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windchimes
Posts: 10
Joined: 8/26/2005
Status: offline
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Website critique appreciated! - 9/22/2005 16:44:37
I am in the process of re-designing my site and would appreciate any feedback. The URL is http://www.windchimespavilion.com/test.htm
Foxfire underlines my text links and changes the look a bit as compared to Internet Explorer. I hope to end up with the IE presentation with both browsers. Also, I haven't come up with a logo/header yet so the header text is just temporary.
My plan is to come up with a reasonably good site design then hire someone to use the design to create templates that are W3C compliant, possibly including cascading style sheets.
Thanks in advance!
Windchimes
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Nicole
Posts: 2830
Joined: 9/15/2004
From: Nambucca / Kempsey, Australia
Status: offline
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RE: Website critique appreciated! - 9/22/2005 21:14:20
Hi Windchimes,
Can I firstly suggest that rather than looking at it as IE displaying your site as you'd like it, perhaps you should be looking at it as Firefox is displaying the site as it is (correctly) according to how it is coded. I think it was Caz in another post elsewhere recently gave the good advice of working in code view and then using the "Preview in Browser" option to view it in Firefox rather than relying on the normal and preview views that FrontPage provides. It really can be misleading.
Taking into account that you haven't yet decided upon a logo/banner, it seems you want to go with a deep red colour scheme, but can I suggest to you that for me at least that the pale pink just doesn't work for me. Look at your images of windchimes, they're all on different coloured backgrounds, mainly greys, whites and blues, and on the following pages they're in dark blues. For a start I'd be looking at changing the background colours of those images to the same consistent colour, and as is often the case when you want the images to tell the story (i.e. stand out), a black or white background is best. Another colour background whether bold or pastel will take the attention away from the images. Have you tried making the image background colours white and having a white page background with no border around the images?
Can I also suggest that you add some padding to the text that says " Wind Chimes Pavilion, your Wind Chimes Superstore!"as its rather close to the surrounding cells, and in the textured cell below the font is a bit smalll and/or it has too much padding. I'd also look into changing the font to arial, as to me at least, verdana loses it's attractiveness when any larger than 10pt or is used for headings.
Basically I think there's just too much going on in the way of background colours (fading red, solid red, grey stripes, textured, pale pink) and there's too much difference in the text (verdana and too many different colours, boldnesses etc.)
Hows that for starters?
Nicole
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Tailslide
Posts: 6003
Joined: 5/10/2005
From: Out here on the raggedy edge
Status: offline
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RE: Website critique appreciated! - 9/23/2005 3:18:52
Hi Windchimes!
I'll start by saying that the site looks loads better - much simpler and easier to see what's going on (even though there's still quite a lot going on as Nicole says!).
Next thing I'm going to say may not be quite what you want me to say. You've got a BIG site there with lots and lots of products and you're keen to have it all compliant etc (which is excellent by the way). If someone came to me and asked the best way to go about such a site I'd say they need to get someone to build them a database driven site (CSS, W3C ok etc etc). Currently you'll have dozens and dozens of pages which presumably cross reference each other - it'd be a nightmare to keep up to date in a static HTML site as you've got currently. You're going to need to use includes for your navigation, footer etc too.
I'd seriously look at getting a few quotes on how much it would cost to get a DB driven shop together (one that you'll be able to update via a CMS).
It may be that once you get these quotes you feel that it's too expensive and that you have to go for the static site option but you should also consider how much your time is worth to you - presuming you get a designer to build a compliant template for a single page for you to copy the tables into - that's a LOT of work and time. Plus these things are never as easy as you think they're going to be (I should have that on my wall to remind me!).
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"My strategy is so simple an idiot could have devised it"
Little Blue Plane Web Design | Blood, Sweat & Rust - A Land Rover restoration project
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windchimes
Posts: 10
Joined: 8/26/2005
Status: offline
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RE: Website critique appreciated! - 9/24/2005 20:07:07
My thanks to Nicoleoz and Tailslide for your detailed and honest feedback! ...I'm still not sure which way to go with this but for sure I will at least go to cascading style sheets.
Thanks again!
Windchimes
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