Hey All,

ok, give me your thoughts. http://www.longislandguide.com

loads slow? too much garbage? I can take it. Site receives over 100K visitors a month..

Regards,

Lonny

there is too much stuff you should put more content rather than slicing everything with stupid polls and a billion ads. Also you should make your navigation bar at the top bigger.

First of all, yes, it is slow loading That's the bad thing about having nested tables. A table doesn't load until everything inside the table is finished loading. By having your entire site in one big table, and lots of nested tables, that's a baaaad thing. It means that when you first load the page, all you get is white. Then, a second or two later, everything shows up at once. You see, the web browser has to wait until all the images throughout the site are loaded before it can display anything. The alternative here is to brush up on your CSS and use lots of <div> tags. You can achieve the same end-result, but the page will be fast-loading as it won't have to wait for all of the graphics throughout the site to finish loading before the text and colors show up.

First thing's first - I must congratulate you on your high level of customization of PHPNuke, or PostNuke, or whatever CMS you happen to be using. It actually even took me a second glance at the design to realize you were using a boxed CMS.

I wouldn't say there was too much garbage ... but I would definitely say it is too cluttered. Everything looks very mish-moshed together. For example, definitely keep the idea where there is a little box for each idea. However, the way you have it now, I see 4 columns of boxes with things ranging from weddings to stocks to events to polls about our president to recipes, etc.

It's good to include all these things, but they should be organized in a better way. Right now, they don't look like they're in any particular order at all. Better organization will do multiple things for you. First of all, it will make your site look more organized (a given). Second of all, it will allow a visitor coming in through your homepage to find something easier - which is always an opportunity to make a returning visitor out of them.

Consider the following layout for your homepage, for example:
Three columns ... One column is entitled "LI Scene" ... All of your boxes about weddings, stock quotes, today's events, movie reviews, traffic and transit reports, weather, lottery, etc. would go in this column.

A second column is entitled "LI Home" ... All of your boxes about games, software, recipes, tv listings, etc. will go in this column.

A third column is entitled "LI Interactive" or "LI Community" ... This is where you put the latest forum posts, the chat rooms, a link to the forums, who's online, links to register, and a login form.

See how much better organized this is? One column is devoted to meeting other Long Islanders in an online community. Another column is devoted to stuff a long islander could do around the house - i.e. cooking recipes, gardening on long island, home and garden, tv listings, etc. A third column is devoted to stuff that would be of interest to long islanders as well as tourists - stuff to do around the island and the LI scene (i.e. restaurant reviews (dining), beaches, nightlife, etc.).

By making an entire column off of the homepage clearly attractive to LI tourists, you just opened up your site to a whole new market. You now aren't limited to a Long Islander userbase. Just by reorganizing your homepage, your site just became instantly attractive to NY/NYC tourists ... without adding any new content!

Similarly, by devoting an entire column to the community, it will make your forum seem much more attractive. You could then market the forum as a way to meet other long islanders. By using the 3-column idea, it gives you the opportunity to really show off the community which is of course much more attractive than a "forums" link buried in a cluttered mess.

Keep in mind - the goal is to "give people a hand" in getting them to click off the homepage and explore deeper pages within your site.

I hope this has been of some help to you. I have a loooot more to say, but baby steps Digest this first