Young American Voters Site Template

Please let me know what you think of my site, Young American Voters.

It is the first design that I just made in the past hour based on a glish design (as recommended by a member of this forum in my last thread).

Before I start doing the php coding and such for the site I would like to have a finalized template, so please list any possible improvements or concerns here.

Thanks,
James

edit: btw, ignore the content on the site, it is all filler for now.

I could still really use help on this please!

Looks fine.
The only thng that I would really comment on is your links - it would be better if you used list <li></li> instead of <br />'s
Syntax is a bit weird in places, eg <center> is depreciated.
Perhaps too, you could look at your document outline and use the occasional <h2> instead of all <h1>.
Good luck

I'll change the h1's to h2's... my only question is how do I properly format ul's? I want it to look like how it does now, not be all widely spaced and have a circle as a button on the left... can anyone give me code for that? thanks.

edit: btw, my (C) notice at the bottom always gets messed up when its at a certain place away from the right-menu. if it's right at the same level, then half of it is moved to the side while (all rights reserved) while the top part isn't. any fix?

You can play around with margin / padding .

thanks, any other changes?

ok, i made all those changes, the site is now updated at the url, so check it out and tell me if you think it's all ok now?


i'm using a dreamweaver site manager/template system, so i'll be able to keep all the pages up to date easily.

thanks, and tell me what you think

try to indent the list to the left, it's to centered it makes a big space both the side

i thought it looked kind of good like that... think it would look better the other way?

If you're marketing twards teenagers, I'd personally stay away from the red, white, and blue. If you where a teenager, would you want your friends seeing you browsing that page?

Try a little more eye candy. Add some 3D elements and some darker colors. You can even stick to the same colors if you tone them down a bit by darkening them.

Also, add some graphs to the front page. Simple bar graphs with 3D bars (rounded) will make them think they're at an intelegent site, not just some pro-gov site.

You could even go with a "hacking the government" theme. You know, green on black terminal, "top secret" stuff.

Just some suggestions for attracting visitors. It may be more effort then you want to put into it right now.

thanks for the advice. I think I want to stick with a RWB theme, but perhaps darkening the colors would be a good idea (originally I had a darker blue/red. If you have specific colors you think would fit, please post the codes here and I'll try them out.

I am not currently running PHP on the server, but I can do the bar graphs manually I guess, using two rounded edges images and a stretchable center one.. I'll look into that and implement it soon.

thanks.

I'm talking about static graphs. Your front page mentions stats in the text. Adding a graph, even just a static one, will make the page look more "cool" to the teenagers. You can even make the whole thing by hand, since it'll probably never change.

so how would you design the graph? I get the basic idea but just not what type of graph I could do for those statistics, but I see what you mean, it would make it more "exciting"

Bar graph. Kind of like what you would see in a magazine ad showing how much better their computer is then your current one.

I'll attach one I just made. Only takes 10 minutes to throw one together. Of course, you'll want to add text too, like "# of kids in US, # of kids that vote"