My rabbit website is attached to my dog website. As much as I would rather not manage two sites, I am thinking of splitting the chicken/rabbit site from the dog site.

First I would like to know if the rabbit link is easy to see, and if the format is ok.

the site is www.showgermanshepherds.info

The link at the bottom is Urban Farm (I tried to change the nav name but can't)
Mouse over it and two links should pop out, click on Rabbits.

thanks

The first thing that I noticed was how attractive your site is!

The second thing I noticed was how slowly the second German Shepherd image was loading. I've got a very good computer, and it still took a good half a minute for the image to load. The image is DSCI0240.jpg, and the reason it is loading slowly is that the original image is very large, and you are scaling it within the browser to a relatively small size: 2,919px × 2,129px (scaled to 253px × 200px). Browsers can do small amounts of scaling very quickly, but this is scaling to less than 10% of the actual size. This causes the browser to think really hard, and take way too long to load the image. If you resize the image to the desired size, and then upload it to your site, it will load in the blink of an eye.

Once I moused-over the "Urban Farm" button, "Rabbits" was indeed easy to see. I clicked on it, and you have another scaling issue with one of your rabbit pictures: SS850272.jpg, 3,264px × 2,448px (scaled to 341px × 300px), titled "BR's Broken Hearts (Broken Castor) 6/30/11 Bridge's OA3A (Broken Blue) x Ayre Agent Smith (Chinchilla)".

I just now (after writing this whole post, stuff below included) noticed that there are little arrows on the left menu denoting submenus. They are very difficult to see, being tiny medium grey on medium brown. If they were changed to bright yellow or black or something, they would be easy to see.

Now I will get nit-picky, as you have asked for critique. These things don't affect the operation of your website:

I run Firefox with NoScript, and I allowed all your scripts to be sure I could see everything.

Below the image labeled "Sabian's Alter Ego v DawnLew, CGC, TDI", there are several banners and things. None of them are displaying properly. They appear jumbled, with graphics where they don't belong, and text where it doesn't belong. I'll provide a screenshot if you like.

This appears twice near the bottom of the page:
"Visit a complete list of WebRing memberships here
Powered by WebRing."
The first time, it is above the Next Day Pets Cool Site award, and doesn't seem to belong there. The second time is below the WebRing graphic, where it belongs. The word "here" is a link, but I found that by accident -- the word is either the same color as the rest of the sentence, or very nearly so, and so you can't tell it is a link. You could make the whole sentence the link, or you could change the color.

The "Cool Site" award is not displaying properly in Firefox. The links in it should be in small type at the bottom of the graphic, but they instead appear to be written over most of the graphic. To give you an idea what I mean, if I read everything in order, it reads: "Cool Site of the Day Dogs Pet Supplies Dog Award Breeders For quality websites about: Frontline Pet Meds Revolution"

Below your Bravenet counter is this: "<a href="http://www.mybannermaker.com" target="_blank"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/3TQXu.jpg" alt='Create your own banner at mybannermaker.com!' border=0 /></a><br>" I tried to manually view the image, and it does not exist.

__________ Tue Jan 03, 2012 1:11 pm __________

I just viewed the site in Internet Explorer, and the scaling issue is the same (as I expected).

The nit-picky things, which I expected to be corrected, were mostly the same. The only real difference was that the "Best of Pets" gold ribbon award appeared to the right of the other banners, where it belonged, instead of overlaying them.

Thanks.

Strangely enough, of all the things I can do. I have no idea how to rescale picts, which is why I have no avatar. All of my picts were over 125K and larger than 100x100. I ususally just load them up straight from my digital camera, sometimes from windows live photo gallery, so what ever size they are they just are.

Any suggestions on how to resize them?

I never thought about the arrows, don't remember ever seeing them, probably because I already knew the links were there. They are a part of the template, not sure how to change them, or if I can alter the template. Going to try that now.

I have not been able to fix any of the banners. They are all cut and paste, and I use the WYSIWYG editor, and don't know what to do with HTML. I tried viewing it in html and just spacing them differently, but they still jumble up. They cannot be dragged to where I want them in the WYSIWYG editor. There was a lot of cut and pasting from my old site to this one, and I believe some of the script got lost in the translation. I will probably have to remove several of the banners, esp. the webring link, because sometimes it completely hijacks my site!

