Website Design? Any recommendations?

[Paul64]

Try it out now!

Not quite finished, but I hope you agree, looks much better.

Cheers, Paul

www.transylvania4x4tours.com

[Andy]

much prettier & a simpler layout to draw people in it would seem. i like it.

[Paul64]

much prettier & a simpler layout to draw people in it would seem. i like it.

Thanks Andy

[GBMUD]

Didn't see it before but I just looked (skiving off from tidying up wrapping paper before the parents arrive) and I think it looks great. Nice and simple, clear links and attractive pictures. I would find a real picture of the luggage and perhaps the map as they do not fit with the other photos. Apart from that, it offers the relevant information in an easy to understand and use format.

As you learn more, you can make the size of the page change to fit the window - or even make the window change to suit the size of the page.

Good effort!

Chris

[GBMUD]

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.

Forum trip to Romania next time then?

Chris

[Mo Murphy]

Hmm, oddly enough, I thought the same thing Chris 2008 anyone ?

Mo

[Paul64]

Thanks Chris for your comments. The critical eye regarding the design came across myself and my friend Peter. The more you learn about this, the more you notice and want to change. With Fridgefreezers guidance we have changed it quite a lot. Tell me if you think of it now. Is as good as it looked before? It should load more quickly as well, as we down sized the pics and text.

Regarding 2008, you are all more than welcome!

Cheers,

Paul.

www.transylvania4x4tours.com

[FridgeFreezer]

2008 works for me wonder if Al or Will will have finished their vehicles by then?

[Andy]

do behave Fridge, even me as quite a new member can spot the never ending stories on this site

[muddyplugger]

My2p worth:

600x800 perfect. I would centre your site on the screen, just a bit easier on the eye.

I love your arrangement on the home screen, and if I were you I would use that same basic design throughout your site.

Steer well clear of frames though!

If you cant manage to keep the home page design through the site then at least keep the same top logo on each page. Think about those visitors who arrive from a search engine in the middle of your site! You also need that same first impression on each page.

As you become more adept at this then mouse over buttons are great 'style over content' a simple swapimage code is quite easy once you've got the hang of it.

Remember the search engine wars, easy enough to list your sites with most search engines for free, but google uses a different method whereby your rankings are based on how many other sites point to you (if you see what I mean), so to get noticed on google your url will need to be on many many other sites, and their webots do the rest.

Anth.

edited: I notice you do not have a stat counter, I would suggest only using a hidden counter, and their are loads of free ones out there, statcounter.com for one. They provide a lot of useful info such as where people came from, screen size, keywords they used, geographical location etc etc etc.

[GBMUD]

Chris has asked me to make a few comments on this thread, I hope no-one minds as I am not a regular here!

800 pixels wide is very small these days - yes, you mustn't forget the PDA and mobile users, but the vast majority of users will be on 1024x768 screens, and even those are are no longer the most popular size - so many people have bigger monitors with much better resolution that 1280x1024 is becoming *almost* standard.

I would usually design a site to fit 1024, as if it is much smaller, it ends up looking 'lost' on the screen. - as someone said earlier (sorry can't remember who) it is also possible to deign a site so that it automatically fits the browser, no matter what size it is.

The comment that fridgefreezer made about navigation is spot on - ideally, you should have consistant navigation, ie it is always in the same place, doesn't jump about. The way the navigation works on the home page is nice, maybe you could keep that throughout the site. Definately keep the logo at the top on every page, so that a visitor who has come to your site and bypassed the homepage will still know what the site is about.

The one thing that your homepage is missing is any text! Search engines love text, without something to tell them what a site is about, you may find it is difficult for your site to do well with the search engines.

Not sure the layout of the internal pages works very well, example the contact page, with the second vertical green bar, the email address is unreadable.

I personally dislike centered text (eco-tourism page) as it is difficult to read - left align or justified is much easier on the eye.

Don't try and hide text by making it very small or the same colour as the background - search engines really frown on it, and may even blacklist your site.

I would steer well clear of frames, pages cannot be bookmarked, search engines won't index your site properly, and some of the older browsers won't be able to display your site at all.

