As we wish to avoid densing down the text again but we dread creating all over again the new shorter pages and links that will make the viewing experience remain gentle and enjoyable. ie minimum scroling.
Your kindly observations are welcomed as we are perhaps too close to the problem. We thought we should invite customer comment but havent yet concluded the best way to do this.

Our site can be seen in our profile but we would draw your attention to the contrast in the page layout between the print and book sections.

Your thoughts comments and advice is welcomed...

Let me just start by saying your site has some great content! It's just not presented very well.

Well since you guys just redesigned the site. My comments might not be that welcome because this will trigger you to do more work...

However, here is what I believe you should do...

1. You are only using about 600px in width you can now use 780px safely assuming you set your margins to zero.

2. The best thing you can do is break your content up and make more pages. This does have an advantage. You will now have more content that will be indexed by search engines, this should drive more traffic.

3. Honestly, this design doesn't work from a few perspectives obviously one of them is use of real estate. I think that you should go with something that has a standard navigation whether it's in the top header or on the left side. Then you should move all those book categories into the middle of the site not towards the bottom it should be the first thing people see. The first thing they see now is you use PayPal for your transactions.

Some other suggestions I have include using a web site template if you are not familiar with web design layout principles. You can either get free ones here:http://www.freesitetemplates.com and customize them or perhaps spend a little money and have a designer make you a custom Web site template.

I somewhat disagree though that a template is the way to go. They seem to me to be "cookie cutter" designing, and most sites built with them give me the impression that the site is an affiliate. It can be a good starting point though.

As a designer when I have a client who has HTML experience but lacks what they themselves often refer to as "creativity" or "graphic ability"... I always recommend the most cost effective solution for them which is to have a designer create a custom HTML template and then that client can go in and add the content and propagate the pages.

This saves them some cash and they still get to feel like they were very involved in creating their own site.

But I did say that I "somewhat" disagree.

Let us know if there is anything else we can help you with.

My comment is that you need to back up your navigation with text links and a sitemap.

charlesdickens - I think this look much better. The info is presented more clearly and theres not a lot of scrolling. It seems much eaier to move thoughout the site.

This doesn't really apply so much to your site as much as it does to sites in general, but top navigation like that isn't very effective when the person gets to the bottom of the page because they have to go back up to navigate. Maybe you can add a link that takes them back to the top (an anchor or book mark whatver you want to call it).

Finally, the overall graphics and color scheme still needs some work. I think if you guys hired a good designer he would whip through it in a couple of hours and you'd have a guide for all the graphics text and other stuff. It just needs to be more professional looking. Then you guys can impliment the changes they suggest.

Those are just some ideas.