Website Design? Any recommendations?

[Paul64]

Well I bit the bullet and handed over the cash for future business.

Bought a domain with web hosting

www.transylvania4x4tours.com

Problem is I know sh*g all about web design, software, HTML's and just about everything else. I downloaded several software packages including one that guaranteed that even child could get a website going in half an hour! Total boll**cks! Took me an hour to load up a title.

Anyway after several days and total failure, I am going to have to pay for someone to design it for me.

Any recommendations for a web designer?

Cheers, Paul.

[GBMUD]

[own trumpet] My wife does it professionally and i think she is good at it. See my signature for some of her work. Some of her recent sites include www.simplypearls.co.uk, www.orchardpark.biz and www.thermaglaze.com, she is primarily a Flash (animation) programmer but can do it all - short of actual design. If you want to see more of her recent work I will find out and let you know. [/own trumpet]

She also did a lot of www.cocopops.co.uk but since doing it it seems to have become embarrasingly slow to load!

Chris

[siearl]

Some great ganmes on there will have to have a proper look at work in the morning

[muddyplugger]

I know a lot of web designers frown on Frontpage, infavour of Dreamweaver for instance, but for myself the simplicity and familiarity to Windows is why I love it.

I do not have any experience of web design nor do I work in computers, but manged to write these two sites over a few evenings and beer:

Where I do a bit part time work www.theoldpitpractice.co.uk and my own (under development) site www.muddyplugger.co.uk

Edited to note: Mr Onions (on this forum) is a free lance web designer (in his spare time).

[Paul64]

Thanks guys, very impressive sites all round. As I said before I am willing to pay for such a service.

Cheers,

Paul.

[T1G UP]

spider spiderDid mine should be up next week.Great guy with lots of experience.tell him i sent you.

[Paul64]

spider spiderDid mine should be up next week.Great guy with lots of experience.tell him i sent you.

Thanks for the info

[Mark90]

My wife does it professionally and i think she is good at it.

Really? Does she do home visits?

[geoffbeaumont]

[own trumpet] My wife does it professionally and i think she is good at it. See my signature for some of her work. Some of her recent sites include www.simplypearls.co.uk, www.orchardpark.biz and www.thermaglaze.com, she is primarily a Flash (animation) programmer but can do it all - short of actual design. If you want to see more of her recent work I will find out and let you know. [/own trumpet]

I'll stick my neck out and venture a professional opinion - nicely put together, good standards compliance and accessibility, and attractive, intuitive design too (I particularly like the Simply Pearls site). I've only met Chris once and never met his wife, so no favouritism.

Accessibility is important if your company is based over here - you're legally obliged to make your site accessible to disabled users. Not sure whether you'd need to worry about this if the company is based in Transylvania, although it's still ethically better to be accessible if you can.

Frontpage and Dreamweaver are really aimed at different markets - Frontpage is aimed more at the home/part time web author. It's difficult (probably almost impossible) to build a really top notch standards compliant site in it, but anyone with reasonable computer skills and a reasonable eye for design can knock up something acceptable with it. Dreamweaver takes longer to get to grips with but is much more efficient and less restrictive once you do - horses for courses. If you really want to learn how to put a website together properly, a decent text editor is still the only way to go, even if you plan to use WYSIWYG tools later.

[TheRecklessEngineer]

Fridge Freezer does web design too I believe. I'm sure he will be along in a min.

[FridgeFreezer]

I do, not quite up to Chris's missus' standards but I get by - if there was any money in it I might get serious but every spotty oik with a pirated copy of Dreamweaver is touting for web work these days, and there's no telling some people about the ugliness that goes on behind their shiny looking website

Just updated my design page in fact www.juracid.co.uk/design/.

I would point out my lodger is also a freelance web chap but he's more into PHP, Java and MySQL databases, his front end design is shocking and he can't understand why I keep whinging at him about it

[GBMUD]

Really? Does she do home visits?

You put up the cash and I will convice her!

Mark, do you spend too much time on ORRP? It is starting to effect the way you think!

Chris

[GBMUD]

I'll stick my neck out and venture a professional opinion - nicely put together, good standards compliance and accessibility, and attractive, intuitive design too (I particularly like the Simply Pearls site). I've only met Chris once and never met his wife, so no favouritism.

Thanks . She spends a lot of time and effort making sure that sites will work with all current and many not-so-current browsers. How many times have you looked at a site in Firefox and found that the layout does not work properly and some text is behind pictures or similar? Even IE seems to work differently on a Mac to a PC.

