Suggestions? Animalpotd.com

[trooplewis]

Ok folks, after looking at the three existing sites, what would you suggest I  keep/change when I get the Animal Photo of the Day site up on Aug 1st?

How do you feel about the simplicity of the site?  Too uncrowded? home page image all right in size?
background beige color (like potdgroup.com) too boring?  Prefer a white or off-white background?  Black?

What about the framing I use around the POTD image?  Prefer white, brown, gray? I typically use a small black border..

Give me some feedback in terms of what would make the site more appealing or easier to navigate for you personally. Any pages that would be helpful to add?

Tending to the three sites (plus mtnhealth.org) has been time-consuming, but rather fun.  My own opinion is rather slanted, so I would value input from members here if you feel it would work better than the current sites. 

Also, I need to get the work out to more photographers and get more images submitted. Suggestions regarding how to do so would be hempful as well


Regards to all

Bill

[KCook]

I looked only at the Group page.  My display is always set at 800x600, so my views may or may not be relevant to other members.  For me, the banner in the header is too tall.  It's height forces the POTD image almost all the way off the page view.  I would also ditch the fat gold button with date.  Plain text for the date would take up less real estate and be in better harmony with the text around the date.  The black border around the POTD image is Ok, but could be a little wider.

I get bored with the stark black backgrounds on all the other sites.  The beige background here is a welcome relief.  You could mix things up from time to time with other pastel shades or soft textures.  Just to wake us up 

Navigation to the "holding" pages for the retired POTD images is not obvious.  Over time, if these image collections persist (which I hope they will), some organization is going to need to be applied to these pages.

As a "teaser" you might add a small text panel under the photo for selected viewer comments on the photos.  The tease being to encourage more viewer feedback.  Mitt link to these forums of course.

no help 

[trooplewis]

thanks for the input kelly.  My website spftware doesn't have the intelligence to automatically adjust font sizes and the page width, so I have to set it at the most common resolutions. If I make it 800x600, it looks awfully small on a 1924 or 1280 pixel wide monitor.

Some day if I have time and can learn how to work with more advanced software, I might be able to make the pages adjust, just not enough hours in my day at this point.

I'll see if I can move the "see current month" button up to the top or make it just a text link, might fit better.

And yes, I'm thinking about doing away with all the "buttons" that they have on potdgroup.com and just using text links like I do on boatingpotd.com

Any other 800x600 users here? I understand that 95% of the monitors are now at 1024 or higher.

One other thing, what do you think of allowing "people" portraits in the animalpotd.com site?  I own the domain peoplepotd.com but don't anticipate setting up a site for portraits/street scenes in the near future.  So we could allow a more general definition of 'animals" and allow people shots there.  Just throwing it out there to see what the consensus is...

[KCook]

Sorry I wasn't clear.  The font sizes and the page width are perfectly fine, just as they are.  My main nitpick is the height of the banner at the top of the page, not font sizes.

I took a look at the Boating page and I'd say the text menus there are Ok.  So are the graphic menu buttons on the Group page.  If we wanted to be fussy, some sort of compromise between those two themes would be ideal.  The way such menus are usually handled is with a table.  The HTML Table object has lots of adjustments for color, etc.

mumbles