Well cypher personally I prefer this one.

Not much of an images person myself, can do some simple basic things. What did you need?

You may want to post your question in the graphics category.

2) i do not know how to lighten an image... if anyone can help...!

Depends which program you use to work on your images. See if any of them have a watermark - watermarking an image generally lightens it up.

As for your site, I see a wonderful, excited, young person wanting to get to the marrow of life. You are doing what creative people your age enjoy doing -- rethinking what you've been taught to discover as much life as you can grasp, like a contestant in a money-blowing machine, trying to grab as much of the vitality and excitement of life as you can, as quickly as you can. Quite exhiliarating, but also quite frenzied.

There is an enjoyable excitement in that, but also a problem. You say that you want to rise to the top of the SERP and have many come to your site to enjoy it, but who do you want to come, and what do you want them to gather from your site?

Any writing needs a purpose and a particular audience. At 51, not an engineer, and having a fairly firm grasp as to the purpose of life, I strongly suspect I am not the audience you want for your site. I'm not sure it matters what you do, or don't do with your site, until you can pinpoint, in two sentences or less, what your purpose is, and who will enjoy/need it. What are your keywords? What are your long-tail phrases? Who wants to see your site and why? Once you focus on exactly who your audience is, and what they are interested in finding, then you have a direction for your plans - you're carving out a niche.

Not knowing who your audience is, I can only say for myself, that the two essays I read, simply didn't ring true with me, nor were they helpful in any situations I come across. Then again, I am about as opposite of you as is possible for this world, so I doubt I am the audience you want. Who would enjoy your essays and why? I know you want to actually write 1000 articles, but in doing so, you need to have some expertise in your field. I don't see any expertise, and am not sure of the field that interests you. I do find it interesting that as an engineer, you chose life lessons. It seems important to you to share them.

That's a potential problem. You have little experience with life, apart from the 22 years you've lived, most in a structured setting. You have more experience in engineering then I do. I have to suggest that you write about what you truly know that will remain a constant throughout your life, or, if you chose a subject you do not know, take a lot of time to research it, before writing about it. If it truly is life you want to write about, then check out authors known to bring vivid imagery into their concepts of life (Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, David Thoreau, Ernest Hemmingway, etc.) If it's life's lessons, try some motivational speaker's books, or even the self-help books. Dale Carnigie's doesn't suck!

And since you're determined to write so many articles, I would start with some writing classes or study as many books on the subject as you can find. At this time, you have the desire of William Shakespeare, but the writing style of George Shakespeare. Writing requires a lot of learning -- at least as much as engineering. Learn as you read and practice what you learn. And, while learning, I bet it will get easier and easier to cut down the description of your site, so you will always have your audience in focus, as you write.

I hope I haven't discourage you. With your gung-ho attitude, I have no doubt you can make your site fit perfectly into your audiences' desire, and will, one day, write 1000 articles that will hit the web like fire to an M80! Just keep your excitement going, it's catching on.

I am really overwhelmed with your response,
Firstly thanks a million for the lovely review and the time you took out for me.
Warm regards and a hand of friendship towards you...
I am not trying hard on money but i wish to earn a hell of a reputation and fame through it..( and little royalty income to be truthful).
Every one loves to be loved and likes to be liked and i am no exception, just that i try real hard to attain it.
lets hope i am successful in achieving that

The background is a bit wierd.. the base colours(RGB) attract the eye, howvere the load time horrendously long(on my computer), and a security message appeared- you must have some kind of appalet running. The site setup is somewhat primitive, and could be spruced up by a few more images. The content is confusing. Overall the suites it's content, however a better layout would be good...

webcrawler559 wrote:

The background is a bit wierd.. the base colours(RGB) attract the eye, howvere the load time horrendously long(on my computer), and a security message appeared- you must have some kind of appalet running. The site setup is somewhat primitive, and could be spruced up by a few more images. The content is confusing. Overall the suites it's content, however a better layout would be good...