Chris

[Mark90]

You put up the cash and I will convice her!

Mark, do you spend too much time on ORRP? It is starting to effect the way you think!

Chris

You might me right, ORRP is corrupting me, I used to be so innocent

[geoffbeaumont]

Thanks . She spends a lot of time and effort making sure that sites will work with all current and many not-so-current browsers. How many times have you looked at a site in Firefox and found that the layout does not work properly and some text is behind pictures or similar? Even IE seems to work differently on a Mac to a PC.

Chris

IE on the Mac is a totally different browser to IE on the PC - about the only things they have in common is the name... Fortunately Microsoft canned Mac IE a while ago and it's gradually disappearing. It was a truly dreadful browser (from a web developers point of view - nothing worked properly in it).

[Paul64]

www.transylvania4x4tours.com

Come on guys, tell me what you think? I have sweated my bo**ocks off with this project. My brain has never ached so much for years. There is still a long way to go with it, but it does seem to be coming together.

If you think it is total ****e, please tell me. I am going to have to make a living from it, so need to know what you really think. Remember it is not finished yet, but if you think I need to change direction, all comments will be greatly appreciated.

Cheers, Paul.

[V8 Freak]

Just had a look Paul and I like the clean design format you have chosen.

Your Team page is a little wide for some screen resolutions.. Generally I format for 800x600 or make sure the text will wrap for lower resolutions.

Looking good... If I drive over do I get a discount ?

(approx. 1,300 miles... So that's 100 or so tanks of fuel, three services, 18 breakdowns and two changes of socks...)

Keep it up....

Neil

[Mo Murphy]

Looks ok Paul, although I thought it looked a bit narrow. I'll be keen to see the finished article with all the finished info on it.

Mo

[Paul64]

Just had a look Paul and I like the clean design format you have chosen.

Your Team page is a little wide for some screen resolutions.. Generally I format for 800x600 or make sure the text will wrap for lower resolutions.

Looking good... If I drive over do I get a discount ?

(approx. 1,300 miles... So that's 100 or so tanks of fuel, three services, 18 breakdowns and two changes of socks...)

Keep it up....

Neil

Thanks Neil,

Yes, I know what you mean about the team page. I will sort it out tomorrow. Thanks very much for your comments.

No need for discounts, if anyone wants to combine a trip with some on ground route planning for future tours, you are welcome to camp on my land as a guest. Weather is great in the summer, fantastic for BBQ's.

It is a long way, but worth it. There are some great places to stop and camp on the way.

Cheer, Paul.

[Hybrid_From_Hell]

Paul,

I know absolutely nothing re web design at all, but clicked to have a lookie

From a complete mumpty point a view what loaded didn'y exactly Guide me, noir really help me understand and motivate me to buy. Poking about showed some ncie info and detail, the pages seem good as a mumpty, but I would say you home page doesn;t reallt scream out that you are offering a real opportunity

In sales they say the 1st 15 seconds makes all the difference, with your home page you'll have to poke about before you see its just what you wnat ?

Hope the above makes sense, FWIW I woyuld say make the home page a real simple statement of exactly what you are all about and then the link wet the appetite, at the mo the home page just doesn't do it that way ?

You may feel that I am 101% wrong in which case that fine I won't take offence

HTH

Nige

[Paul64]

Paul,

I know absolutely nothing re web design at all, but clicked to have a lookie

From a complete mumpty point a view what loaded didn'y exactly Guide me, noir really help me understand and motivate me to buy. Poking about showed some ncie info and detail, the pages seem good as a mumpty, but I would say you home page doesn;t reallt scream out that you are offering a real opportunity

In sales they say the 1st 15 seconds makes all the difference, with your home page you'll have to poke about before you see its just what you wnat ?

Hope the above makes sense, FWIW I woyuld say make the home page a real simple statement of exactly what you are all about and then the link wet the appetite, at the mo the home page just doesn't do it that way ?

You may feel that I am 101% wrong in which case that fine I won't take offence

HTH

Nige

Thanks Nige,

No offence at all. These are the comments that I am inviting. I want to get this right, and if all I get are polite responses then it won't improve. If you were looking for an exciting trip to Transylvania, what would wet your appetite in those first 15 seconds?

