New website, feedback please!

[herpchick]

Hey everyone. So I've been working a little bit on making a site for my reptiles and finally got it up. Obviously it's got some work to be done yet, but I'm looking for any feedback, advice, comments that I can get to help make it better. Any advice things I can change, things you like, don't like, would like to see...... anything really!
I'm really excited about this and any help would be great!
Thanks guys
http://valleyherps.webs.com/

[RichsBallPythons]

Looks good, but id really invenst in your own .com and hosting to get the ads off.

[herpchick]

Thanks, I was planning on actually getting my own domain name in the future, but figured I'd see how this went for now.

[iCandiBallPythons]

I got a little cracked up at the advance autoparts ad at the top of the page lol

[Herp_Herp_hooray]

Looking Good so far!!! I like the Reptile Radio link

[Herp_Herp_hooray]

Thanks, I was planning on actually getting my own domain name in the future, but figured I'd see how this went for now.

I got ours because, I was affraid someone would get it before us...

[jfreels]

Cool! I am going to offer some advice, having been a web developer for many years. Take no offence to any of it, I'm just trying to help.

Your header banner of the carpet python is over 300k and it's scaled down from 800x600 to 446x334. I suggest resizing it to the dimensions that you prefer and set the resolution to 72 dpi. That will make it roughly 20k and it will load in a second rather than a matter of seconds. People on dial-up will appreciate this. Same goes for any other images you have scaled such as the ball python at the bottom of the home page. Don't do this for your gallery images though, you want those to stay high resolution.

If you don't have content for a page, it's best to leave the links off of menues and other pages. Looks like the FAQ page is the only one that does that. Or you could put a place holder page that says "Valuable FAQ coming soon" or something.

From a design perspective, I would never change the background. Looks like it changes when you navigate from the homepage. You want the same feel on all pages so people know they are still at the same website. I know it sounds silly for just a background, but it's a general rule.

I don't know how much control you have over the template, did webs provide that for you? If you can, center the content in the 'fw-content' tag or even better, fit the content into the tag so there is no barren space on the right hand side.

I like everything about it though. The flow is nice and nothing is over complicated.

[David802]

My only complaint is that you don't have any albino balls available on there

Jfreels is right about the background as well I'm hardly an expert a few class's at the community college is hardly what I'd call experience, but I do remember talking a lot about consistency in things like background, fonts, borders and things like that.

[herpchick]

Thanks for the advice. I'm going to try fixing the background thing, I was playing around with it at first and guess I didn't realize that I had actually saved it that way. I'll get the images re-sized as well.
As for the template, I really don't like that either. Webs provided the basic template and it doesn't allow me to center it (at least not from what I can find). I'll definitely see what I can do to try and fix it though!
Thanks again guys, this is really helping me out

[Neal]

Aside from what everybody else posted:

Hostmonster.com has really good prices, cheap, and it also includes a domain. That would be the route I would go.