please review my site

[Armina5]

Dear all,

I just walked in to this forum. I am actively improving my site for search engines, and would like you comment and review. Very much need expert opinions.

:idea:

Thanks so much.

here is the site http://www.welcomearmenia.com

[Starting Big]

Hello,

I did not navigate your site very long, but when it first loaded I did not know what the site was about; I had to actively look around before I found out it was about Armenia. Aside form that, and without much navigating, it looked nice.

[deathshadow]

To warn you, I'm harsh - VERY harsh. I'm not going to sugar coat what's wrong here and lead you down the garden path. I don't rap, I don't jive, I'm going to tell it to you like it is: You have problems in accessability, design and coding.

First off it opens up to a big blank white nothingness - aha, flash with no fallback content so that's instant /FAIL/.

Turn flash on and... crap, annoying music. Auto playing music + website == complete miserable total malfing /FAIL/ that only 12 year olds still do for their myspace crap.

The flash is an even bigger /FAIL/ because it chews up a third of my 1200 high display - people on 1024x768 aren't even going to have CONTENT of the page displayed... Gets even worse when it doesn't keep animating resulting in 90% of it being a static picture - yeah, that's worth the 718k file... which BTW is ten times the size I'm usually comfortable having an entire PAGE (HTML+CSS+IMAGES) being. Do yourself a huge favor and pitch the flash in the trash - there's a reason it's called flash and not substance.

NOT that the design is even 1024 friendly being a fraction too wide (remember, you need to subtract 32px for the scrollbar and window-frame), and as starting_big noticed, there's no content so people landing on the page for the first time are struggling to find your about link...

Which is lost in the sea of links. Too many menu items with too many footer links results in a jumbled mess nobody is going to take the time to investigate.

This is excasterbated by the absurdly undersized fixed metric fonts. It's ignoring the system metric on large font machines, and are well under the 12px 'usability minimum' so you are effectively alienating most of the population under 30 - I have to zoom in 50% under opera to read any of your page on my machine.

My reviews always touch upon the code driving it, and it's much akin to the rest of this review. The document contains invalid characters for the character set meaning it can't even be validated - we fix that to find it has 336 validation errors. You do not have HTML here, you have gibberish.

Tables for layout on a single column design, presentational images inlined, redundant title attributes, lists not marked up as lists, legacy tags that have no place on a modern page, invalid attribute use, and 44k of HTML for 8k of actual content meaning it's easily three times as much code as needed.

You've gone nutzo on third party 'counters/analytics' for information you can parse without the bloated scripts out of your server logs, pick one, not three.

Normally I tell people there is more of 1998 to their website than 2008 - in this case it's more like 1995.

So... it's a disaster. My advice on this is pretty much the broken record treatment - throw it away and start over as there's nothing here worth salvaging.

[LivingLegend]

Hello,

I did not navigate your site very long, but when it first loaded I did not know what the site was about; I had to actively look around before I found out it was about Armenia. Aside form that, and without much navigating, it looked nice.

that was my first impresion too