New Website - opinions needed

[Sgian Dubh]

Thanks for the words of encouragement.

Much better than the sliding thing. There are some oddball things happen when I click on a small image to open up the larger images. The screen that opens is mostly up above the top of my monitor. I can only see I'd guess the bottom third, and I can't move it. I'm using IE 7.

There are quite a few grammatical and spelling errors that I find irritating. Proof reading would be a good idea. Ideally your proof reader is not you, and the person that does it works off a printed page. It's almost impossible to proof read off a monitor. I suppose it's self evident that your proof reader is, ideally, good to excellent at english. Slainte.

 

[Benchwayze]

I found the site a bit hard on the eye in some respects. The gallery wasn't what I expected and I felt I was being bounced around.

On a woodworking note:

Couldn't you find a lock of such a size that the keyhole surround wouldn't have interfered with the inlay on the glazed door?

I know brassware is difficult these days and sometimes it means designing to accomodate it. It is one of the ughhh factors of repro and restoration work, but it's a fact of life.

Best of Luck
John

 

[Benchwayze]

Right, now I've got to write my best mans speech for tomorrow...

anybody got any ideas? :lol:

You must know the groom well enough, so my advice is to just wing it.

If you have to write anything at all, just write large headings on a sheet of paper. Instead of holding the paper to read from, leave the paper on the table. Use the headings as reminders. All it takes is a glance down and you're away.

Oh and take Paul's advice about your fly and you'll be fine.

Best of luck again.
John

 

[Fecn]

Ooh.. that's a big improvement.. but here's a few more ideas...

1. Having a Latest News section of a website is often a very very bad idea... People update their site news for about the first 2 months after a site goes live and never again after that - Visitors to the site find that all the latest news is old and figure that you just don't care - It's often better not to have a 'news' section, and put any news on the homepage instead.

2. I expect you're already on the case with this, but you could do with combining your name with the top decorator so you can create some kind of branding for yourself/company. Since you're mid-way through making this site, I'll assume you're sorting out that kind of thing (and matching business cards etc)

3. Your HTML code still fails the basic HTML validation, and that means that search engines won't be able to read it as well as they should - The Web Design Group has a free site validator at http://htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/ - It's a bit strict at times (it picks up on bad capitalisation in parameter names etc), but it's worth fixing the things it finds since it means your site will really and truly work everywhere. (Most of the stuff it's complaining about currently is failure to properly close singleton tags (you're doing <br> and never following it with a close tag... to close a singleton tag, you finsihing with /> rather than just > .. same for img and meta tags)

4. You have a 'learn more' link at the bottom of each page which goes to a non-existant page.

That's all I've spotted this time.. I'm off to read something else

 

[Bodrighy]

That is so much better. Even on my gas fired connection it loaded almost immediately and the links that are set up worked well. Make sure that you put an alternate text in for your images. People who use screen readers can't tell what the images are otherwise. (picky I know but I teach a lot of visually impaired students and it is the bain of their life that so many web designers assume that they don't want to know what a pictue is.)

I am sure that you will never be satisfied, if your woodwork is anything to go by you are a perfectionist, but it is really looking good now

Pete