Looks good!

I also just had to add your GSD's are beautiful!! I am currently raising a GSD for Pilot Dogs of Columbus and have fallen in love with the breed. Do you ever go to any UKC shows? I may be going to Wapakoneta in April with my sheltie, maybe I will see you there.

I have only been to one. AKC showing is expensive and time consuming, so when I finish one I will probably try the other. Also at this point, I am showing a fairly angulated dog, more AKC type than UKC type.

You have to resize them on your computer before you upload them to your image hosing site.
Use MS Paint if you have Windows. There are lots of free basic image editing programs and software you can use online or download.

Yes, MS Paint or Irfanview: http://www.irfanview.com/

For Paint, here are instructions for 7, Vista, and XP: http://www.oregoncoastphotoclub.com/dow ... Resize.htm

When you bring up the "Stretch & Skew" window (or "Resize"), the percent you put in is the percentage of the original size you want the final image to be. Thus, putting in 25% will knock it down to 1/4 of the original size (reduce it by 3/4), not reduce it by 1/4. Put in the same % on horizontal and vertical, to keep the aspect ration correct and prevent distortion of your image. Save your image with a new name, and be sure it is saving it as a jpg, not bmp.

For Irfanview, click Image > Resize/Resample. You can set the new size either to a certain size, or to a certain percentage. In size, you can resize it to a certain number of pixels, centimeters, or inches. Make sure "preserve aspect ratio" is checked, and then enter a value into one box. It will automatically set the other box for you. Click "OK" and save your image with a new name.

I understand the issues with the banners. It's actually why I learned basic HTML. I hate templates, because they don't let me do what I want to. I've been messing with computers since the early '80s, so I don't like being boxed in.

never saw "urban farm" anywhere on the site. So no rabbit info for me to see.

and I looked everywhere I could for it.

In Chrome it's a HUGE website. I needed to click and slide to get around the site.

ah.. now I just clicked on a link that said Barred R... and that took me to chickens.. and then I found my way to the rabbits!

Sorry Right after I read the first post I went about trying to fix some things. I thought Barred R might be more obvious than Urban Farm, so I changed that first. I'm trying to condense some pages to make it easier to navigate. It is really skinny in Firefox, kind of strange. I think it's optimized for IE, which I never use.

lovely site, even better buns, and very interesting 'pencil test'

I probably is optimized for IE. However, it isn't skinny in my Firefox. It spans the whole screen (and I have a relatively large screen). The middle pane is like 9" wide or so, and the two sidebars are about 1 1/2" each.

I actually have to scroll sideways in firefox on my computer. It's wider than the page so the calendar and statistics are sitting off screen. That seems to be all that doesn't fit though.

As my computer classes and work have taught me, these days it's best to design everything for firefox. Usage of firefox has actually become required in many work and school environments. If using raw html or a good editor you can add an if statement that if someone is using IE ignore the following code and use this code to space everything so it works on both. I forget the entire syntax of that command because I never bother. Maybe if my site breaks in IE it will encourage more people to change to a better browser and increase internet security.

You can also easily resize and edit pictures by uploading to photobucket.com and using their editor then save the pictures or link it direct to your site from photobucket. If you have limited space to save your webpage depending what service you are using linking pics from photobucket can really cut down on everything. Only problem is if you move a photobucket picture it does not keep it's link. The link changes to match the new location so you have to go through and redo anything you used that link on.

I've actually written my sites for Firefox, but I check them in IE and change things if it doesn't look like I want it to.

I appreciate scalable websites, and I make sure mine are scalable. Rather than fixed widths, the body of the page will be 80% of the width, and the side menu 20%... stuff like that. I'll even do it with images, making the width scalable, so the images will resize according to the width of the monitor displaying them. That way, I avoid having things display poorly on a low-resolution monitor, or one that's set for large print for accessibility.

You do have to learn HTML for that stuff, though.

Skysthelimit is using a WYSIWYG editor. I think that her site looks really good, just with a few things that would make it even better. The only reason I can think for me not having issues with the width of the site in Firefox is that I have a widescreen monitor.