My Web Site

[lkramm]

Thought I'd get some feed back on my web site from some experts. I've gotten feed back from a number of users and they really like the ease of navigation. We're showing our horses and trying to let folks interested in horses see what we have for sale.

The site is: www.kyhranch.com

Larry S Kramm

[Builder]

AAAGH! Music! Really, most people hate being forced to listen to music on websites. I would get rid of it, or allow it as an option. (There are players you can embed.)

This has all the hallmarks of a FrontPage generated site even though the source says it was created with "MicroVision WebExpress". Pleasing enough but not quite professional.

Contributing to the not-quite-professional look is the MS Comic Sans font on your home page -- the most over-used font in the world, and probably the most hated (http://bancomicsans.com/home.html) as well. A better choice would be Verdana, Tahoma, Trebuchet, or even Arial. Verdana was created specifically for its ease of reading on-screen. The rest of your pages use a Times/Times New Roman font. You should keep your font consistent site-wide.

Your contact e-mail address really should be a something@kyhranch.com address instead of AOL. This would also help project a more professional image.

Hmm: "Thru generations great breeders have incorporated..." should be "Through generations, great breeders have incorporated..." Always use full versions of words. Someone in Thailand, while they may speak English, may not recognize "thru". They don't call it the World Wide Web for nothing. Additionally, screen-readers for visually impaired visitors may choke on it. Note the comma I added. Not sure if it's absolutely necessary, but it makes the meaning of the sentence more clear to me. But I tend to over-punctuate anyway... :D

Typo: "...started Kramm's Yellow Horse Ranch were color..." -- should be "where"

Get rid of the hit counter. Use web statistics available in OPS to track your site use. They are much more informative. And hit counters are a bit amateurish, belonging on geocities-type sites.

Every page needs a navigation menu, right now only your home page does. So you have to click the browser's back button or click the KYH Ranch graphic every time you want to go to another page on your site. Which opens your home page and then the music reloads... I turned my sound off to shut the dang thing up.

Your "banner photos" on each page need some optimizing. Resize them in an image editing program to the size you need rather than using the IMG tag's width and height attributes. You are continually "resizing" 600x174 images to 450x131. An experiment on "ourmaresbanner.jpg" shows that you can reduce an 88kb file to 14.9kb. This will greatly reduce page load time for those not on broadband. See this (http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/wso.php?url=http://www.kyhranch.com/ourmares.html) for a speed report on your mares page and for some hints on reducing load times.

Consider centering your container tables. On wider screens such as mine your page content appears all scrunched up on the left side of the window. Centering the tables won't change their appearance on smaller screens.

There's a couple of missing images/photos on the Larry's Photos page.

Some things I do like:
Nice photos of the horses
I like the KYH Ranch graphic you have on most of your pages.
I'm not an equine-oriented person but it looks like you have a lot of great information about your horses.
The down-home, friendly tone of the site.

Good luck,
Kevin

[Doc C]

I, too, like the down home feel of the site. It's easy to navigate and serves the purpose of showing your horses and art very well.

I like the font you chose. It fits in with the feel of the site. I think the site Builder refers to is written tongue in cheek considering the graph from the Corporation for Public Misinformation! :)

I would also suggest giving visitors the option of not playing the music. Or at least turn it down a few notches.

I'd show the site to my girlfriend but then she'd want one of your horses!

[Kitchensink108]

You might try making the navigation vertical instead or two lines horizontal. Also make sure you put it on every page.

I like the layout on the other pages (eg Foals page) a lot more than the main page. I'd say remake the homepage using that layout, and consider centering it on the page.

Don't use animated gifs or hit counters.

Don't insert images directly into text, as you do on the Foals page.

Get rid of all the extra line breaks or w/e at the bottom of each page.

That's all I'll say for now.