http://mixed-drink-guide.com/

http://mixed-drink-guide.com/ looking for your opinions and comments especially concerning better search engine ranking

in my opinion your white font is too small and it gets harder to reader the lower it is on the page, because your background gets lighter and lighter as it fades to the bottom.

Can I make a few suggestions? Get rid of the background, it is appaling, it doesn't compliment your website's style and it just makes the text hard to read.

The images take a while to load, your site is a nightmare to load on a 56k modem.

The site's made in Microsoft Developer Studio, and you can tell this. The coding is sloppy and the tables are not nessicary for your site's design.

You have used styles with div tags to make the design, why not use an external .css file for these divs. Also use these divs as layout containers, much more effective than tables.

I would reduce the size of your header and increase it's quality. Then I would get rid of the gradient and stick with a fixed black. The colours work ok, however the layout doesn't. It is proven by accessibility experts that the last place a viewer of a website looks is on the right hand bottom side. I would suggest you move your links to a top bar consistent throughout the web-site and have the text of each page filling the major amount of space of your website. Relevant pictures also wouldn't hurt.

Lastly I would ditch the font and use a standard font common to both mac and pc. ie. Verdana, arial, trebuchet ms are some web-safe fonts.

I hope I haven't been too ruthless, don't take it badly, theres always stuff to improve upon, however this site has got the beginnings of a brilliant site and has the content that most website's lack. A touch up on the points i've mentioned above will work wonders on it.

i can take it. you wouldnt know of a way to fade the font
in a linear fashion maybe going a shade darker every line would help .

Yes, it can be done but I really really advise against it, because you have to use either IE only CSS filters or activeX controls, IE only again.

If you have to fade the text, something like this-:

would be a better solution except for the extreme tedious work involved?

let me know http://mixed-drink-guide.com

it's an effort to read, not only because of the background but the font as well... if you want to keep the font you should at the very least use a size over 1em (not everyones eyesight is as good as yours), but you should definitely ditch the background. High contrast is best for reading from, i.e. black on white, or white on black.

also, the two highly contrasting fonts you have, do nothing for me

I see what the others mean about the background I am seeing the dreaded cheesy banding on the gradient. Yes, it has to go. What is that logo supposed to say about Mixed Drinks? Looks like one of those NASA photos of Neptune or something. Font - yes, the default looks small on my 19in monitor at 1024x768. I can zoom up though (even in IE ) so there's a green tick. Good work there. Don't call for Curlz MT and Engravers MT because no-one has those installed. Search engines? Add more keywords to your title tag. Learn xome CSS and make your main nav links as a CSS list and that will remove all that code soup. H1 tags good but again need to style them with CSS. Just makes the markup cleaner and therefore helps the engines decipher the juicy bits from the junk.

i have gone to great lengths to make sure it displays properly in both netscape and ie i thankyou for your post

I'm going to cast another vote strongly against the graduated backround. Go with solid black, with white text, it will look much better.
Increase the font size, it all looks like the fine print from an ad.
Move the link bar to the top of the pages.
Good content though, I like the subject matter