Put me In my Place

So I am designing a website www.mkmair.com and need to be told how to make it more user friendly. More search engine optimized. Better keywordsm etc.

Please help.


www.mkmair.com

Fireworks... gah...

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbo...www.mkmair.com/

Don't bother fixing that, if you plan on keeping the fireworks created code.

A definite suggestion, and I promise you would hear this from someone else if not from me, would be using CSS. It wouldn't take much, a simple header/two-column/footer layout, you could probably find on glish, or another popular CSS layout site ( csszengarden, for example ).

A proper document outline, and the semantics therein is very important, that is how search engines define what terms are relative to your website, and more importantly, it is how people follow the logical flow of content within your website.

For example,
<div align="left" valign="top" style="padding-left:20px; padding-top: 10px;"><strong><font color="#CC0000" size="3">MKM Services Include
</font></strong>

Could be accomplished with <h1>MKM Services Include</h1>

And then defining an applicable style for h1...

h1{color: X; padding:Y; size: Z;}

It would increase the speed of the page also, becuase the css file is loaded once, whereas all that code is loaded everytime... not that it makes a huge difference for anyone that isn't on dial up... but for those dial up people... they appreciate well written code :P

To sum up,

Dump the tabled layout and stick with CSS, it's the way to go. I'm not sure about the navigation system... it's kind of quirky in Mozilla... but it looks nice in IE

Hey, I actually didn't use fireworks to generate the page. Just took their javascirpt functions and incorporated them into the page because it was easier. Their is a lot off CSS used too. I think though, that I will make a CSS change for H1 tag which i can then put around all the text to hopefully help with search optimization. After the first load though, the pages should move relatively quickly.

I tried CSS originially and it didn't much load time. Th buttom images are 2k or less each. It is the pic of the plane that is big. I may change that one.

Thanks a lot.

Any suggestions on search optimization would be great. Or techniques on how to get oher sites to link.

CSS won't reduce load time.. if it's written incorrectly, and your page is not structured right.

take a look at http://www.flegart.net/ Then take a look at http://www.x-versus-o.com/fleg_demo/ tell me which one loads faster. Then take a look at the source for both. With CSS and a well structured page, I can make the same page with less than half the markup.
Less code to process = shorter load time.

Great example...

weirdly for some reason the first one (using tables) loads a a lot faster than the second one, even if I clear my webcache and stuff.............very strange, but then I am using a Microsoft product.

might be the random image script in php. could be your machine.

most likely, it's my webserver

As far as the look of the site goes, the one thing that stood out to me where the low quality icons in the menu. The "sell jets" icon doesn't really make much sense. The "Members" icon just looks cheap.

At the very least, start with a larger, higher quality image, then scale it down to size with antialiasing. Otherwise, you're better off just leaving the graphics off of the menus.

My problem is that it is illegal to take someone else's pictures and do that. I will either have to take them myself or buy stock photo. I am trying to avoid additional costs. I will take that into advisement.

Did you have the opportunity to go tthrough thte site. How does it flow?

I thought the site was easy to navigate. Simple and functional.

As far as the graphics go, you don't need to use someone else's graphics. Just use any paint program. Photoshop and Gimp both have good scaling tools. After you paint the bigger image, when you scale it down, you won't see many of the mistakes you made.

Plus, there are sites that have royalty-free images. Go check out gettyimages and look under the Creative>Royalty-free menu item. The royalty-free images tend to be a little small, but they should be more then big enough for this task.

Here's one I just found that'd probably work nice for you with a little editing.

thanks a lot!