FOR HIS OWN G00D Experts tell one man the truth about his Web site

Entrepreneur, Dec, 2000 by Amanda C. Kooser

3 "The ads should be sectioned off in different areas of the page; for example, you should put a couple at the top, a couple halfway down the page, and a few at the bottom of the page."

4 "There are already a large number of portal sites, but the successful few have something that makes them stand out. This site doesn't have any remarkable aspect that lets it compete with the successful sites. The users this site targets remain nebulous. You need to decide who your customers are before you open your store."

PROGRAMMING

Tobias Walbridge, PERL programmer:

1 "I viewed the source and honestly don't see anything terribly wrong with it. I didn't notice a long load time, and I'm connecting through a telephone line. The site could benefit from incorporating some CSS [cascading style sheet] code to avoid the trouble of typing the FONT tag over and over again, but other than that, everything seems OK."

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Kimberlee McEachran, project manager and Web site designer:

1 "Size down the fonts and redesign the top logo graphic."

2 "Get rid of the flashing banners. One or two sponsor banners on top or at the bottom is OK."

3 "Work on getting internal pages into a format that is consistent on every page. Currently, each page has its own look and layout. Add a three-column layout (two with links--one with banners or sponsorship). Some pages require scrolling to the right because they extend outside the screen."

WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT

Katherine Tombeau, Web site developer and graphic artist:

1 "Logo: You need to make a transparent background or set the BGCOLOR to be FFFFFF. This is a very chipper font; I like the happy feel to it."

2 "Navigation: It's too Yahoo!. Perhaps it would help to organize things so that it could be customized by the user, or better separated or simplified without extraneous verbiage."

3 "Look and feel: Again, too Yahoo!. Many other portal sites or search engines are changing their look and feel to specialize or to simplify the user's options. Users can usually handle five options, not many more. You want to give the user all the options you have, but perhaps it's better to subcategorize to avoid 'sensory overload.'"

4 "Coding: ALTs should be specified for visually disabled users and users on LYNX, a text-based navigator on Unix machines, which a surprisingly large number of people still use."

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