Have removed the background image, and worked on the load time as well... hope it is now better.
Suggestions on background welcomed,
Presently trying to manage the content in a better flow.

Hello

I looked at your site today and I agree it is way to busy and slow loading. It must give your server h-e-l-l to try to parse all that. Have you thought about cacheing the output page? Of course if you did the busy busy would be gone but It would load fast and save you a lot of bandwith. The boxed at the top are almost imposable to read and hurts your eyes to look at it. It needs some more color of some type at the top also because it looks bland up there. I wish you the best of luck with it!

Buckeyman wrote:

Hello

Have you thought about cacheing the output page? Of course if you did the busy busy would be gone but It would load fast and save you a lot of bandwith.

How do I do that...? I don't understand anything about it...

Hello people... have changed the look and feel...
Just removed the table borders and some alignments... please tell me if this suits, and should i change the inner pages like this too??

secondly,
which is better the one visible or
www.decipheringlife.com/main1.htm
(earlier it was www.decipheringlife.com/main2.htm )
any other recommendations are welcomed.

That is a great improvement well done

The next two things you should look at (now that you are getting te hang of swinging things around ) is 1: Your left hand menu looks a lil bit like a group of adverts so it it took me awhile before i clicked on it, perhaps you can try structure is more with background images or bullets.

2:Another structural change would be the colors, not changing them but using them to control the eyes. When i look at the page i dont know what im looking at really, my eyes just kinda dart left and right until i find something to look at, the idea with using color to structure your page is that (like your borders used to do) people will be able to tell almost instantly where the menu, content and articles are placed. Perhaps playing with variations of grey and blue will fit into your site easily.

Good Luck Well done thus far

Ryan_steyn wrote:

That is a great improvement well done

The next two things you should look at (now that you are getting te hang of swinging things around ) is 1: Your left hand menu looks a lil bit like a group of adverts so it it took me awhile before i clicked on it,<b> perhaps you can try structure is more with background images or bullets.</b>

2:Another structural change would be the colors, (like your borders used to do) people will be able to tell almost instantly where the menu, content and articles are placed. <b>Perhaps playing with variations of grey and blue will fit into your site easily. </b>

Kindly elaborate the highlighted points. I am confused and have a little idea about what you are trying to say...
and
1)   which one is more suited out of the two.....

2)   should I change all the pages of the site... as my site is a premittive kind, I'll have to make all changes manually...

First a hint on formatting in this forum, if you want to make text bold, use the brackets [ ] instead of the greater than / less than signs < > around the b.  You can click where it says BBCode: on when posting a message for more formatting codes.

On to Ryan's suggestions.  The problem that I see with menu, is that it looks too much like those Google adsense sections you see on the made for adsense pages.  I don't know the best way to fix this without taking out the extra information, but like Ryan suggests, you may try putting a light background image behind each as a method of differentiating them from adsense ads.  You might also consider increasing the font sizes.

The second suggestion is easier.  Look to the left of my message.  See how the area with my information is gray instead of white?  This breaks up the area and automatically lets you know they are different bits of information.  Doing something like this to separate the right and left columns from the center (main information) would make you pages a little easier to understand.  You have a good start on the right side, but I would bring that gray up to the bottom of your banner.

Steven has hit the nail on the head. Im not sure if i can go further than his explanations

I would suggest you work/study up on your css, remembering that an external css page is easier to work with than an on page one, bearing in mind also that having css on each page defeats everything that is good about css (IMO)... having your css in one stylesheet which you include like this

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="stylesheet.css" />

Will keep your pages neater and make them easier to change.

Then you can change your entire website simply by linking each page to this one css file.

Next, try keep this external information idea going throughout your site, there is no need to rewrite your menu on every page when it could also be one html file included on every page (like the external stylesheet it will only need to load once).

