Cedar's Chest Wildlife Plaques

I presume youve helped to review some other sites first ?

Firstly, your order forms superb! Nice & clear, will look good printed out ! I did like that, & if this is your first shot at a site, good on you implementing a shop as this still gets done wrong by even experienced users!

Well done on your first site, youve implemented a good shop & you have real potential. Use sites like this, do some reading & youll come along in leaps & bounds

Some good resources are;

dynamicdrive.com - for pre written Java/DHTML scripts
zengarden for examples on beautiful use of stylesheets & CSS
elated.com for some excellent pre made web templates

unfortunatley ......

The whole site reminds me of how sites used to look in the eighties! The background contrasts against the text too much making it very difficult to read! Also, it impairs loading time. On a modem, this would be a nightmare!

The header graphic at the top of the page sits on its own & doesnt intergrate with anything, Its also hard to read 'Cedars Chest' & doesnt do anything to give the site a consistent theme.

The links at the bottom ( as there arranged vertically ) make the page huge & difficult to navigate. Also, theres spelling mistakes on Jewelry & when you click on a link, the page transistion effect takes an age to complete even on a fast connection.

Theres absolutley no need for page counters in my opinion, & you could try & use some simple java script to create a simple text based counter somewhere which may be more effective. Also, the scrolling marquee that sits alongside the bottom edge of the window is hard to read, jerky ( due to its implementation) & off putting to readers.

Your site doesnt look right in most browsers either!

Im confused with the domain name ? Whats with the 50webs bit, is this free webspace ?

Font selection is poor, & no consistent look exsists through the site.

Please done take this wrong, but theres huge amounts that you could do to improve this, find some suggestions below;

First, get yourself a HTML guide for beginners & learn how to write simple effective code that validates correctly & study tips to get your basic site looking smooth & professional

Look at other sites, look at the code & see how other people create effects & layouts. Also, CSS is your friend! Learn how to use it to create effective & good looking site styles. A good starting point is the wonderful zengarden.com to learn how to use stylesheets/CSS

I presume you did this in Frontpage ? Learn a more sophisticated package like Dreamweaver, the hard work is well worth it & will allow you to produce good looking sites easier!

Constantly use forums like this to glean knowledge & learn of others. Also search the Net for various online web tools such as pre written scripts like dynamicdrive.com which is excellent for beginners.

Learn how to use Photoshop or paint shop pro. You can create excellent graphics & rollover buttons which can enhance the look of your site. If your struggling, you can always use free templates which can be found on the web to give you a head start!

Buy some webspace. When hosting a shop, you want to convey a professional image & at present, this site doesnt do that & you will not be realising your potential & increasing your sales.

It is very good for a first attempt but I do agree with MFDC.

If you need a free website layout try my site http://nethooked.com/freetemplates.php

Is it your site? or your friends site?

Thank you mfdc. I didnt use frontpage, I used Hotdog7 html editor. I did review other sites before i posted this. I appreciate the honest response. i will be the first to tell you i have no clue what i was doing. it was a spur of the moment decision and i made the whole basic site in 4 days... i learned about html from a website called htmlgoodies. I appreciate all the advice and links you gave me of places to go to learn more i will certainly use them. thanks again. oh what do you mean my site doesnt look right in most browsers??? yes it is a free web server. is that bad? i mean i know its not the best but what are the downsides??

Renegade - Well... I made the site... and Im hosting it... hes the one that makes and sells the plaques, he knows Nothing about pc's... so i dont know, whos site would you call it?

Angela

Technically, it's your site because you made it. But, he is the client...

Your review:

Firstly, you page takes way too long to load on a 56k. Try optimising your images and then your code.

Secondly, organisation. You want to try think about organising your site a bit more. To be more specific, split up your content into different sections and not just having everything cascading down the page in one column.

The text size that you are using is too big! I mean, I'm not one to advertise using small text, but, in this case, I'll make an exception. Sure, you want people to read your content but, not by shoving it in their face with a huge font size.

Repeating backgrounds similar to the one that you have are a big no-no in the world of web design. It is too bright and too much on the eyes. A bit like visual overload. The same goes for that animated GIF that you have. It doesn't serve much purpose and takes away from the "professional" image of the site. You want to sell your plaques, don't distract the user with animated GIFs.

Try, with your images, having them as thumbnails and when a user clicks on them, it goes to a bigger version of it. That way, the user doesn't have to load the whole image if he/she isn't interested in the plaque

Overall, it isn't too bad as a first website, you are off to a pretty good start, keep it up and don't stop learning

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this confused me Renegade. They are thumbnails and if you click them you get a seperate big image... i had a few fullsize ones as samples but on the three plaques pages i do have them set up as thumbnails you click to view full image. I too was wprried about the load time on the pages but i wasnt sure how to make them load quicker other than breaking the three plaque pages into more pages yet...any ideas?

Angela

Okay heres what I have decided to do... from what you guys are saying just about everything is wrong. I think for now Im gonna leave the site hosted pretty much "as is" and start work on a totally new one. Once I have it written and looking "professional" i will then purchase a domain name and host it on a paid server instead of the free one i am using. I think trying to change this once would cause a lot of down time for being under oonstruction and stuff and i think starting again from scratch may be the easiest way to do it. So now i guess i better go check out the html writing posts and the websites you all told me about and learn how to make a professional looking site. I work alll week and dont have a lot of time to do this so it will probably take me awhile to make one thats right, dont think i will have to worry about the one review per three months, im sure it will take me all of that... so i'll leave this one up until the new one is done. sound good?

Angela

Yip. Good luck.

Don't forget, if you need any help, we're here

I still dont know what you meant about the pics not being thumbnails?? they are.

angela

Usually a thumbnail pic is a jpeg of a gif file that is at most 5k in size. It is very small like 100x100 pixels or something like that. Then when you click on it you may get the full pic which can be as large as you want. Hope that helps