Looking for constructive criticism...

[djwtwo]

I've just put up a web site for one of the organizations I volunteer with at:

http://www.cachalotalumni.org/

I'm reasonably happy with it (although I am planning on tweaking things a little to improve text contrast, and I have a little bit of minor tweaking here and there for IE6 since I'm a Mac guy.)

Any comments are welcome!

[blade83]

Viewed with: Mozilla Firefox 0.9, Mac OS X

I think your site is very well done, layed out quite nicely. The colors are perfect for a camp type website, very earthy.

There are a few things I would change though:

1. The color of your links is too similar to the background color of your website. I might try making the links the same color as the red line that borders the bottom of the heading. They would be much easier to distinguish from the rest of the page.

2. On your landing page, you have two "news" type boxes on the right-hand side. I would make the background color of the text-containing portion of those boxes a bit lighter, again to make them stand out a bit more.

Otherwise, with regard to layout, standards compliance (you're close, an error with one heading tag on your landing page invalidates your code -- http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A//www.cachalotalumni.org/ ), and ease of navigation, I give you an A :]

[YvetteKuhns]

Your header banner "blinks" when moused over and I even see the hourglass next to the cursor as this happens. It is not necessary. Most people will not download a font just to view one webpage, especially when there are similar fonts to use.

The gallery has beautiful pictures. The images are valigned to top, but the text would look better valigned to bottom and aligned to the left. The forum uses the same color scheme and design as the website. I always mention this because it helps people remember that they are still on your website! ;)

I like the hiking boots footprints along the left. The web design looks nice and is easy to read and navigate. I clicked the link to the actual Camp website which looks very different. The link should open in a new window, because it links to another website and will help visitors get back to your website if desired. Maybe you can redesign that site to match yours! :D

[djwtwo]

blade83 hit on the text contrast issue I referred to -- I was considering switching to a darker olive color for them, but the red isn't a bad idea, either.

The header issue that Yvette mentions is the IE issue I think I have a solution for (IE never caches some background images in CSS) and I suspect it's related to the one validation failure blade83 mentioned. The same is true of the long-description text blocks in the gallery -- in IE they appear beneath the thumbs because fixed positioning isn't supported. In other browsers, those descriptions appear in the "whitespace" to the right when you hover on a thumb. That design is likely to change, anyway, as I'm planning on making the gallery portions more dynamic (and data-base driven.)

I never really expected people to download the one font. :D The "credits" line on the other pages doesn't include that information. I'm just fond of Vera (and especially that Bitstream has made it available to all...)

There's a few people trying to get me to find time to redo the official camp site as well, but I'm resisting for the time being... ;)

Thanks for the comments!

[djwtwo]

The site should validate now, and should have the flashing problem solved.

Thanks again!

[blade83]

Valid XHTML Strict -- impressive :] Nice job.

[YvetteKuhns]

Yay! No more flashing (on the website). ;)

[dizzyd]

Great job, I love the colors and the layout! :)