I wouldn't use mouseovers as has been suggested, the javascript ends up bloating the page and it will take a long time to load - there are other techniques using CSS that will acheive the same effect without slowing down your page.

BTW - I am available for freelance work if you are interested

Jenny (Not Chris, even tho' that's what the signature says)

[FridgeFreezer]

To follow that and refine the point I made, 800 wide is not very wide these days and you can design a site to look its best on a larger monitor, but I would still keep any graphics (esp. title banners) to <600 pixels, then the rest of it can be HTML text and tables etc. that automatically sort themselves out to any screen size. Again, look at Amazon and even this forum - they work at 500 or 5000 wide.

The CSS for mouseover highlighting of text or an area is (for links) a.hover and just set a new style, stick to something like underline & a colour change as some people do stuff like change the font & size and suddenly when you mouse over something, the whole layout goes to shot and text has to re-wrap itself.

Avoid frames, use tables for layout even though the uber-geek-purists and W3C are discouraging it they're still the only thing that works reliably on all browsers.

I don't know but I suspect, as Jenny said, many search engines have gone beyond looking for keywords since people started filling pages with lists of keywords just to get search ranking, proper content is most likely to get you listed, and clicked on.

[nas90]

Just looked at this thread for the first time and thought that your site looks good especially the home page. Did not like the green vertical bars and as Jenny said it masks the email address.

[Paul64]

Thanks everyone for your help. A fantastic response and very helpful. Myself and Peter are trying to implement as many of your ideas possible, and the site has been changing by the hour as a result. It is far from complete, but please keep looking and telling us what you believe would make the site look better or more user friendly. No pride involved as we want to get this right. If you think something stinks, or we keep missing the point please tell us.

Thanks also Fridgefreezer for your comments about the aol browser. It has been some 48 hours now and no change. So frustrating, as a whole audience out there are seeing nothing but the original site. Just so you all know what I am talking about. When I update my site, the changes are shown in the internet explorer and mozilla browsers. However, when I use my aol browser, it always looks the same. I have cleared the cache, history, cookies and refreshed many times, but nothing works. AOL have not responded to any of my e-mails, and when I tried to call them at 23 cents a minute, I never got past the queing system at 20 minutes.

Regards,

Paul White

(pdwhite2000@aol.com)

Cheers, Paul.

[FridgeFreezer]

This is why everyone loves AOL

[Paul64]

I will probably move from AOL now. I have had plenty of problems over the years.

Anyway, I have activated the guestbook on my site. Please leave some nice, complimentary messages to get the ball rolling

www.transylvania4x4tours.com

Cheers,

Paul

[Paul64]

My guestbook is begging for some comments, without swear words would be preferable!

Can't seem to get listed on google, or with any other search engine for that matter. Not sure where I am going wrong?

www.transylvania4x4tours.com

[muddyplugger]

Submit your website to free web directory listing (or several), as the best way to get listed is have lots of links. lots of links, lots of links. This is why the Admin on here spend a huge portion of their time deleting new members just looking for traffic! (I assume they do, as I do it everyday on a forum that I mod!)

Don't even bother using Googles submission tool, it is the same as the 'close door' button on lifts (Not wired up but great for frustration). Google, as do others, index pages rather than websites, so ensure your keywords, metatags etc are correct for your niche and as mentioned previously, a bit of text goes a long way. Search engines love text!

Listing with the others takes time, often weeks or a month, just keep submitting your site to their 'submit your url to yahboo here' link, or use the free url listing sites that are plentiful.

Just an off the wall thought, Really what you need to do is also have lots of back links too, so get everyone to submit their site to you and in return they will list your site, hey presto mutual increase in links for everyone and let the webots do their stuff.

[Paul64]

Submit your website to free web directory listing (or several), as the best way to get listed is have lots of links. lots of links, lots of links. This is why the Admin on here spend a huge portion of their time deleting new members just looking for traffic! (I assume they do, as I do it everyday on a forum that I mod!)

