www.sunstateconsulting.com
www.members.tripod.com/joy.thedoghouse

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mydog8it.com
SunState Consulting

Had to say I found your dog site far more fun and LOVED Samson BUT this site would be far better for some image crunching - Samson's pics are lovely but they must total 200 KB and took an age to download.

Image Composer would get them down to no more than 8,000 kb each with little loss of quality. And you're starting with 8KB of background image to load first (have you thought of having the background picture just as a border?)

Factoring is dead boring to anyone who has no need, but that site was very professional - clean, fast loading and logical layout.

Whoa! It changed!

Although I'm not crazy about FP themes, I feel like the one you used on the first version of the site was more in keeping with...well...Arizona, anyway.

Now, everything is so BIG. You could stand to scale down and try to get away from the "everything centered" look.

One of the most important suggestions I would make is to have your main navigation near the top of the page as well as at the bottom on all your pages. It's a good idea to have plain text navigation somewhere on your page, and the bottom is a good place to do it.

Some of the pages with forms are being pushed out of whack, causing side-to-side scrolling. Netscape reads form field spaces larger than does IE.

Doghouse:

My first impression is that it is awfully graphics heavy...with long download times. I'm going to stop there because personal sites are just that...a reflection of one's personality, taste, and interests.

Sandy

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Stu Reilly Design
Allegheny Web
Dreamweaver Sites

[This message has been edited by Goober (edited 05-12-2001).]

regarding sunstate site - i thought the blue might look a little more professional, plus it's not a standard theme and the old one was. no?
-is it the animation at the top of the home page that's too big, or the whole thing? I have most of the text set to "normal" font size, and while viewing on another computer with a HUGE monitor the other day, i noticed that everything looked massive. do you recommend specifying a font size rather than using default?
-about the forms being skewed - is it just a size issue, where if i make them smaller they'll be ok, or is it something else?

about the doghouse site - i have already compressed all the photos on the site using adobe image ready on the jpg low setting. i'm worried that i compress them any more they will look choppy. what's image composer, and will it still not have a negative effect even though the pics have already been compressed?
-what do you think about thumbnails? i've never used them before and don't have a clue about them. i'm guessing you just link them to the actual photo file?
-did the home page load quickly, or was that slow, too?
-you mentioned adding the background on as a border only...do you do that with tables, or some other way?

thank you both so much for your suggestions. they are much appreciated.

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mydog8it.com
SunState Consulting

[This message has been edited by joy (edited 05-12-2001).]

I had a look at the pic of Sam (original 600 odd pixels wide although appears about 300 on screen and its 22+ KB) Forget Image Composer - I made the interesting 'discovery' (for me, anyway) that FP actually does it better. Click on pic and go to appearance, set size (try 300 pixels wide) and resample. Knocks file size down to just over 6 KB with no loss of quality.

On the picture as border - I've seen it but not done it myself so I'll leave that to experts to advise - though I guess you could do it as either table or as shared border.

Somehow, when I viewed the business site, I missed the animation. It may have had something to do with the order in which it loaded...or maybe I had gotten distracted. It wasn't until I happened on it through the dog site that I saw it was animated.

Everything is rather large on the site. The font size I use depends on the font I use. Some fonts appear larger than others at different point sizes.

If you make the field sizes smaller on the forms they should be OK. It is very important that you test your sites on at least Netscape and IE browsers, as well as at different resolutions.

Image Composer is a graphics program shipped with the stand alone FP program...second CD. The biggest problem is that you have too many graphics on the page. If you feel you need all the pics on the page, you could try thumbnails. However, I would recommend setting borders to zero if you do use them. Yes, they link to the photo file.

The home page was very slow to load.

If you wanted to use a piece of the background as a border, you could use it in a cell, for instance, on the left side of the page, OR use one tile (or piece) of it on the left plus about 1000-1600 pixels of white (or other solid color) on the right to create a page background that will tile down, leaving a piece of the pattern on the left. Maybe that's what Janet was talking about?

You cannot use a different background with shared borders. You can with include pages.

Sandy

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Stu Reilly Design
Allegheny Web
Dreamweaver Sites

Haven't had a chance to do much with the doghouse site yet, but I did change all but one of the photos on Samson's page to thumbnails. You're right - The photos are huge (like 1500x1700 pix on some!)- scaling them down rather than just resizing them cut them down to 10K or so. (I was wondering why optimizing didn't make them very small!) It's going to be a long process changing every photo on the site...

I read somewhere that a single web page shouldn't be more than 60-70K total in order for it to load quickly for everyone. What's your opinion on that?

I've been using anybrowser.com to check the sunstate pages for compatibility. The only problem is that I don't see anything wrong when I check it there (the too-long form boxes you were talking about, etc.) I'm reluctant to download netscape because the last time it was installed on my computer it crashed the whole thing. Is there a better browser compatibility tester out there?

Again, your feedback on the updated sunstate site would be greatly appreciated.

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mydog8it.com
SunState Consulting

[This message has been edited by joy (edited 05-14-2001).]