hatton
Perch
Testing in Firefox on Ubuntu Linux 6.10 as well as Konqueror
First off, you have a good header. Then you KILL it with your background and images. Also you have alternate text for all of your images which is great.
You have TOO MANY IMAGES on your main page. I'm running at close to T1 speeds and it took the site over 10 seconds to load all 50 images on the main page. You're driving visitors away right there... remember, if you don't grab them in less than 5 seconds with the front page, you've shown them the door.
I had to drop my font size twice from the default for the text to show correctly - I think that's because the CSS generator you used set the size to "12"... 12 what?
Even after I did that you've got issues with the images and their captions on the right-hand side. They're overlapping.
The content on the front page is one big block of text. There is no spacing, no distinguishable paragraphs and no way that I'm reading it.
The menu on the left is confusing as well... there does not seem to be any logical order that you put them in... you just put them there. Take some time and organize the menus into groups or categories if you expect anyone to use them. Also, it looks as if you have multiple items linking to the same page ("Fishing Report" and "All About PV")
I'll end it where I began - with your images. DO NOT use a giant picture as a background. At best it slows down a browser and at worse it never gets seen. I just viewed the properties of your background image ... 8o It's HUGE! 1164px by 1558 px! Almost a MEG in size.
General rule of thumb - total content for a web page should be as SMALL as possible to allow for loading times. Typically less than 100k, preferably closer to 50k. You've got 1 element on your page that is 10 times the size your whole page should be! Aside from the picture that you "sliced", the rest of your pictures on the front page are impossible to see.
My suggestioin - Read through the information found here:
Web Building Tutorial
Pay special attention to what is said in the Web Design, Web Users and Web Standards pages.
- Some other tutorials I found:
Web Design Tutorials
Website content writing tips that work
You've got very good content and good intentions, now we just have to get it somewhere that people will actually stick around to see it!