were you I'd edit this post so only one site is mentioned, then post each of the others in a separate thread.

You haven't done anything wrong, so I'm not complaining. It's just that I for one will have to put off giving a full reply because doing four sites will take a long time.

If you post four separately in this case you are likely to get more and quicker responses :)

__________________
Sualdam

Hi Glenn,

Went through the list of sites and the above is the most professional looking.

It made me feel like I as reading something that somebody had made the time and the effort to put some information across.

The rest of the sites are good in the fact that the information is there but you just need to work on the presentation and navigation.

A lot of information is available that could be put onto separate pages, which would make it easier for people to find what they are looking for.

You have some good graphics which unfortunately, maybe due to optimisation do not do your sites justice (not a pun!) Tweak your site so that you would feel that you wanted to volunteer with a (amateur) yet professionally minded organisation.

I admire the concept of the site and what you are trying to achieve, so go for it.

__________________
Keimos - Always learning something new each day
www.keimos.co.uk , www.keimos.net , www.selfpacedit.co.uk

On this site...

First of all I found the music very annoying on the homepage. As with most things it is a personal thing, of course, but it is generally considered that background music is nuisance. At the very least people whould be able to turn it off. If nothing else, the music file is probably very large and will slow things down for dialup users.

You have the font switching between Arial and Times. It is best to not mix fonts without a good reason. I'd suggest sticking with Arial.

Where you have your 'For an Application' link it was interesting that you'd used a graphic for that rather than straight text. It is just a text image after all, and it is in Times. Compare this, at 3kb with the few bytes text would involved and you could save a little extra.

As keimos pointed out, the page is a bit long. I guess it would be about 12 screens long on an 800x600 display. Your links especially are crying out for a page of their own.

Some of the link images are quite big - both in terms of filesize and physical dimensions. I totalled all the images at a shade under 200kb - which would take nearly a full minute for some dialup connections. At to that your music loop and people may not stick around, and that'd be a shame because you have a lot of useful stuff to tell them.

Because you have a lot of different things to say, they'd be great if they were on different pages.

And any link that goes outside your site would also be better if it were in a separate window - that way people don't leave, and they can easily come back.

It is definitely a good start.

__________________
Sualdam

This one looks very nice because the text is all the same and it is well spaced out.

I'd make the same comment about the sound loop as for the other site - even on broadband it took a good few seconds to load.

And the same comment also about the link images and the length of the page (although it isn't as big as the other site).

Some of the images are distorted. This is possibly because you only had a small image you works with, or because of the compression used, or perhaps a combination of both. I'd bet you could get hold of a good sized masetr of all of those and then work from there - you should easily manage to get a high-quality badge image with clean text/definition.

Although it doesn't take up much bandwidth (i.e. it is small), you've used a GIF image that says 'Links:'. I'd use just text - much easier to manage and quicker to download. You have a couple of these.

The National Hurricane animated GIF is 126kb. That is 30 seconds of download on its own. As a rule of thumb, if an animated GIF doesn't add anything, don't use it. They tend to be quite large.

__________________
Sualdam

This one's fairly straightforward.

My only comment would be to use Arial font to keep with the look of your other sites. And perhaps break it into a couple of paragraphs to make it easier to read.

__________________
Sualdam

This one has a completely different look.

Did you (or the same person) design and build all four of the sites?

This one looks more professional all round. That navigation would be just the sort of thing I'd recommend for the other three.

There's nothing really to say other than that it looks very nice and is in keeping with the law enforcement image (in my mind anyway).

:)

__________________
Sualdam

I'm going with Sualdam first post I would break it up into four different reviews.

__________________
Custom Website Design | Search Engine Optimization | Web Design Templates

Would be cool if you had a play and stop button which people can opt to hear or not to hear the recordings.
I have a feeling all the images used on all sites were originally smaller but now they have been stretched beyond the indended size

http://www.auxiliary-police.org/
Would be cool if you could retain original size images and then arrange them all neatly so people will be able to see it all without having to scroll so much.

This one u could replace with a smaller textual link or reduce the size coz it is so raggedy looking.

Please reduce teh white space between all those links. People will appreciate u for it:) Other than that I'd say yr site is cool. :)

__________________
http://ejrs.com/spybot | http://ejrs.com/irfanview | http://splashingtime.com