Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Since I am doing it all "on my own", there are still a few changes/fixes that need to be made.  But, just wondering how people feel about the "look".  My big problem is the yellow bar to the right of the top picture (welcome to Vancouver)  The tall green vertical line running up the right of the page, I would like to go all the way to the top, rather than just end there.

http://www.europeaninhomeservices.com

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"German VOICES Vancouver"
For German-speaking Canadians in Greater Vancouver
http://mitglied.lycos.de/vancouvergerman
germanvoices@yahoo.ca
Wir sprechen auch Deutsch!
Please send us your jokes, quotes, pictures, feedback or suggestions! Frohe Weihnachten!

I like the overall feel of your site and understand that you are doing this on your own.  Im not sure it portrays exactally what you are trying to get across at first glance. I would move the "whats new" area to a location farther down on the site so you can explain your business in as few words as possible at the top somewhere.

As for the line and the yellow area -  You need to change the margin and padding of the site to 0. Then just have an image the same size as th site to run vertically up the site. I would recommend using CSS instead of tables to design your site. 

Hi :-)

First of all, I think this is a fantastic idea! I`ve thought for years, that with all the young unwed mothers out there on welfare, they could be joined with working moms as "au paire" girls. Both sides would win.

I took a closer look, barely seeing the yellow cell to the right of the upper row. The first thing is that you`ve got a table within a table, and the outer table isn`t set up very well. I`m not at ALL a developer, but I have a sense of how tables work fairly well.

You`ll probably do a whole lot better with cascading style sheets (CSS), but that`ll mean learning how all that works. There`s some good stuff on the Web, if you just use Google for the term, and explore.

In the meantime, your table looks like it`s about 600px wide. That`s pretty narrow, and I`ve found that 900-950 works very well on most of today`s monitors.

If you set that first table to 950, then you can span the top row and make the outer border the green. That`ll go all the way to the top. But first, you have a couple of extra Paragraph (<p>) tags above the table. They`re putting white space at the top, and that`s keeping the right border from going all the way up.

I`m wondering if you can see the source code in whatever editor you`re using? If not, then you need a different editor. Mozilla`s "Nvu" is very good, and free. It has many of the features in DreamWeaver, and there`s a good online tutorial. It also has a CSS tool that helps you set up styles quite well.

Again, I`m not at all a developer, and I`m supposing someone will join us in this topic. They`ll have many more ideas. For now, though, it looks like the top paragraph tags, the unjoined (spanned) row, and the narrow table are causing your problem. At least it looks that way to me, anyway. :-D

On a side note, it`s not good form to mix two basically different font types. You`re split between serif and sans serif. People tend to be able to read sans serif (e.g., Arial, Helvetica) more easily than the serif fonts (e.g., Times Roman). Choose one or the other, and bring them into conformity.

The page is 40% right side whitespace.

It`s hard to put my thumb on it, but it seems like the middle content doesn`t have .... I don`t know ... like graphical continuity with the sidebar?

Your top picture is getting background showing through. The problem seems to be too many overlapping/unnecessary tags. Like you don`t need a td tag, div tag, and span tag all on the same cell with just one image in it. I think that is where the problem is getting with overlapping styles and phantom color backgrounds.

Where ever you are making that green bar ... take it off and just give the whole table/page a 1-pixel right side border. In your table tag, you could put
style="border-right: thin solid #99cccc"
and that would give you a band running up the whole side.

Hope this helps ...