I Would Love Your Opinion of my New Design on my Website!

[Damon Rambo]

O.K., I am a little slow technically, but my Old Site looked horrible. It took a little while, but I have revamped it. I would love your opinions, remembering that I do not know what I am doing!

Straightwalk Home

Thanks!

 

[AThornquist]

I like it; it's way better than what I can do, although that's saying very little. Just a note, under your Statement of Faith you list the "2000 Baptist Fait and Message." Adding an 'h' would be an improvement. Altogether though, the site is easy to navigate and helpful in defining who you are.

 

[Damon Rambo]

Just a note, under your Statement of Faith you list the "2000 Baptist Fait and Message." Adding an 'h' would be an improvement.

Darn it! Just goes to show that its hard to proof read your own work. How did I miss that?

Anyway, thanks!

 

[Steve Curtis]

I like that there are pictures of you on the home page with a beard and without a beard!

Actually, it looks great and it is easy to navigate.

 

[Rich Koster]

I like that it is not cluttered, easily figured out and the color scheme is pleasant on the eyes. Also, the movement is attention grabbing but not flashy and annoying. You did a good job for someone who doesn't know what he is doing .

 

[janimar]

Good job. I was concerned that Damon's Theology Page the "e" was partly cut off. However, I was in Firefox and when I went to Chrome it was fine so it was probably the way I had Firefox set up.

 

[Semper Fidelis]

I'm not a big fan of "showy" websites. It's aesthetically "blocky" in some points. The "curtain" effect is sort of distracting. Is the goal for it to look techie or to pass information?

My guess is that it's a flash site and you may have made it difficult to index by spiders and hurt your search engine results through the design.

Personally, I would go with a CMS like Wordpress. If you've got the talent to set up a Flash site then it shouldn't be too hard to set up Wordpress.

 

[au5t1n]

The first time I clicked your link, my browser (the current Firefox for ubuntu) went haywire and started opening up lots of tabs. I closed out and came back and clicked the link again, and now it shrinks my browser to the smaller size. Is this happening to anyone else?

 

[fredtgreco]

Yes, it happened to me also. It resized my browser to half size. Very annoying.

 

[TimV]

I like the good, basic info. Hopefully people will use it. Perhaps the red colored writing and dark background could prove irritating as well.

I'm glad you posted it here. I posted my website here a year or so ago and got lots of good suggestions.

Rich said something about spiders. I know what they are but haven't a clue as to how they work. A beekeeping friend helped me make my website spider friendly and even today (8 years later) I still have people who have hired me since I come up so high to the top on search engines. So, while I can't advise you on how to do it, I would advise you to make it spider friendly

PS I love your enthusiasm!

 

[Scottish Lass]

Shrank/resized my Firefox window, too.

 

[Edward]

I don't like sites that require that I launch Flash before I can see anything on them. I run Flashblock for a reason. I'd suggest that you offer an alternative nonflash screen so folks can know what they are getting into. (And not everyone has a broadband link, even today. So you are in effect saying that you don't want their views. And aren't there some Apple products that don't do Flash?).

If you hadn't linked from here, I'd consider the site untrustworthy and would have clicked away.

When I click on the Flash button it loads in about 14 seconds. Not bad, and there is a progress meter. The site is clean and well organized. You don't overdo the animation.

So, to summarize, at the least, I'd put an alternative link to a fixed non-flash page that would contain basics and a link back to the Flash if someone wants more.

----

Reading some of the other comments - I'm using Firefox 3.5 on XP, and it didn't do anything strange to the browser window.

 

[LaurieBluedorn]

Pleasant to look at. Artistic. Beautiful colors. Intro needs proofing -- too many commas.

 

[VictorBravo]

I'm on a moderately slow connection, around 1.5 MB/sec, and it took 30 seconds for the page to load. I'm pretty sure it is because you are using flash.

I'd try making it more browser friendly. Rich recommended using a Wordpress template--that would work well and be easy to update. Otherwise, try making a basic webpage with the same info.

