Site Suggestions and Improvements

[justplainwayne]

We have a health and fitness informational site: www.slimntrim.com
We have tried to be a helpful tool to individuals wanting to stay fit in a balanced healthy way.
We have a variety of content that we feel is valuable, we have a strong logo, and an excellent message to get into peoples hands.
We are going away from the "affiliate marketing" programs and want to be more content oriented.
What suggestions can be made to help us be more:

1) User friendly
2) To present our message in an engaging way
and what type of content should be available?
3) The site has "frames" should they go away?
4) What are our strengths?
5) Are they easily identified to a visitor?

We would appreciate all comments and suggestions.

[sanity]

Hi justplainwayne :hi:

I've had a quick glance and immediately a few things sprung to mind:

The navigation image/s on the left are extremely blurry and difficult to read. You really need to redo them.

There's a lot of animation going on which I find too busy. Can I suggest reducing the number of things going on.

The frames. Personally I'd ditch them. It'd be much moe search engine friendly if you did.

Hope this is of help.

Sophie

[Blue]

Hi justplainwayne,

I'll second all three of Sophie's suggestions. IMO, your site is just plain too busy - busy with moving things and other graphics.

I might suggest that you size some of the graphics quite a bit smaller, for instance on the Partners page all the triangle cheese graphics could be sized smaller leaving more room for information.

As well, the slim rabbit guy (Pete?), though cute, is so large on some pages that I saw NO information without scrolling.

You should try to check your site at 800x600 resolution, and design for that res as a minimum. As it is now, there is quite a bit of horizontal scrolling. Actually, all three of your frames scroll horizontally and vertically. You can alleviate this with either basing the site on tables or sizing the frames and their content correctly.

Some pages have the Slim n' Trim logo presented twice. This IMO is redundant.

To make your site more user friendly, I would rethink your nav structure. There were some links that weren't obvious, and I saw no way to see the structure of your site. Build a site map and place it in a conspicuous place on every page or at least your home page.

Right on the front page, the first thing I would expect to see is what your site is all about and what can it do for me.

Your site's strength is it's information. It just needs to be better organized and presented in such a way (right from the home page) that it can be easily got to.

You're well on your way, so keep it up!

[justplainwayne]

To Blue & Sophie:

Right on and thanks for the in-put. I'm reaching similar conclusions regarding the "noise" and "navagation".
THanks for the in-put!
plainwayne