For months, I have wanted to submit my site for your review, but I was afraid - too much of a "newbie." I'm still a newbie - the site has only been up since last fall and I never even heard of "html" prior to last summer. However, I've been religiously reading the posts to this site for help. And, I can say that reading your posts have dramatically improved my site and some of my pages are rating at near the top of the search engines. Thanks to all of you with your feedback!

In the meantime, the size of the site just gets bigger and bigger and I know that there are more improvements that I can make. I figure if I don't ask for help now, it just might be insurmountable soon.

I am not a web designer, but rather a historian, writer, and photographer. Unfortunately, I have a "real" job that I would like to make go away soon and this site is my goal to make that happen.

The site is an e-commerce site with limited exclusive products (to support the expenses of the site.) However, my goal is the content of the site; e.g. research, travel, photos, etc. I'm looking for any feedback that might help me meet my goal. If this is more product, ok; if design tips, help me; if something I haven't thought of -- even better!

Anything that you can provide, I would really appreciate!!

Thanks so much!

Kathy Weiser
www.legendsofamerica.com
kathy@legendsofamerica.com

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Legends of America is a travel site for the Nostalgic and Historic minded. Focusing on the American West this content rich site features ghost towns, outlaws, local lore, historic people, and even a ghost story or two. http://legendsofamerica.com

Overall: It's a great site with wonderful content. Seems well organised and is easy to get around. Has great potentials to being something a lot more.

Quibbles:

* Inconsistent color schemes. You should consider setting a set standard colors. Right now the background changes from the textured parchment to white. A little disconcerting and it really helps to use a color theme to tie everything together.

* Alignments. A little bit of tidying up would help enhance the overall appearance of the site. For esample the menu links are right up against the margin - give it a little breathing space. Add some cellpadding to shift it away from the edge.

* Fuzzy pictures. A few of the photos are showing degration from too much compression. Might want to ease off that a little.

* Black picture borders. I would lose these, they don't really help. The other thing is that I kept clicking on the photo to get a bigger, close viewing of the wonderful buildings. It would be a nice additional touch if you could incorporate it.

* Layout. Create a set of formatting rules and stick to it. It would help the site to give it a tighter, more uniform look. The photos, especially since they are wonderful, would be helped by a more structured presentation. Perhaps making them the same size (more or less) and using tables to constrain their position on the page will help.

* Banners. Some of these appear right under the boxed titles (as on the Vintage Photo page). Looks "forced". If you must have them consider putting them inside the title box.

Other Suggestions:

* Get a logo made and start "branding" your site. It will help make it easier to market and help retain customer loyalty

* Standardize your font selection.

* Design your pages like a "Coffee Table" hard cover. A stylish "professional" approach will really help the excellent site contents really shine.

* If you are selling products, it helps to have links to your shop items from pages which bears relevance to the items. So for example, on one (or more) of your Ghost Town pages include a hint/link to a relevant video that you are selling. Don't be shy to present your products.

Really great contents. I've bookmarked your site and will be sure to give it a thorough read when I next get the chance.

A wonderful site with lots and lots of fascinating stuff! I've bookmarked it as well so I can wander thru at leisure.

Trackdancer said "* Fuzzy pictures. A few of the photos are showing degration from too much compression. Might want to ease off that a little".

I agree completely. I checked a few pictures to see what was really going on and find that the resolution on some of the pix is as high as 1100, (many are 300 or more).This means probably you were optimizing a pic with a very high DPI, and to reach a reasonable size you then had to massively reduce the quality.

On the web you'll find that 72 to 100 DPI is plenty, anything more than that is wasted space. I find it best to first reduce the DPI of the picture and then to make it the size I want. Then I optimize as JPG (or GIF - whichever is most appropriate). During the optimization I decide how much quality I can sacrifice vs. finished file size and then make my choice. Uleads "Smart Saver Pro" is great for this, but most graphic programs (I use Corel) have an "Optimize for Web" function built in. Perhaps then I'll find I must reduce the original size further to use a picture without degrading it too much. For most of the pix that I've seen on your site to this point, I would say that nearly all of them could be optimized well without much degredation (starting from the original good quality pic) and still not be larger than 10 to 12K or so for the largest when you're done.

I see also that some pix (Cachela Poudre River for ex.) are reduced in size in the HTML but the picture itself was not reduced, e.g. the pic is 400 px h. but on the page it is 239 px h. This doesn't save file size. Do all your work on the pix before they go on the page.