 

[Ruby]

It shrank my page , too but as a totally non techie person I think it looks great!

 

[Ask Mr. Religion]

An admirable start!

A few suggestions:

If you run flash before site entry it is polite to offer a "skip this" link to bypass the painfully slow loading process I encountered. Running the entire site as a flash object is just going to limit your traffic, for reasons already noted above.

At the links page you refer to links at the left and below. Those on the left are outside the text box, while the one's "below" are inside the text box. Disconcerting. Also the individual sentences describing the links to the left should be set apart as bulleted items.

You might consider some hover effects when mousing over the links at the top of the page. Something that either changes their color or underlines them as the mouse passes over these items.

Add "a title=" tags to the links on the left that appear when the Links option is selected. No need to make someone click these images to learn where they end up.

Make a pdf of your resume for the folk that do not use Microsoft Word. You might omit the personal data of your references from that document, too, as they don't need any unwanted spammers and probably did not want the worldwide advertisement of their information.

Use consistent font faces, styles, and sizes across all the text popups. You seem to have a variety of fonts being used. Keep things simple and consistent.

The blue color for sermons and writings needs to be something else. Use a color scheme tool to determine the right mix of colors:

Color Combinations Tester - Combo Tester - ColorCombos.com
ColorSchemer - Online Color Scheme Generator

The banner (scroll and Spurgeon etc) should appear above the links. The scroll should have the grey border on all four sides.

Can the drop down menu items for the About Us and Theology links be centered below each of these items versus their current far left positions?

In the textbox for Contact, there is a space needed between other and queries.

The pix of you at the Home link seems a wee bit younger than what appears on page three in your resume. Use an accurate pix to represent yourself.

AMR

 

[BJClark]

austinww;

The first time I clicked your link, my browser (the current Firefox for ubuntu) went haywire and started opening up lots of tabs. I closed out and came back and clicked the link again, and now it shrinks my browser to the smaller size. Is this happening to anyone else?

It's done the same w/ mine

And in looking at the contact page..."otherqueries"
there should be a space between the words-- other queries

In the links at the top (I think it was mentioned above) the "e" in page is cut off, you could change the size of the button link on the 'links' link--(I also use firefox, so you may need to check the codes to see if there where the conflict..

Check your PDF files as well..I opened two of them and this is what the documents look like for me, it may be different for others, so have a few people check them out.

%PDF-1.5 %µµµµ 1 0 obj <<>>> endobj 2 0 obj <> endobj 3 0 obj <<<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageB/ImageC/ImageI] >>/MediaBox[ 0 0 612 792] /Contents 4 0 R/Group<>/Tabs/S/StructParents 0>> endobj 4 0 obj <> stream xœ–KoÛ0 €ï
òt´Y©7PÈ£Ù:´]±Ø¡è!íÒ®‡4EáËþý('éâ.&„Ä–l‰)Š¤\OÞÚçÇÕC+ÎÎêIÛ®~¯

 

[Damon Rambo]

The pix of you at the Home link seems a wee bit younger than what appears on page three in your resume. Use an accurate pix to represent yourself.

AMR

Actually, the pictures do not have THAT much time between them! The difference is : #1 Eating and exercise habits at the time of the pictures, and #2 The different poses in each picture. #3 In the second picture, I was recovering from Bell's Palsy.

Actually my current appearance is actually represented by the front page picture (since I have re instituted by exercise regimen), but I put the other picture up, so they will be prepared for me, either way. Kind of the "full spectrum" of what I can look like!

 

[Jake]

When I load the website in Firefox, my window rapidly jumps between two window sizes so much that it is unusable and I can't do anything. I've never seen this behavior before. I was able to close the tab with a keyboard shortcut, however.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.6) Gecko/20100626 SUSE/3.6.6-1.2 Firefox/3.6.6

 

[Scott1]

Very innovative.

A passion for truth comes through.

It might be helpful to have a user friendly link to the London Baptist Confession, and perhaps a Catechism under the reference section. Also, a short explanation of the Gospel, as quick reference.