http://branches.asce.org/huntsville/

I'm a Civil Engineer who's taken over as webmaster for our local chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Just figured I'd start with that sentence, so your expectations would be sufficiently lowered.

This site is only for local members, so the maximum amount of people I'm looking to assist would be 140 or so, right now. Therefore, I'm not looking to attract lots of members. It's just meant to provide info on ASCE events and members' successes. The purpose is subject to change, as we see what we can do to make the site more useful to our members.

I'm still in the process of updating information, but I think I've got the look of the site about where I want it. I'm mainly looking for critique on the code, but feel free to fire away at whatever you feel is in need of a good ripping.

http://branches.asce.org/huntsville/

I have also been working on a survey that we intend to use to find out the needs of the members. It's a mailto, mainly because I know nothing about Perl, cgi, asp, and all of that crap. As much as I'd love to, I don't have time to get that far into it, so I've done what I can with what I know. Let me know what you think there, too, please.

http://branches.asce.org/huntsville/survey.htm

No comments after four days. Am I to assume that my site is perfect? Sweet! Thanks, everyone!

Umm... No.

Since you are asking for a critique of your code, I'll simply say that it is the terrible code that Dreamweaver spits out. Table layouts, font tags, no header tags (h1, h2...). The code could use some drastic improvements, but I'll always recommend people use XHTML/CSS for their sites.

I actually think it looks pretty good. Nice colours and layout. I would be very happy with that. One improvement would be to name the other page files with their titles, rather than just link 1, link 2 etc. It helps search engines and screen readers for the disabled.

Yeah, thanks for reminding me about that. I was going to wait until we had what the page names would be solidified, but we do now, so I can change them.

As far as the "horrible code" that Dreamweaver spits out, you are correct that I used Dreamweaver on most of it, but what other option do I have? Just code it from scratch?

Well, maybe... you could. One of the things that frustrates me about DW/FP users is that very many don't know basic HTML, and rely on the software to write the code.
That's all fine, but in some cases, and this might be one, certain modifications need to be made in order to make your code more elegant, readable and easily modifiable.
That's why sometimes coding some basic skeletons in Notepad might not seem that difficult after all...

I'm not sure if this is what you're referring to, but I use DW to set the pages up, and then try to make additional changes to the pages through html. I have not touched up the code, because, as you realized, I'm not extremely familiar with it just yet. That's why I'm here. I know basic html, but need enough help to get the code more readable. I'll work on the heading tags, as mentioned previously. Anything else? I need specifics.

On a side note, I've noticed a trend in here of people being vehemently opposed to tables. Could someone explain why? Not that I'm trying to defend the use of them, just curious as to the reasoning, and what other options are available. Thank you all for your help and you interest in looking at the site so far.

basicly because tables was never ment for layout purposes.
tablelayouts breaks the structur in a html document.
http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/

Thanks, Akh. I think I get it now. I'll try to learn CSS and apply that instead.

Nice link Akh ... finding it fairly usefull, well .. its designed well at least. =D

Could someone give a quick example of a CSS code for a layout somewhat similar to mine, so I can have a starting point?