How goes it. I am a just an amature webmaster. Only started learning to make the college paintball club website 3 years ago and there it took off. The search for more content and features fueled my interest.

Anyways, PaintBaller.ie - Home page it my website. The home of paintballers in ireland. The entire site is built on a portal system with a phpbb2 core.

I am more interested in comments and suggestions for content, layout and navigation rather than the technical side.

Cheers.

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http://www.paintballer.ie

hmm, 44 views and not one comment. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

ok...

Its a good and simple layout but here are the things that i don't like.

the XTC advertisement and the bebo and youtube logos instantly grab my attention, taking away from the content on your site.

There is too much information on the front page, i would normally keep front page articles short, and if they have to be long, truncate them and have a "more..." link at the end. There really only needs to be one or two of those truncated articles there as well.

I would take the mini map off the front page and put it in a contact us or about us page, to reduce clutter.

The page load info should either be styled, or removed. Your normal users aren't interested in it.

Also because its a phpbb skin, and not your own design is probably why you're not getting too much feedback on it.

Remember, keep it simple, your designing a website for your users/customers, not for other deisgners to see cool things. Its common knowledge that if there's too much information on a web page, users lose interest, in generally less than 10-15 seconds if what they're looking for isn't right in front of them, or readily easy to find.

Your pages don't validate
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I think your images could be better as well, ut i think at the moment you should work with de-cluttering.

cheers for the feedback. I'l get onto some of the suggestions straight away

Okdoeky, I have made some changes as per suggested. I have cleared up the main page a bit now. Havent gotten around to changing the adds just yet.

What else can I do to help improve the looks?

*I understand that its only a skin and that I didn't actually design it etc, I am merly trying to customise something. Webmastering is merly only a hobby

Hi, I like the hottie in the first pic... but that's just me

Nice layout and good use of site. I am viewing at 1280 in Firefox and it's going great.

I like the site and might refer to it for pointers in the future.

G

Just wondering if I can get some more feedback.

I have tidied up the site a good bit in the last few months for visitors. Registered users get to see a lot more stuff such as a shout box, poll, more menu options etc.

If you disabled the really annoying challenge/response on your email it would be a good start. It's a really bad antispam technique!

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The what now?

That email that you have to reply back to, saying that you are a human thing?

Yes. It's called challenge response and it is fundamentally wrong. Either disable it or find a proper spam filtering solution

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