New site, all about food, please review.

[roodlemcdoodle]

I have started a new site on food and was looking for any suggestions and ideas?

Its my first site and would welcome any comments, its only a week old so the content is a little lite still but the concept is there.

Please let me know what you all think.

Thanks.

www.cookingrosemary.co.uk

[Chris]

Your design is mid 90's, for a just launched website that isn't good. Dress for the job you want, not the job you have. Design for the traffic you want, not the traffic you have. Put more work into it.

The image slideshow is both unnecessary and a bandwidth hog. Drop it.

[Generalissimo]

I don't quite think the design is mid-90s (although the text is far too large, at least start by resizing it) and I personally some early to mid 90s designs are very effective (especially with adsense), see BrainyQuote.com for example. Chris' own design of his newest site on TV switchover is currently hardly dressing for success...

What I will say is if you're going for an international audience and want a site name that isn't just aimed at search engines try to get a .com. That's one of the lessons Chris and his site taught me (I used to make brandable.co.uk website aimed at an international market, now I use .coms must of the time)

[roodlemcdoodle]

Thank you for your constructive comments. i will look into resizing the text. i do feel that chris could have been a bit easier on me as it is my first website.

Im not trying to go for an international audıence what gave you that impression?

i am also starting a sister site that will be based in london but is no where finshed.

as for the food pictutres, i have also asked around in other forums and have had lots of good feedback about them. most people have stated they would lıke to see more?

[Chris]

Chris' own design of his newest site on TV switchover is currently hardly dressing for success...

That is a free template, and the site has a maximum life of 12 months. So I didn't bother putting work into it. For a site you know will be taken offline in one year, there isn't much point to invest any more than you need to.

Roodle... you can include food pictures, but the way you're doing it means on every page view they all have to load (in larger sizes than you need) to do the slideshow. Even on my broandband it took over 30 seconds for your page to fully load, someone on dialup would take a few minutes, that is unacceptable. People will abandone your page before it fully loads.

Honestly, I would probably recommend getting a copy of wordpress, finding a free template for it, and use that as your starting point. I believe there are also image gallery mods for wordpress that will fulfill that need as well.

[Chris]

http://themes.wordpress.net/columns/...ion-fruity-10/

That, for instance.

[roodlemcdoodle]

i all ready have wordpress installed and use it for the blog section, i also have phpbb with a forum,

i will take into consideration about just posting a few pictures on the home page instead of the slide show to enable quicker viewing.

i just find it funny how my site got reviewed but yet wasn't really looked at properly?

thank you any way for all your comments.