i'm working on a website for my church, and i'm in need of some major constructive criticism. the links are dead, that's just the basic concept of how it's going to look. so any help/advice/constructive criticism would be greatly appreciated.

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proverbs 17:28
Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.

proverbs 25:7
open rebuke is better than secret love.

www.gfa.org - Gospel for Asia

www.persecution.com - Voice of the Martyrs

+) Don't use *.gif for your title bar, use *.jpg, I can see the grain in the image.

+) Use more updated graphics for the title bar, make it look more modren. Use a cutout picture of the Church possibly mixed with the title bar. I see Horsebranch, possibly use a country theme? Visually it should be attractive to you and others. How about some white cream with coffee green and some complimentary greens for the overwell site colours. This should reduce the site from looking and feeling old as it does currently.

+) Use a pattern going down rather than the paint spraypaint, colour to match the title bar but faded

+) I'm assuming the geocities is being used as a test

Here's a link to my churchs website;

http://www.theparkchurch.ca/

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proverbs 17:28
Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.

proverbs 25:7
open rebuke is better than secret love.

www.gfa.org - Gospel for Asia

www.persecution.com - Voice of the Martyrs

[This message has been edited by bennythebear (edited March 15, 2007).]

Mack has the right idea: pick a color scheme first. Not too many colors. I typically like to pick a couple main colors that are somewhat similar, and then one color that's quite different, to use as a highlighting color.

Mack's church's site is visually cool. Looking at it, you can see that it has brown as its base, and green as a highlight. Don't worry about the bells & whistles; an attractive site can be done with just a well-defined visual scheme, without Flash and pretty rounded buttons (though they are cool!). However, without a well-defined visual scheme, it doesn't matter how much Flash or clever things you have, it will be ugly.

Here's my church's website: http://www.elkhartrpc.org/index.php

If your church has a logo, choose colors from that.

Here's my biggest piece of advice:
Look at different sites, especially church sites, and find things that you admire, and think that you could implement. It could be something like the color scheme, or a menu layout, something like that. I totally stole ideas for my church's site from our denomination's site. The biggest thing I stole was the way of doing the title bar across the top (it's a tiny .png graphic about 5px wide, and repeated across the top). It's attractive (I think) and extremely cheap, bandwidth-wise.

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it's pronounced "tonics"

quote:

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Originally posted by bennythebear:
once you get some free time you have to show me the colors you're talking about(i have no clue what they are ).

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Sure thing bro I'll try and get it done tomorrow sometime.

http://www.tigercolor.com/

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Sam Washburn

[This message has been edited by samw3 (edited March 15, 2007).]

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proverbs 17:28
Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.

proverbs 25:7
open rebuke is better than secret love.

www.gfa.org - Gospel for Asia

www.persecution.com - Voice of the Martyrs

First of all, a lot of people seem to be moaning about the use of tables lately. I like their functionality, but using <div> with some CSS is the general direction of web development right now. In terms of appearance, there isn't much to gain from that. But it's just the first thing I noticed when I looked at the source.

Next, I suppose this is a bit more subjective, but I don't like the division line between content and navigation. I would definitely recommend a solid background behind the navigation to distinguish the segments over the spray paint divider.

This already came up as well, but a color scheme is nice. Even if you go with blue, some things could be done to make it look a bit nicer. Here's a sample of a site I built with a gray scheme. You might care to notice the complete absence of images.

By no means is it an amazing website, but I feel like it makes decent use of a general color scheme. I call it "strictly utilitarian," but it's a step in the right direction towards a clean, well kept look.

That's just an idea. Like I said, I don't think it's amazing, but I think it's a solid design all the same.

I don't really have much else to offer that hasn't been said already. The paragraphs could definitely use fixing. Rule number one with paragraphs (I'm making this up, by the way) is that you use paragraphs to separate segments of a page. So, this:

<p>We would like to invite you to come out and worship with us. Our Services</p>
<p>are:</p>

<li> Sunday School - 10:00 AM
<li>Sunday Worship - 11:00 AM
<li>Sunday Evening Bible Study - 6:00 PM
<li>Wednesday Night Worship - 7:00 PM</p></ul>
<p>*All times are in Central Standard Time.</p>

Would be better looking (in terms of output) if you did this:

<p>We would like to invite you to come out and worship with us. Our services are:
<ul><li> Sunday School - 10:00 AM</li>
<li>Sunday Worship - 11:00 AM</li>
<li>Sunday Evening Bible Study - 6:00 PM</li>
<li>Wednesday Night Worship - 7:00 PM</li></ul>
*All times are in Central Standard Time.</p>

One last thought: make frequent use of w3cschools.org. That's probably the best reference for web development. I use it all the time when building web sites for figuring out the proper way to use an HTML tag or how to get a piece of CSS code to work properly. Oh, and I should compliment your desire to integrate CSS. I think it's overrated, but it is industry standard last I checked.

