Santa Barbara - Goleta Pool League

Five years ago this was my first-ever whack at website creation. Every page was designed and coded by hand. It has come a long way, but it is still 99% html (still have to teach myself ASP, etc). There are so many pages now that need updating on a weekly basis that I had to write a custom league database application to compile the stats and auto-generate the html pages.

This site is used by a pool league of between 150-200 people.

My biggest concerns are:
1. Are the color schemes pleasing?
2. Is the site easy to navigate and read?
3. How annoying is the top advertisement bar? And is the triple-frame structure goofy looking?
4. Do other browsers have difficulty with the site? (I only have IE)
5. Just how long do all of the pictures take to download on a dial-up network?

Any good words on how to improve the site would be greatly appreciated...Thanks.

Chris

@#$@#$@#

I hate keyboards with a backspace bigger than the ALT key, heh. I also hate idiots that hit the backspace key and erase their posts. Doh.

So then, a shortened re-post review...

1. No (more later)
2. Mostly (more later)
3. Annoying for one reason (more later) and "it is very goofy" (more later)
4. Firefox is fine with it
5. More later!

More later 1: The audience is key, if you have no real desire to reach out to the search engines and say "love me!" then who cares if the frames are not very SERP friendly, fact of the matter is, frames are not a bad way to navigate, double goes on that since it sounds like a fair % of your audience has dial-up. Color scheme, eh, I have seen what people wear to play pool, most of them would look only slightly out of place golfing (I like pool, just being mean). I don't think your audience probably cares (if you ask them and they grunt or look at you funny, good possibility they are fine with how it is now).

More later 2: On annoying issues. Presuming same audience above, what they will care about most is easy and quick access to information. The home page should use text on the left, and an optimized 8-ball image, probably a GIF/JPG versus a PNG, depends on color depth you can get by with, I tried a JPG and got to 35kb (versus 190kb now) without visible problems - this presumed I would place the text - as text - on the left). Top ad, if it is paying for the site, at 150kb or so, perhaps use frame loading in a series and make the top load last? And make sure links have high contrast, blue on black is a fine song but not a very good usability strategy ("enter website" an example on home page, make it white?).

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Step 1. Frames are bad...really bad and in your context they are not even needed. They are frustrating. So dump the frames and start over with one page.

Step 2 get rid of the landing page. it is bad for SEO purposes. The information it contains can be on an updatable section of your web page.

Step 3. Pool table navigation.....acceptable though i would try and get a cleaner picture to work with.

Step 4 Don't worry about load time you are WAY under anything you need to worry about.

Step 5 if you HAVE to have an advertising banner, that's not horrible. It will do

Step 6. Navigation part 2...the click here if you don't see the navigation.....sends you back to the same page

Step 7 Lose the frames.....I know this is a repeat but for both aesthetics and seo dump them.


Color scheme is okay..on the whole if the page didn't have frames you might be looking at a B grade with the frames....well you know.

Edit: Get a picture of the sport on your front page......it sets the mood.

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Thanks for your insight. When I was originally teaching myself how to do this, frames were the only way I could think of to have the pool table navigation stay of the screen while the user scrolls a very long table, for example. I guess it doesn't have to stay on the screen. I am kind of sentimental about that navigation tool as it was my first such homemade tool, but it IS crude and needs polish. I'm afraid I'd be polishing a turd, however.

I am really not too interested with SEO for this website. This is an informational site used almost exclusively by our league members. Occasionally I'll get a phone call or an e-mail from someone who found our league through the site, but not ofetn. But that's good to know about frames and SEO. I have read in many places that frames are badly outdated, but haven't gotten around to doing it another way.

Thanks again.