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I have a website now

S

Stacey S

Joined
Jul 1, 2004
Messages
61
Likes
2
Location
Claxton, Georgia
Thanks for the input yesterday on websites and hosting. I did a little looking around yesterday and ended up going with yahoo as my hosting company. So far I am pleased. It was easy to upload the site we had built at home using microsoft publisher.
Here is the address for our new site.
www.planeandsimplewoodcrafts.com
Please tell me what you think. If something needs changing to improve it let me know.

Stacey
 
You are off to a good start.

You should use a smaller sized file for you thumbnails. Your gallery page takes a noticeable amount of time to load on my cable connection. I can't imagine anyone on dial-up waiting for your gallery page to load.

I found the striped background on some of your gallery pictures very distracting.

How about including some pictures of you and Lisa and your shop on the biography page?


Ed
 
Thanks Ed I was thinking some of the same things that you mentioned when I looked at it at work. We are planning on adding some pictures of ourselves but thought that we would go ahead get the site up for now. I will look at resizing the thumbnail files also.
Stacey
 
Looks good, Stacey. I see you have been getting helpful critiques on photography over on WoW so that part is covered ;)
Seems that you have dealt with the thumbnail size, I'm on dialup and everything loads normally.
I would suggest trying other editing programs, that are specifically intended for webpages. Microsoft Publisher adds about 900 lines to the HTML source of your home page that only needs to be about 150 or less. Well, it does the job anyway, but take a look at Nvu and/or Arachnophilia, a couple HTML WYSIWYG editing programs. (What You See Is What You Get). I use a text editor so haven't used them very much, but have seen them recommended quite a bit.
Helpful links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_HTML_editors
http://www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia/
http://www.nvu.com/index.php

--
Ken Grunke,
AAW Forums Co-Moderator
member & webmaster, Coulee Region Woodturners
My Home Page
 
Thanks Ken but could you give your suggestion to me again in english. I am not very experienced with working with webpages and html so I don't understand what you meant. Thanks again. That is suprising about your comment about the thumbnails I haven't resized them yet.
Stacey
 
Your new website

Stacey

Your new site looks good, had no probem with down-load speed on gallery items.

John Boyles
 
Stacey, I was referring to the page's source code which can be viewed from a browser (Internet Explorer or Firefox, for example) by going to the "View' menu and choosing "Source" or "View Source". Notice how much more text the source contains compared to the page you see in the browser? A large part of it is unneeded, that's just the nature of Microsoft Publisher.

Anyway, after all the time and trouble you spent working on the site, you probably don't have any inclination whatsover to start over with a different program, and you could just leave it be--it works now, that's what counts. When the time comes for a major revision, it would be good to look at other programs that will produce cleaner, more trim source code.

By the way, your thumbnails don't need resizing, I checked a few random ones, and they're all under 4 kilobytes! It's possible that the extra source code from Publisher made the pages load slower, that would be my guess.
 
Thanks Ken, I wasn't quite sure what you meant. I will remember that when we go to do a major revision. I am sure that it will continue to evolve as we learn more and try different things.
Stacey
 
Stacey....


I'm not one who can critique on the finer points of photography and web design, but from my limited experience in such things, your site looks well presented and professional looking.

I am impressed my your sense of form and design in your turnings. You use the KISS principle well!

I have DSL, so your photos show up within about 10 seconds, or less.

Keep up the good work.

hogzilla
 
website

The site's looking fine from the UK! There is a slight lag with the thumbnails loading, even on Broadband, but so much that it would put me off visiting.

You have some nice work on display, both turning and the scroll-sawn baskets.

The finer points of building a website will come with time. I imagine you'll get to a point where you want a more dedicated web development program and when you do there are lots out there. I use Namo Webeditor6, you could probably buy a brand new copy on eBay for around £20 ($40ish). It's not a top end program but does everything I can ever imagine wanting to do with a website.

One tip I'll give you: don't pay for search engine listings...ask as many website owners as you can to place a link to your website on their links page and let your stats build with time. You'll be surprised how quickly you climb the google ladder. And all for nothing!

Keep up the good work


Andy
 
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