I hope something I said will be useful!

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Information on my projects
My game industry/theology blog

My church site is not much better - we only got a few links in!
http://circle.or.campusgrid.net/home/Links

What is going on with this?

-Tim

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Called by God. The passioned plea of a father. The journey awaits at Jarod's Journey.
Participate in the Parables, The Interactive Parables

On my system, your site looks fine, but you might want to include something regarding the location. As to what to include in the title bar, I think you've already chosen the right item; the point is not the congregation, the point is the Christ.

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Never Forget to Pray!

"...prayer itself is an art which only the Holy Ghost can teach us. He is the giver of all prayer. Pray for prayer---pray till you can pray; pray to be helped to pray, and give not up praying because you cannot pray, for it is when you think you cannot pray that you are most praying. Sometimes when you have no sort of comfort in your supplications, it is then that your heart---all broken and cast down---is really wrestling and truly prevailing with the Most High."
Charles Haddon Spurgeon, from the pamphlet, "Effective Prayer"

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Information on my projects
My game industry/theology blog

Last night I had some time, so I just did up a little mock-up real quick for you.

http://www.elkhartrpc.org/benny/index.html

It's one graphic across the top of the page, and I just positioned the menu's <div> so that it's right on top of the green bar. Likewise, the title's <div> is also given an absolute position so that it's on top of the brown part of the bar.

So, with one small 9px-by-90px graphic repeated across the top (the filesize is less than half of the current header gif), and some css to define the text position, size, and color, you can get a reasonably attractive page. I would recommend a link to Google maps for the church's location, as well as giving directions with words. Let Google's server and AJAX technology handle the graphics load for the map, rather than trying to upload a low-quality too-large graphic from your own site.

The files in the elkhartrpc.org/benny folder are: index.html, sample.css, and brownbarbkgd2.png. I often find it easier to take an existing barebones structure and tweak it, so if you find that helpful, go ahead and download and play with it.

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it's pronounced "tonics"

[This message has been edited by tonnyx (edited March 18, 2007).]

Sorry I took so long to get this done, I was tied up with some stuff and I completly forgot until today.

quote:

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Originally posted by tonnyx:
Hey, benny!

Last night I had some time, so I just did up a little mock-up real quick for you.

http://www.elkhartrpc.org/benny/index.html

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I like how you achieved so much with so little.

[This message has been edited by Calin (edited March 19, 2007).]

quote:

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I like how you achieved so much with so little.

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Heh, thanks. Naturally, I would love to make a site that looks as cool as Mack's, but, as you said, I was trying to do something with as little bandwidth as possible. I should hope that most people's connections would download 4kb in not too long.

A danger of putting the image as the div's background is that it's last in line, in terms of a browser's download priority. So, since the text colors are almost white, it could take a little time before a person is even aware of where the title & navbar are. So I hope that with the small file size, it wouldn't cause too much delay for the client's browser.

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it's pronounced "tonics"

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proverbs 17:28
Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.

proverbs 25:7
open rebuke is better than secret love.

www.gfa.org - Gospel for Asia

www.persecution.com - Voice of the Martyrs

------------------
proverbs 17:28
Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.

proverbs 25:7
open rebuke is better than secret love.

www.gfa.org - Gospel for Asia

www.persecution.com - Voice of the Martyrs

I'm glad to be of help. I have to credit the web designers at http://www.unlimited-focus.com/ with the 9x90 title bar idea. If you look at this site of theirs (http://www.rpcna.org/conv_name.html) you can see that I totally stole it (they know it).

Best of luck! Let us know if you have any more questions!

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it's pronounced "tonics"

I'm sorry, but you just SHOULDN'T have to pitch out $50 to figure out a color scheme. [Here] is a link to a color scheme creater (online) that I came across a while ago. Hope someone finds this useful!

God Bless!
-Teh Riddler

[This message has been edited by tehriddler (edited May 07, 2007).]