Two sites I recently finished.

[Tom Elledge]

Here are two sites I recently did and would greatly appreciate your opinion. Branson Veterans Events www.bransonveteransevents.com
a local tour company. www.shtours1.com

[gwpriester]

Good work, Tom. I'm partial to the veteran's site being one of them guys myself.

[Cloud]

On the veterans site I would make the following changes:

On the home page (and the rest of the pages) make all the text left aligned, it will look more professional
The navigation bar text seems to be repeated half way down
Make the blue division lines thinner on the organizations page and anywhere else they appear
Increase the height of the dropdown sub menus, difficult to see and navigate on a mobile phone without zooming in a lot
Also keep the submenus in line with the colour scheme, if you must have black text on them then make the grey background lighter
Keep text on all pages consistent, the text on the reunions page for instance is bigger than the rest of the pages
On pages such as discounts keep the logos and pics the same size
Keep all heading text the same

You have obviously done a lot of work on this and I congratulate you, in short try and keep things consistent

On the tours site, remember that visitors expect to see certain elements in a certain place, anything which moves away from this convention will jar with visitors, for instance the logo being centered and below the navigation menu. The company's name to the right (angled) is just not necessary

Make the site lighter, it is after all a tour company, and also set the width to 955px, it appears very small on monitors larger than the standard 19inch or wide
screen laptop monitors.
The background images on packages and attractions are too large, they need optimising
Again think of consistency; text on the various pages is in a different position, for instance the home text is centered and on about us it is left aligned.
On the links page you only have your link and the page is pretty much empty, is that page needed? Your site should be linked in the footer of the website.

I hope you look at the changes needed, I have looked at it from the point of view of a visitor. Don't forget that you are creating a portfolio; make it the best that you can, and if a client asks for something in particular then show them that you can make it look better, if they don't like it then change it to how they like it.

[Miko]

On your Branson Veterans Site, look about halfway down the page. I can see what looks like the text of your navigation bar along with the copyright notice, jumbled up with the main text.

[Abikadabra]

On the veterans site I would make the following changes:
The navigation bar text seems to be repeated half way down
Keep text on all pages consistent, the text on the reunions page for instance is bigger than the rest of the pages
Keep all heading text the same

Tour sites are something close to my heart!

Just a few points. I agree with what Skech has advised, and in particular the text/font. The headings on each page are inconsistent. For instance, the page About US, and on other pages the headings are capitalised, such as CONTACT, and PACKAGES, and then on the Links page you have that heading in lower case and in a different colour to the other headings. All headings should be the same text size and the same colour. When Skech says the photos need to be smaller on the packages page, he does not mean they need to be physically smaller, but that you need to optimise the images so that the site will load more quickly.

You dont need to put 'welcome to our website'. People already know they are visiting a website, so you only need to put WELCOME and nothing else. Well, you could put Welcome and thanks for visiting! if you want to be more friendly, but toss the word 'website'. The phrase 'welcome to our website' immediately declares 'home made' or 'unprofessional'.

With a tour company, you want your home page to immediately evoke an emotion in the visitor, and that emotion is 'yes, lets do this!'. A big slideshow on the homepage will evoke more emotion than the small carousel you have presently got. A big slideshow evokes 'oooh, look at that, they do boat tours' and then the visitor will want to explore your site to find out more info.

Testimonials? You will need to ask your client for some testimonials to put on the website. No one will book a tour if there is no evidence of anyone actually having been on a tour with this company. A testimonial or two on each page will be more effective than a page dedicated just to testimonials.

The colour is not really a touristy colour. White, grey, and black are great colours for tourism sites, such as this tour company in california http://www.california-tour.com/ and these guys in Australia http://outandabouttours.com.au/Home.aspx . White sites look elegant and spacious, black sites look elegant and dramatic, and shades of different greys look professional. Blue sites are favoured by web design companies and dentists. Try playing around with different colours for the site.

I appreciate the amount of effort and the hours of time you have invested into both of these sites, and they look very good. But with a bit of tweaking they will look great! Have fun with it.