Design ideas needed for a simple page.

[BITM@D]

I have decided to make a page where I post all my bookmarks. I come across many excellent and useful web sites in all categories and want to share them on a page in case they are useful to some of you as well. I don't bookmark a page unless it has something worthwile to offer and so I think my collection is probably worthy of publishing on the web.

I worried over the design for a while and decided to just put something up and let it evolve from there.

I chose ivory as a bg color and there are no graphics apart from maroon Horizontal lines. To assist in the 'appearance' of speed (the page is nearly 100kb) I have broken up each category into separate tables because some browsers don't display the contents of a table until it's fully loaded and with over 450 links that would make for a very large table.

Anyway, my query is basically one of design. I don't like the way it looks at all and the categories don't make sense if I arrange them all alphabetically (although I'm working on using some creative naming to get around it at the moment). Crickey's even I get lost!

Here is my question:
What - in your opinion - would be a better way to arrange so many links in a way that promotes browsing and discovery?

For example, more descriptive links, seperate pages for each category, frames - yuksome, some graphics - I'm getting better at using photoshop for example I turned this (133kb jpg) into this (200kb jpg), so I'm pretty sure I can knock up an interface If I really have to and I'm working on a logo but it's slow work because my design skills aren't that good (obviously).

I know that I have found many good web sites accidently while I was looking for something completely unrelated and that is what I want to promote with my page.

If you have a few minutes to spare I'd appreciate your thoughts. Here's the link to my page, it's called Bill's Internet Guide.

[Cygnus-X1]

First things first,

Plenty of info there to be had!!!

Nice cept that the colors and the all-text look a bit too outdated.
I expected to see last updated Saturday 22nd September 1997!

Navigation is superb!
It just needs to be spiced up a little color wise.

There is plenty of well thought out research and much resources to be had, thank you for compiling this for us.

Robert

[BITM@D]

Thanks Cygnus.

rofl re: '97, perhaps it should be plain old white.

Ok, so it's ok with you that's it's all on one page?

I'll stick with the text navigation if you like it so much.

But, what to do with the text and how to add colour?

Maybe some coloured table headers for category headings?

I'm glad you like the idea though. It has given me a boost in confidence that this is worth doing.

[BITM@D]

All my recommended sites are now coloured red to make it easier to distinguish the links that I recommend as particularly useful or interesting.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

[strangerstill]

One suggestion: use CSS. Your code seems a bit overloaded with FONT tags and suchlike. And it will make it easier to do global style changes, which you may well do quite a few times as the site evolves...

Nice site though.

[BITM@D]

Are you following me around Stranger?

Yes I definately need to learn how to write style sheets.

I have a few links on my page but can anyone suggest any beginner guides to CSS?

[strangerstill]

Nah, just online this time of day/night.

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/ is the place to go for the definitive guide. It's fairly self-explanatory.

[BITM@D]

Thanks, Stranger.

I'll check it out while I'm at work (it's 8am monday morning here).

Thanks for the link, I'll post it on my site tonight.

Gotta love those guys down at the consortium.

Have a good day people.

[rh71]

check out Bradbury TopStyle as a CSS editor. It should come built-in with Homesite... well it did with ColdFusion Studio, which is practically the same thing.

http://www.bradsoft.com/topstyle/index.asp eval available.

[BITM@D]

Thanks RH I'll give it a try.

Did you find the site useful?