My New website ...

[Carol Haynes]

My new website is up ... check it out and let me know what you think.

See:

A bit of background - I live in very rural sheep country in the North of England. Most of my clients are going to be locals in the area so I wanted to kee the site pretty simple and a bit 'naive' or even a bit 'folksy' with some humour as I am not trying to pretend to be a high powered international conglomerate. (There is someone in a neighbouring village who describes his one man band as 'international' and the web site makes it sound as though he is running MS or Google rather than from his home - I don't think that helps around here).

Any way constructive criticism welcome (be kind  !) ... I had to get something up and running. I plan to change the Products and Services pages into a more branched structure with more detail on specific ideas I have but I thought this would serve to get me off the ground.

[mouser]

I like it a lot.. very fun and inviting and charming.

I imagine if i was local to the area I would have a very comforted and happy feeling finding your site. 

[Dormouse]

Lovely part of the world.

Clearly fine as an initial website. I agree with Mouser's impression. And clearly identifies you as embedded in the local community.

My natural inclination was to click on the sheep, though; so I'd make the sheep a button too. I'm always slightly irritated by having to look for the enter button. In practice,I prefer having the menus available on the first screen, but that may just be me.

I'd also add Linux to your list. You may not feel expert - but you can tell people how expert you feel - and most problems will probably be within your compass. And there won't be many locals who will actually want support for a Linux machine, anyway. But it would help the impression that they can take all their computer problems to you.

Good luck.

[Deozaan]

My natural inclination was to click on the sheep, though; so I'd make the sheep a button too. I'm always slightly irritated by having to look for the enter button. In practice,I prefer having the menus available on the first screen, but that may just be me.

I had to scroll down to see the "Click here to enter" link, which I think should be a big "no no" for a website. Just to give you an idea of how "bad" this is: My resolution is 1280x1024. My browser window isn't maximized, but it takes up most of the screen. Dormouse's suggestion would help, but I think you need the "Click to enter" somewhere up higher so people can see it and know what to do.

[Carol Haynes]

Thanks guys for the helful and positive comments.

If I make the sheep active as a link it ends up with a box round it - anyone any idea how to remove that in CSS or Dreamweaver? I looked everywhere fort he option but couldn't find it. Tickling the sheep was my original intention!

Thanks too to cranioscopical for his helpful comments via PM.

[cranioscopical]

Thanks too to cranioscopical for his helpful comments via PM.

Probably more helful than helpful 

[Deozaan]

Thanks guys for the helful and positive comments.

If I make the sheep active as a link it ends up with a box round it - anyone any idea how to remove that in CSS or Dreamweaver? I looked everywhere fort he option but couldn't find it. Tickling the sheep was my original intention!

I'm not sure on the exact CSS method, but in the <img> tags you can add (for example) <img src=sheep.jpg border=0> to get rid of the box. My example isn't xhtml compliant, but I think you could just add a border=0 to the CSS for img tags.

[Carol Haynes]

Frustrated ...

I have set:

#container #graphic-link a {
color: #999966;                              <<<< Background colour
text-decoration: none;
}

and this works fine in Firefox - but I get a nasty border in Internet Explorer 7.

Changing the border properties to none, 0 pixels,  background colour has no effect.

Setting properties for a:link, a:hover etc. has no effect

Anyone any ideas how to get rid of the nasty box - please ???

[Carol Haynes]

Never mind - seem to have fixed it. Not sure how but it seems to work!

[Deozaan]

Maybe IE had a cached CSS file?

Everything I ever learned about CSS & XHTML (which I've all forgotten since it's been ages since I did any web design) I learned from http://www.w3.org/

[Perry Mowbray]

Never mind - seem to have fixed it. Not sure how but it seems to work!

From memory Carol, FF and IE handle image borders differently. Deozaan's suggestion:

I'm not sure on the exact CSS method, but in the <img> tags you can add (for example) <img src=sheep.jpg border=0> to get rid of the box. My example isn't xml compliant, but I think you could just add a border=0 to the CSS for img tags.

will work for all browsers, except if you put it in the IMG tag it should be border="0", not border=0.

Or you could add something like

Code: (css)

a img {
    border:none;
 }

which will remove all borders from images in links from your page.

Edit: simpler solution added 

[Perry Mowbray]

Probably more helful than helpful 

Cranioscopical: you've got to learn to "P" more 

[nudone]

great to see you've finally got the website up, Carol. 

the only thing i can add, and i think you must make this change, is that your top banner is being blocked by my ad blocker - which means it must be being blocked by a lot of other peoples ad blocker too.

if you just change the name from 'banner' to 'header' or something that doesn't sound like an advert it will work fine.

[tomos]

looks greatCarol
love the sheep intro and the banner eh, picture on top

I like the approach too - everything stated clearly -
that's good more trustworthy IMO

[nosh]

I like it. Simple and functional.

It's a good thing you put your photo in there - it tends to up the trust factor (that's the way it works with blogs, anyway) - I'd consider putting it right on the home page, if possible.

[icekin]

The website seems simple and to the point, which is the way most customers would like it. Wasn't too sure about the point of the intro splash page with the sheep, but I'm glad at least its not another lame flash movie intro that suddenly plays music.

I assume the purpose of this site at this point is to merely inform and provide a point of contact rather than act as an online service with support tickets and so on. Maybe that would be a future step, but its good to plan a site with future expansion in mind. Is the whole site just done is old fashioned HTML or does it use a CMS?

[Carol Haynes]

Thanks Perry - I did use an img tag modification in the end but I seemed to try it numerous times without it working. Maybe it is a cache thing.

It is just in HTML - so few pages to start with meant that CMS was a bit overkill.

I am however working on a PHP/MySQL layout for the future as it will make adding/editing products/more detailed service descriptions/news items and possibly a recommendations page easier to maintain. Whatever I use I want it to be simple.

Thanks nudone for spotting the 'banner' issue - I will change that. AdMuncher doesn't seem to object on my system so it is hard for me to spot things like that. Can you check it again and see if it is fixed (don't forget to refresh the page with shift F5 in IE or FF).

[PhilB66]

A few comments...

1. Directory listing should be blocked.

2. I personally find the "click on image to enter" pages annoying. Also, the animated gifs on the second page (your actual home page) do not match the style (btw, did you check copyright issues?).

[sri]

The circle graphic in the homepage: Systems and Training text should be inverted for better readability.

[Carol Haynes]

OK I get the message on click to enter ... gone.

Yes I have the rights to use the images.

.htaccess now set to stop directory listings (I think!)

I have set .htaccess in my server root directory to:

Code

Options -Indexes
DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm index.php

## PROTECT FILES ###
<FilesMatch "\.(htaccess|htpasswd|ini|phps|fla|psd|log|sh)$">
  Order Allow,Deny
  Deny from all
</FilesMatch>

Does that look about right? I am not too experienced with .htaccess files.

[nudone]

banner, er i meant top image, appears to be getting through the ad blocker fine now. 

[zridling]

Good colors. Easy to navigate. Clear set of services offered, and news to boot. Excellent!

[Carol Haynes]

Thanks nudone.

Thanks all for the comments - much appreciated.

Just updated the home page image to ensure text is the right way up. Unfortunately clipped the bottom edge in the process very slightly. I'll fix it when I get a moment.