New Web site help. please

[HOJ]

In the process of re doing my web site, I would like to know what would generally be expected to see from a Joinery business.

I am trying to keep it simple, one page and to the point.

OR do I flood it with pictures and lots of linked pages?

I for one, struggle with picture heavy sites, as my broadband is carp, even this forum is painfull some times, especially
when re loading "quoted pictures"

I am also looking at adding an enquiry form option, do people use them?, all of my current enquries come through direct email.

All advice welcome, if any!

Paul

 

[Rhossydd]

OR do I flood it with pictures and lots of linked pages?
I for one, struggle with picture heavy sites, as my broadband is carp,

Certainly worth considering if your potential clients will have the same issue. If your work is mainly in a defined local area, it will be worth looking at if there's much high speed broadband around, both in terms of landlines and 4g mobile provision, then letting that information guide your design choices.

A smart move would be to keep your home page clean and low bandwidth, but DO provide a gallery option with good photos of your work for those interested enough to look.

 

[mind_the_goat]

Use a contact page, don't publish your email address, it'll just end up on hundreds of spam email lists.

 

[Adam9453]

It's generally a good rule of thumb to provide whatever you think people might want.
I'd expect plenty of photos and preferably case studies or work in progress of other projects or commissions you've undertaken.
Make it simple, clear and easy to navigate. Good clear navigation at top is always good.
Decent contacts page with address, telephone, email, google map showing business location and yes a contact form is a good idea.
The home page needs to grab people's attention and keep them on your site.
The home page should tell people who you are, what you do and most of all why they should choose you.
Clients testimonials are valuable and important to prospective new clients that need to build faith in your abilities.
Your website should be designed so it optimises itself based on the device the user is viewing it on, mobile, iPad, desktop etc as the new google analysis bots will look unfavourably on websites which aren't mobile friendly.
To summarise, stick as much as you can on there as people love reading detail particularly when they're looking at spending potentially large sums of money. You need them to buy into you not just what you're selling.

 

[Adam9453]

Use a contact page, don't publish your email address, it'll just end up on hundreds of spam email lists.

Whilst spam emails are a bit annoying, they are easily deleted. Whereas I hate websites that don't have an email address on as I personally hate filling out bl00dy contact forms!!

 

[petermillard]

I've always based my sites around the five 'W's of Journalism - Who, What, When, Where and Why - substituting 'How much' for the 'when'. Keep the home page simple so it loads easily, and link to the other pages with more detail. Personally I use simple graphics on the landing page as these will load faster than full photos on dicky broadband or mobile connections. If you're building your site with one of the many website companies (e.g. Squarespace, weebly) you'll get 'responsive' design (where the site re-jigs itself for mobile devices) built into the standard templates, btw.

Include your mobile number on the site - it's the 21st century and I get as many enquiries by text as I do from email, which is also listed directly on the site. If you separate your personal and business email addresses and use e.g. Gmail, Outlook etc.. as the back-end, then spam email won't be an issue.

Again, in my experience, customers like to see pictures of finished work just like the thing they're asking me to make. They have little or no interest in WIP - it just looks messy and unfinished to them - and I've never used 'testimonials' I just have past customers ready to supply references, if requested; that's happened once in fifteen years...

HTH, Pete

 

[HOJ]

Thank you all for your comments.

I have drafted my site using Dreamweaver, I will need to look into the mobile support options, and how I code for that.

I have started to include a contact form but not sure I like the way it works, will probably just use email/phone as the contact me
option for now.

I may upload what I have to date and try it on different platforms, just to make sure it loads ok.

Thanks again

 

[Lonsdale73]

Re: Enquiry forms

I often wonder why some firms have these as they don't always respond. Some do, particularly American sites, often receive a reply within minutes of placing the enquiry but sadly a lot of UK sites are slow to respond if they do at all.

I have one on my own site and I try to respond to genuine enquiries as soon as I can. One thing I don't like about it is the number of emails I receive from so-called developers promising to deliver more customers.

 

[Alex H]

I've always based my sites around the five 'W's of Journalism - Who, What, When, Where and Why - substituting 'How much' for the 'when'. Keep the home page simple so it loads easily, and link to the other pages with more detail. Personally I use simple graphics on the landing page as these will load faster than full photos on dicky broadband or mobile connections. If you're building your site with one of the many website companies (e.g. Squarespace, weebly) you'll get 'responsive' design (where the site re-jigs itself for mobile devices) built into the standard templates, btw.

