The Sons of Norway Vennekretsen Lodge of Atlanta, Georgia is one of the more recent fraternal organizations being formed in early 2008. Three members of the lodge made initial websites and this one represents the one chosen. Launching on December 12, 2008 the website quickly became a leader among the Sons of Norway lodge websites across the United States and Canada. It was created on a volunteer basis as the lodge had no budget allocated for the website.

It would be interesting to get an unbiased opinion of the website at w w w . vennekretsen . c o m


Thank you.

I would have used .org instead of .com as .org implies/connotes a non-profit organization.

All the images need to be replaced with higher-quality, non-stock photos.

Tons of content. That is great.

Simplistic design is easier to navigate, but has a beginner's look to it.

All in all, a very good start.

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Dave Barnes
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I think Dave is right. .org might look better.

In all it is a nice site, easy to use, lots of content.

Didn't see one, but do you have a link to an English/Norwegian on line translator? Or perhaps a basic on line Norwegian language course?

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I agree, nice site, you should be proud of accomplishing this with no budget. Personally, I'd style the <a> links to be a different color than that bright blue. That shade of blue is typically a "default" color for links, and looks amateurish to my eyes now in a Web 2.0 world. Once clicked, the links turn bright pink, which I think looks odd as well. I also think that Contact US should be Contact Us, (no capital S).

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It's a good designed site!! But don't understand why does the site background become blue for a moment after menu tab pressing.

Thanks for the feedback - I'll try to respond and/or incorporate your suggestions.

Regarding colors of the links - it matches the Blue in the Norwegian Flag which was important to them to have this color scheme.

I probably erred in using 72 dpi images trying to keep the size of the page as low as possible for lodge members who utilize a dial-up connection to view the pages. I could try 150 dpi images.

Overall on the site, more than 80% of the images used on the site are non-stock photos that were resized down to small 72 dpi images. They are only about a year old as an organization and the website less than two months old. I'm sure the members have thousands of photographs taken on various trips to Norway. The tough part is getting them to submit the images to us for publication. But I'm working on this.

Dave, I used a heavily modified template in order to reduce time - the site was ramped up and launched in one weekend and I decided to focus on increasing my time and effort in adding content versus spending too much time with the look and feel. Sorry it looks like it was created by an amateur. They didn't offer a lot of guidance in the design process except that they wanted the colors of the Norwegian flag used in the overall theme. I was torn in just how much to give away. I opted for a standards compliant site that looked okay and was very search-engine friendly. I can work on the look and feel as it is CSS based. Today the pits, tomorrow the wrinkles.

Martin, Great idea for the translator - I'll add that to the list for the next batch of updates.

Austin, thanks for letting me know about the visited link color - I thought that I used the default purple so I'll have to revisit that.

andr113: The blue background on the body tag apparently shows on slower connections. I could use a white background on the body tag but I'll leave that as is for the time being and bring it up at one of the next meetings to see what the rest of the officers of the lodge think.

Thanks again for your feedback. I appreciate it very much.

Forgot one item the org vs com TLD. The HQ Sons of Norway along with the majority of the 400 lodges use com over org so com TLD was used in order to follow the leader in this case.