If your site is on an apache (php supporting) server you could simply include a file like this:
mainMenu.html

<a href="home.php">HOME</a> <br />

<a href="page1.php">PAGE 1</a> <br />

<a href="page2.php">PAGE 2</a> <br />

<a href="page3.php">PAGE 3</a> <br />

<a href="page4.php">PAGE 4</a>

Using this line on every page:

<?php include ("mainMenu.html") ?>

The only file you will need to change to change your menu on the entire site is mainMenu.html

That is just an idea of what you can do to make your site upgrade worthwhile and functional, there is no need for it to be complex or tedious

Thanks Ryan,
You have been a great help to me, Your post was really very helpful and it made me take the initiative of learning Java. I now have an idea about basic CSS and JS too. Am now planning a major makeover in the site and I'll try to make the site cleaner.
Still I have a lot to learn and apply, your support is a great boost.

Thanks and Regards,
Cipher.

of course every site needs improvement, but i think that a pretty nice page
so for entertainment made

keep it on

cheers CO

First off I like your site and even submitted a link exchange for my blog-I am kinda confused here by everyone's comments-when I go to buy a product the last thing I worry about is what color the site is and it does'nt deter me from my goal-the product I want to purchase- your content is excellant-that is what I look at-not where you put things or what color your site is-the most I think when I see a site that is done by the owner is man they should of got a website designer to design their website-not oh I'm not going to buy there product because the color is wrong-very strange-Your site looks fine to me-I bookmarked it to really give it a good reading on a nite that I am not busy. I think some of the comments here are very damaging to someone's self esteem, they have obviously taken time and money to do these websites-And quite frankly-The layout and color of a page does not make a sale-a product that is legitamate and not a scam is what makes more sales, I would be more worried about promoting my product to the public than what color my page is.  My sites are not that great-I didn't go to school to be a website designer-but I do the best I can with what knowledge I have of computers.  I have seen some really crapy websites that have lots of hits and sales-why? There product is good!

With the purpose of the site, have you considered converting to a blog?

@ Fannystice - Well then, i think the safe answer here is ... WRONG!! A website is not like putting an ad in a newspaper where it is irrelevant what it looks like as people will read it regardless. On a website you have about 3 seconds to convince someone to stick around, if your colors are sporadic, to distracting, shocking and lack professionalism (none of this applies to yours cipher ) then you can pretty much say goodbye to most of your customers. You need to build trust with online customers and there arent a ton of ways to do this, color is one though, hence you need to make sure your color scheme is welcoming, appealing, easy to read on etc... Its incredibly naive and dangerous to tell someone that the colors of a site are irrelevant and that the advice given to them (please take careful not of the term "advice") is demoralizing in any way.

We help people improve their sites, not because we like telling people where they went wrong but rather because they ask us for our help as they KNOW they can do better if they just knew what they missed.

Definitely a person would like to buy stuff from a mall that looks great and not by a road side vendor even if the product is really good. The case varies but the online market is a place that works partially (not completely ) on looks.
Thanks for the post FannyStice, it really brought a smile on my face...
The subject reminded me of a website it is a simple blog by steve pavlina if you have heard about the person,
it is a very simple blog, but the content is amazing, the guy is cashing on thousands of dollars and still is not worried about the appearance.
So the point is correct that the appearance does not matter if you have a content that can have people as referers, (remember mouth to mouth publicity?) even I am here promoting a blog unknown to me.... this is the power of good content. I still have a ling way to go... and I am really loving the support I get here at SR
Thanks Ryan as you have contributed greatly to my website. It motivates me and also challenges me to improve on my potential and hone my skills.

Timous wrote:

With the purpose of the site, have you considered converting to a blog?

ok considering now... what do you suggest?
I am not familliar with blogging concept... I tried a hand on it one or two times but it didn't materialize... kindly guide

Wow Ryan it was just an opinion-like yours-who are you to say who is wrong or right-by the way-how much do you make a year off your site-just wondering. Like I said before-the color doesn't matter the product does-your wrong.