I installed the 29 programs today. Have been having difficulties reproducing the site with the visual site designer so I will try to basically reproduce the site with the Coffee Cup HTML Editor application and will be following suggestions with that decision

How about something like this?

I just used VSD, and it's not aligned properly, as I just did this quickly for a bit of an example.

You can use the button maker in VSD if you're worried about Flash Menus as mentioned by Inger.

PS> the image size was too large to attach, so I had to upload at imageshack.

http://img405.imageshack.us/img405/6519/sitepreview.jpg

Yes you can use the buttonize feature in VSD to make a main category only menu.

I guess that I cannot send image of the home pg because a jpeg of it is about 277k and I have not yet uploaded it to the server so cannot link to it

Greg, the highest file it seems, is 100K, so I took a screenshot of the site preview and uploaded it to imageshack to put a link here.

Perhaps you could do the same thing.

About half of my scrn image scrn shot is a jpeg image of 292 k bytes and I am of the opinion that that is pretty good as far as file size goes I am not going to limit myself to absurdly ridiculous small file sizes. The pg full size renders fast on a 3g connection and that is fine I do not know why web sitre designers are so obsessed to catering to the very least capable of internet customers Nowadays probably most everyone has high speed connection and fairly large resolution settings on whatever rendering device they are using

My original site header image from 4 years ago

My mention of the 100K file size limit, was attaching files to the forum, not to your website. Just thought I'd mention that in case I wasn't clear.

Greg, Paintbrush is right about what you should have on your index page; an image of a nice paint job that you have completed. You can show the tools on one of the other pages, but you need something nice and eye catching on the front page. Bren's idea a bit further up here is good. But above (or beside) the main text insert a nice image.

Since I'm not actually using VSD (I'm coding), I didn't think of the buttons you could create for your nav bar....

OK Greg B checking in again. I tried desperately for a good while to make the site over with the visual and then the html editor several times each for hours and then finally gave up or at least took a break from it. I do not find it to be intuitive or easy what so ever I can pretty much do what ever i can think of with the ancient front page express and relatively quickly. But i cannot or do not know how to make a legitimate home pg that will list correctly with the search engines so I have to use the couple of hundred dollars of software I purchased for that purpose. I implemented some of the suggested improvements with the old frontpage software this evening in an hour or so added a couple of paint job images to the header changed the header took out the flashing phone number If you go to my first entry for this topic you can click on the site again to see the changes guess I will continue to make changes with the old frontpage and then try to translate it into the new software when I can www.workhorsepainting.com