New site - useful or no? Attractive?

[ajmorris]

Created a new local portal site and
would like feedback. The site covers
Larimer County Colorado, including
Fort Collins, Loveland, Estes Park,
Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado
State u., etc. About 400 pages so far,
with lots of 'sticky' material. Would
appreciate comments on any and all
aspects from appearance to commercial
prospects to functionality to loading
speed to whatever.

http://www.larimerco.com/

[andrewkooi]

Hi,

Your website index page took a long time to load, even though I am using broadband.

In the end, I could not even load the site. Is your site still operational? I keep on getting a Cannot find server error.

[ajmorris]

Sorry, the server was down for about 10 hours today. I have two other sites with same company and they were down too ... first time in three years I've been dealing with them that sites went down so long. They are up and running again though, so please take another look. I'm assuming slow load was related to problem that crashed system.

[nilsmo]

Very colorful...

[bluesrover]

I would move the mountains/title pic to the upper left corner, stretch it across the page as a full header. you've got scrolling anyhow, might as well go with a full header look. also the text in the jpeg is is pixelated.
Stretch the links under the mountain pic across the page.
Also state the purpose of the page in a prominent place. I know it's a portal but many may not.
Also the light blue cell on the left could stand to be toned down, maybe grab a tone from the mountain pic. i've found that incorporating tones from the header into the page helps to give the page flow and consistency. I would also color the cells behind the sign in form and google, the same as the color of the cells that are below them.
My two cents, looks like a usefull site.
:cool:

[Barbi]

Your site loaded pretty fast on my PC (I have DSL), yet the only thing I didn't really like is the color scheme. You have quite a few shades of green which (sorry, in my opinion) clash with each other, especially the green heading in the center, which is so different from the two background colors you selected for the left and right columns. I think maybe grabbing a tone from the mountain pic would help substantially. :)

Good luck with your site -- quite a lot of good info on there.

[ajmorris]

Thanks for the feedback everyone. The colors will be adjustable by users, so it will be easier to change when I've written that code. The greens were replaced with blues a few days ago, but those are defaults, members will be able to set any colors they want.

Because fonts size can be changed by users there are limits to design options, but bluesrover is right, maybe having the header span all (or even 2 out of 3 cells) across the top might make it look a little less boxy, I'll experiment with those ideas. Don't want the graphic to get too large though as I'm concerned with load time. It takes 5 to 10 seconds on 32K dialup most of the time ... but every couple hours a user gets hit with RSS update or weather update time, which slows it further.

Anyhow, thanks again.