New website & advice

This is my first website. A friend did the original template and I used Namo Webeditor5 and PSP7 for the rest. Have come to really like Namo and PSP. Excellent tools, though I havent used much else. Any suggestions?

URL

looks alright, tho im not a fan of black backgrounds

Hi Danz,
The site looks OK, but just a couple of tips:

- Instead of the big image on the front page, have a "welcome to our site" paragraph or two. Big images take too long to load and people might click away.

- For the menu on the left, add a drop shadow to the writing for each button because it's a bit hard to read.

- You've used Namo Web Editor 5 to design it, so make sure that the <meta> tags for keywords and a description are setup. Then goto www.addme.com and submit it for free to 20 or so search engines.

Other than that, great job for your first site It does take some time to get to know everything and design quirks etc, but you'll get there.

Thanks guys. Ben, I agree with black backgrounds but my wife insisted on it because she said it was a better backdrop for art work. After seeing it in operation I agree with her but added the stars to give it some kind of meaning. Art is a touchy subject to backdrop. Colors can conflict and white draws color out of the artwork.

I also agree with your suggestions Mytch. In fact, I think Im going to change all the buttons to the ones I made for the main gallery page. Theyre a Hubble picture of the Pleides star group. They show wording much better. Though the sun shining through the arch works design wise, its hard to read.

When I first started on this project I didnt know diddly about HTML or authoring and spent many hours cursing my decision to do our own new site instead of staying with our old site already done for us. Now Im totally hooked and have already started on another project for someone else. I can only chuckle when I now do something in a few minutes that in the beginning took me hours to do.