as for your site.. It looks a little too basic and amateur in my opinion.
I think the reason is that you've overstated everything.. Its like "LOOK AT ME, I'M A BIG TITLE!!!MWUHAHHAA!!"
The images for the mouseover on the menu doen't work (in firefox at least). This might be due to a missing file or two? Not sure...
Some pages use frames, other's use tables. Both are generally accepted as bad practice for page layout.
Frames: Can cause problems when using favourites. Which page does the browser bookmark? They are, however, usefull in some situations...
Tables: The problem with tables is browsers tend not to render them untill it knows exactly how big the contents will be. This can make pages seem sluggish.
Why do you have buttons AND a drop down navigation menu? The drop down could work really well if you could work on a it a little more (for example, the way [href]www.deviantart.com[/href] use drop downs in the browse section to filter content), but for the contents of you site - a nice simple navigation menu would work well.
Did you make that page from a template? If so - can I suggest you spend a few hours to learn the basics of HTML. Its one of the most simple languages ever. Try to avoid javascript unless you absolutely need to. It will make the page more compatible. Use CSS where you can. CSS is easy - you can just define rules for the way you want everything to look, then instead of people having to download the rules for everything on every page load, they get the CSS file once and cache it. It REALLY speeds things up.
http://www.w3schools.com/
This site is the best one on the web (excluding TGC's sites obviously
). It covers everything a beginner needs to learn about website making. I use it often for a reference when I get blank moments and cant remember exactly how certain tags are worded.
Some usefull links:
http://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/main.htm
http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/best_and_worst.cfm
Take a look through those and make notes about why you think they're good and bad. Then try to recreate those points in your site.
Other advice - dont just start working on the page. Sit down and think first. What do you want it to look like? Pick a colour theme...
http://www.colorschemer.com/
That will help you keep nice colours together.
Navigation - keep it simple and easy to use. I hate sites where I have to click here, then there, then over there, then pick something and click go before I finally get to the page I want.
Scrolling - I personally dont like it. Most people dont. If what they want isn't on the page, or withing a few clicks of the scroll whell, they'll leave the page. Keep your pages small.
Resolution - what is the target resolution? DO NOT make the page work best at 1280x1024. As much as I would like it because my TFT works well at that, some people (about 25% believe it or not) still use 800x600.. Most people (about half) use 1024x768.
Compatibility.. If you only use IE - you're a moron (no offence). IE is famous for being a crap browser. It disobey's nearly every W3 rule. It shouldn't be used. Unfortunately for us website makers - it is. Obviously then, it should work in IE - however, it should also work perfectly in other browsers too. Some strange people like me use Mac's with Firefox and/or Safari. Others use Netscape. If you're serious about your page, get FireFox at least and make sure your pages works in both IE and Firefox. If it does its fairly safe to say it will work in more than just IE.
Hope this helps