Cheers, Paul

[Hybrid_From_Hell]

Hi Paul,

The old adage of "You have just 5 secionds to make the right impression" is paramount here on your web page.

What would grab me ?

Well, how about Most of the screen being the most stunning picture you have, coupled with your logo at the top and a statement / tag line ie

"If your looking for the best holiday compnay for transiolvania - congratulations you've found us or

If you can find a better company to organise your Transvania holiday - Take it

Then at the side of bottom have the links to the other parts of the sites etc ?

Just my 2p worth

HTH

Nige

[Andy]

i agree with the idea of a stunning pic on the homepage, i didnt see much currently to grab my attention when i first looked. the text that is currently there sounded good & professionally written though so its not all bad .

you need something to make people go 'wow i wanna know more' right at the start or a lot of casual broswers may well just head to the next linky they have. sounds like a good place to visit though & thats just from whats written so far. btw where is transylvania? eastern europe i guess - hey maybe a small map of europe & a cross/circle/stake through it somewhere on the site to say where it is?

Looking good... If I drive over do I get a discount ? wink.gif

(approx. 1,300 miles... So that's 100 or so tanks of fuel, three services, 18 breakdowns and two changes of socks...)

:lol: your sure do change your socks a lot mate

[FridgeFreezer]

A few pointers:

1) You've made the classic mistake of re-sizing images in the web-page using the <img width="" and height="" tags, your banner is very slow to load because it's not 975x100 (which is how it's displayed) but a massive 3509x407. You need to make it the correct size in a graphics program and save it as a separate JPEG file. It will load faster (you're knocking 60% off the file size) and look better because graphics programs are far better at resizing images than web-browsers. This is true for almost all the images on your front page, your logo looks awful too because of this! (also see 6)

2) While we're on the subject, 975 pixels wide is waaaay too wide. Just because you and many others have a screen that's 1024 pixels wide does not mean that everyone has a screen like that, or that everyone views your website full-screen. Think about laptop users, people with older PC's, PDA's, or in web-cafes or public libraries who may not have such good screens. I would stick to 600 pixels wide and fade out the ends to a coloured table cell background that will then scale to whatever size screen. Look at the top of this website for an example of a nice top-bar that scales to any width screen.

3) Your banner disappears on any of the sub-pages, which leaves them looking a little dull and reduces continuity. Also the side-menu suddenly appears, rather than being present on the homepage - again this makes the navigation inconsistent.

4) Search keywords along the top of the page, at least make them a small font and an invisible colour. Personally I find the tactic of spamming keywords across all your pages smacks of desperation, just put proper content into your pages and they will attract people in. Leave the spam to spammers.

5) While the suggestion of a breathtaking image on your front page is a good one, these days you do indeed have 5 seconds or less to make an impression - and currently your banner alone takes about that long to load. Keep images, even big ones, to 500x500 pixels or thereabouts. This is enough to display a good picture whilst still loading quickly.

6) Use .GIF format for graphics with sharp outlines (like logos) and use .JPEG for photos. Use 75% compression (or 25% quality depending on the graphics package) for JPEGs - you won't notice the difference in quality but the file size will be much smaller.

7) The best bit of web design advice is "What would Amazon do?", their website is designed to be as quick and easy to use as possible, for as many people as possible. That's how they make their money. If they are doing something, or not doing it, there's a damn good reason.

8) The antithesis of 7) is "What would an AOL user do?" - whatever they put on their websites you probably shouldn't put on yours. The list includes animated GIF's, flashing text, scrolling banners, pointless JAVA (EG falling snowflakes), multi-coloured text, text in all-capitals, smileys all over the shop, text-speak, hideous background graphics, "under construction" images (guilty on that one!), frames, bling hit-counters, pointless graphics, funnies, adverts, advert banners, popups, music, etc. These days you can substitute "AOL" for "Myspace" etc. with similar results. See JeffK's website for the full treatment

9) When you make your pages, try viewing them in several different browsers (IE, Netscape, Firefox & Opera are all freely available and commonly used) and in different sized windows to give an idea of how they will look on smaller screens. There are even tools available to show how your page will display on about 20 different browsers/computers, as well as tools to validate your HTML. Don't take the validation one too seriously, iron out any major faults it reports but after that you'll never make it 100% happy so as long as the pages work OK leave it at that.

[Paul64]

Thanks for all your comments, what a fantastic response. Trying to work with a friend on a few of your ideas already.

Many thanks,

Cheers, Paul