|
Tailslide -> RE: I gave it a try!! (3/23/2007 14:05:40)
|
Hi tdub - welcome to OF.
I don't wish to be discouraging but it crashed my browser (Firefox) and I couldn't actually visit any of the other pages in Opera. Seems like IE is the only browser it'll work in.
In IE7:
The map isn't appearing on the contact page.
The text is rather small on some of the pages, but when I make it larger in my browser all the different content areas overlap.
On the Commercial/Business page the whole mouseover/text appearing thing is slightly confusing - it's not clear which photo means what and it's unexpected that the little bar chart thingy disappears and the text appears.
I'd make sure too that the big image of a house is a good quality image as at the moment it looks like it's been enlarged and is therefore a bit blurry.
On the quote page - I'm not able to get at the form bit unless I use a mouse (and some people won't be able to).
I think that in general considering you've been at this for 3 weeks you've done alot - it's not a small site to build from scratch in 3 weeks!!
As far as whether you've gotten in over your head? It depends. Are you expecting the website to act as a major source of new business? If so then unfortunately it pays in the end to get a professional in to do it. I think that this is particularly so in any sort of finance-related business.
I think that if you're determined to do this yourself you need to be aware of FP's limitations. It will allow you to use unclean proprietory M$ code that won't work in other browsers and that takes up a load of space and slows the pages down.
For beginners in your position I'd say the secret is probably to keep things as simple as possible in site and page structure. Make sure that the site will work in at least some non-M$ browsers (Firefox and Opera are free to download). Try not to rely on FrontPage's built in widgets like rollover buttons etc - they don't work particularly well. Never ever paste stuff in from Word and never ever rely on things saved as HTML from Word - it doesn't work properly.
I hope that doesn't sound too harsh or like I'm trying to put your efforts down (because you've done a LOAD more than I'd have even attempted in 3 weeks starting out - did you sleep at all?) as that's really not what I'm trying to do. My basic message is that if you can face it and afford it - a professional site is probably best for businesses that will rely on their website for business generating. Othewise, keep it simple, don't trust FrontPage to build your site properly (it needs a lot of kicking to produce something reasonable) and be prepared to keep learning and tweaking it accordingly.
Good luck with it!
|
|
|
|