Don't even bother using Googles submission tool, it is the same as the 'close door' button on lifts (Not wired up but great for frustration). Google, as do others, index pages rather than websites, so ensure your keywords, metatags etc are correct for your niche and as mentioned previously, a bit of text goes a long way. Search engines love text!

Listing with the others takes time, often weeks or a month, just keep submitting your site to their 'submit your url to yahboo here' link, or use the free url listing sites that are plentiful.

Just an off the wall thought, Really what you need to do is also have lots of back links too, so get everyone to submit their site to you and in return they will list your site, hey presto mutual increase in links for everyone and let the webots do their stuff.

[Paul64]

Submit your website to free web directory listing (or several), as the best way to get listed is have lots of links. lots of links, lots of links. This is why the Admin on here spend a huge portion of their time deleting new members just looking for traffic! (I assume they do, as I do it everyday on a forum that I mod!)

Don't even bother using Googles submission tool, it is the same as the 'close door' button on lifts (Not wired up but great for frustration). Google, as do others, index pages rather than websites, so ensure your keywords, metatags etc are correct for your niche and as mentioned previously, a bit of text goes a long way. Search engines love text!

Listing with the others takes time, often weeks or a month, just keep submitting your site to their 'submit your url to yahboo here' link, or use the free url listing sites that are plentiful.

Just an off the wall thought, Really what you need to do is also have lots of back links too, so get everyone to submit their site to you and in return they will list your site, hey presto mutual increase in links for everyone and let the webots do their stuff.

Thanks for that. Submitting now.

Cheers, Paul

[FridgeFreezer]

I never bothered submitting my sites to search engines and especially not those "list your site with 11,000 search engines for free" sites as I tend not to trust free stuff on the web. Be patient (remember google's spider trawls through billions of pages) and just add proper content to your website - click here to see how google's page rank works and why you should stop trying to fool it and just make a proper flippin' website

Making the web address in your signature clicky would probably do more for your page rank than fretting about search keywords or submitting your site every day for a week.

[Paul64]

I never bothered submitting my sites to search engines and especially not those "list your site with 11,000 search engines for free" sites as I tend not to trust free stuff on the web. Be patient (remember google's spider trawls through billions of pages) and just add proper content to your website - click here to see how google's page rank works and why you should stop trying to fool it and just make a proper flippin' website

Making the web address in your signature clicky would probably do more for your page rank than fretting about search keywords or submitting your site every day for a week.

Thanks for the info. I managed to get the AOL drama sorted out with the browser. They eventually contacted me and sorted it out over the phone. Yes, I am guilty to submitting to 11,000 search engines, but I did it individually!

I will just wait and see what happens now. I take your point about content, quality etc. I will start putting te meat on the bones.

Not sure what you mean regarding the signature clicky?

Cheers,

Paul.

[Mark90]

{url}www.transylvania4x4tours.com{/url}

or {url=www.transylvania4x4tours.com}Transylvanian 4x4 Tours{/url}

Will give you clicky links to put in your sig if you change the {} for [] and these will be picked up by search engines giving your site a higher ranking.

[alan kemp]

I used to use Frontpage and managed to make a passable web site using a standard template. I struggled with Frontpage extensions so abandoned it. Bought Dreamweaver and struggled like mad with it. I have no real understanding of web speak and have not been able to produce a website. I simply do not have the time to dediccae to the ;earning curve.

Is there somewhere to download templates for Dreamweaver so all I have to do is edit them to suit my needs?

I use pay per click to get hits on my site which generates a reasonable amount of business for a reasonable monthly outlay.

[FridgeFreezer]

Alan, I find the easy way to get a good layout template when you're learning is save a page from a website you like the look of, then open it in whatever design program you're using and make your own changes etc. as required. Stick with Dreamweaver, or at least stick away from Frontpage. I use GoLive which isn't as trendy as DW but does what I need and the price was right

You should be able to transfer the templates from Frontpage to DW simply by saving a blank page in any given template style, then opening it in DW and adding your content.

Out of interest, pay-per-click may get you traffic but does it get you sales? And how much does a click cost these days?