Include your mobile number on the site - it's the 21st century and I get as many enquiries by text as I do from email, which is also listed directly on the site. If you separate your personal and business email addresses and use e.g. Gmail, Outlook etc.. as the back-end, then spam email won't be an issue.

Again, in my experience, customers like to see pictures of finished work just like the thing they're asking me to make. They have little or no interest in WIP - it just looks messy and unfinished to them - and I've never used 'testimonials' I just have past customers ready to supply references, if requested; that's happened once in fifteen years...

HTH, Pete

Try and get your site like this , Even on my really slow 1-2MB 'broadband' it's lightning fast to load and Pete tells you what you want to know in 1 click =D>

 

[Mike.S]

Do remember to optimise for the web any images you use e.g. crop pictures to focus in on the relevant part; eradicate unnecessary background; use JPEGs, GIFs or PNG where appropriate; don't have too high quality, it will be wasted on most people's screens or use large images shrunk to size using code - shrink the image instead.

It's been a few years since I did web development but I do recall being amazed at how many sites used images that were unnecessarily large (think over 100kb per image) and consequently took a long time to load. If you want to use a high quality picture then load the page with a low res image and provide a link to the high resolution image. I used to use Photoshop which was/is the image manipulator of choice but there's cheaper (even free) alternatives.

To keep web page loading times quick don't be afraid to use CSS and manually (using a text editor) clean up Dreamweaver coding (which used to insert lots of extraneous code).

 

[petermillard]

Try and get your site like this , Even on my really slow 1-2MB 'broadband' it's lightning fast to load and Pete tells you what you want to know in 1 click =D>

Thanks! It's a SquareSpace site - one of their templates with the design changed and my own content added. I have a separate portfolio site which is essentially just pictures of recent work, and can be easily change to more closely target what I want to show a potential customer.

@ MikeS. We're in a hi-res 'Retina' world now and 100k / image is laughably small, in every sense; just for example I'm writing this on a one-generation-old (late 2013) iPad and a simple screen grab from the Maps app saved as a medium quality JPEG comes in at around 15Mb...

Cheers, Pete

 

[HOJ]

Thanks again, lots of ideas to deal with.

Peter, is the Squared space site on subscription? I like the way the gallery pages work.

I haven't a huge selection of pictures to show, which was why my original thoughts of keeping it to one page for now, I have in principal done the "Who, what & where etc

Does any one know a way I can upload my trial site along side my existing one without conflict, do I still need to title it as the "index" page or can I rename it and put it in separate directory to access it independently somehow.

 

[CHJ]

You can put it in a separate directory.
The start page can be named anything you like. trial.html, home.html whatever.

index.htm or index.html is what a browser will look for by default.

I like to add an index.html page like this in there as well that just re-directs back out to the main site just in case someone inadvertently gets access to the test directory listing.

Does not stop a determined scripter looking but it can save some agro, just be careful if you have multiple versions of index.* about that you don't overwrite the wrong one.

Don't take my site as an example of modern scripting, it's got no optimisation for mobile devices, it does what I can do, not what I should do.

 

[mseries]

You can put it in a separate directory.
The start page can be named anything you like. trial.html, home.html whatever.

index.htm or index.html is what a browser will look for by default.

It's actually the webserver that serves up index.html if no page is specified. Furthermore it's usually configurable in the webserver to serve the default page so it doesn't have to be index.html at all.

 

[CHJ]

You can put it in a separate directory.
The start page can be named anything you like. trial.html, home.html whatever.

index.htm or index.html is what a browser will look for by default.

It's actually the webserver that serves up index.html if no page is specified. Furthermore it's usually configurable in the webserver to serve the default page so it doesn't have to be index.html at all.

Stand corrected on my terminology, I'm not a scripter, I do have site folders configured with default.html pages that do as you say on the server and point to the appropriate front page.

 

[petermillard]

Peter, is the Squared space site on subscription? I like the way the gallery pages work...

Yes, it's an all-in-one type of deal with hosting and CMS / customisable templates included, costs about £100/year - http://www.squarespace.com .
I used to do my own sites and host them individually back when it was just simple HTML, but it stopped being 'fun' long ago and now I just want something simple and easily maintainable. There are other companies that do similar things e.g. http://www.weebly.com - that has a free tier, though you get their branding on the site unless you pay up.

Squarespace have a 14-day free trial, no c/card signup or anything, so you can build your site and see how it looks.

Cheers, Pete