I would love to see the pix in better quality (I thought the "Red Bandana Mine" pic was a watercolor at first because the quality is so degraded). I'm looking forward to taking the time to explore the site thoroughly. I already feel nostalgic for the west. I've been living in Germany for 8 years now and although I lived in NY, I had a house in Scottsdale as well and from there went on many an exploration of the surrounding land to see historic sites or natural wonders.

I hope this helps. It's a really nice site!
Karen

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I love your website and have bookmarked it to return when time permits. I want to read every single page!

I agree with Trackdancer's comments. He has made some very good suggestions.

A bit about fuzzy photos:

Some months back, I was forced to learn digital photography of jewelry, which was quite a task for someone who only knew how to push one button on a camera. I did a lot of research via the internet and learned a lot more than I had ever expected.

After much newly-acquired sound advice, I learned to save my photos in .tif format, and then reduce them to whatever size was needed, before converting them to any other format. In that way, you can maintain the quality of your photos.

Saving/scanning them first in .jpg and then reducing them will really mess them up. I wouldn't change the dpi until you get them reduced to the physical size you want to use on your web page. You can see the end results of what I accomplished in the pop-ups of my necklaces on my website.

Best of luck with your website. It is really a winner!

Nanci
Nanci's Necklaces
www.neckwares.com

I think this site is a testament to the fact that Content Is King. Everyone's comments have been overall positive, and I just had to go in and click through a few sections to look and read. Especially Central City Colorado since I'd been there.

So A+ on the content - excellent job.

My input on photos on the web:

* Definitely optimize all the images as people have been discussing. A computer monitor CANNOT display anything more than 72dpi, so you waste space if you try to display an image with a higher resolution.

* If you're using Photoshop/Imageready to optimize images, you can use the crop tool to crop AND reduce resolution to any size all at the same time. So if you wanted all your images to be 225x175 @ 72dpi it's easy to do.

* After you've cropped/sized your images in your graphics program, then it's time to optimize it. Use a program that allows you to preview different compression settings so you can choose the smallest file size with the best quality.

* I personally like the black borders, but I would prefer a 1 pixel to 2 pixel.

* Some photos have captions and some don't. I'd like to see some more consistency in this, as the ones with captions are very interesting.

Again, great site with content alone. Easy to navigate; easy to read; simple, clean layout. Just tidy up a little and get your images spruced up and you're in great shape!

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-BW
Bozell Interactive / Web Design and Development / http://www.bozell.com/

Thanks everyone!! I truly appreciate your suggestions. I know your comments will help me in making my website even better! I knew I had a picture problem -- to such an extent that some of my originals have been ruined. I will do some shopping to see what kind of a photo program I should invest in and take a crash course -- especially since this is such an intregal part of my site. I will also work in the other suggestions. I really like the idea of a "tight" uniform look. I'm so glad I asked for advice now rather than waiting, as the number of pages has grown so much it will take some time to incorporate the changes.

I have also been working on a logo. When I get that done, I'll post it here too for a little more of your excellent advice.

Lastly, thanks SO much for your comments regarding the content. This is where my heart is. Now, if I can just get the left brain working on the technical aspects I'll be much more confident.

Thanks again and good luck to all!!

Kathy Weiser
www.legendsofamerica.com
kathy@legendsofamerica

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Legends of America is a travel site for the Nostalgic and Historic minded. Focusing on the American West this content rich site features ghost towns, outlaws, local lore, historic people, and even a ghost story or two. http://legendsofamerica.com

not bad for a 'newbie' ;)

seriously, though, very clean, easy to read. lots of text for the search engines, etc.

the only thing i would ask is if you have a long term plan for all the content. that is, it seems you're doing them all by hand now, which is fine. are you planning on having hundreds of pages? thousands?

if so, i'd suggest looking into some kind of CMS or Blog software to make updates and archiving easier.

there are some search engine tweaks you could probably make too (heading tags, looking at filenames, etc.), but overall you're off to a very, very good start.

congrats and good luck.

lemme know if you have any specific questions and i'll try to help.

=kpaul

i just wanted to second this. you have a great domain name. a logo/slogo would help market it more.

-kpaul

Great site. Nice style and color. The content is excellent. Other than the few search engine tweaks as mentioned earlier. There is not much to critique on this site. If this is truly a newbie, than some experienced designers should take note.

Congrats!
Worth bookmarking.(I love the Old West).

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