My first website ... need comments from the pros

[Glorfindel]

Hi everyone,

I just happened to open my first website a couple of days ago. I used the fantastic Coffee cup HTML editor.

I would appreciate some input about my website. http://www.inmyplaces.com

Tank you.

[webwey]

Hi Glorfindel

I'm not a pro, but I took a look at your website. I am using a slower computer than normal so it took a while for the home page to download. Anything you can do to make pages faster to download, especially regarding graphics would keep visitors on site, as if some find them too slow they will not bother. Sometimes you find jpg files are smaller than gif files while sometimes it can be the other way round. You only need gif if it is animated. (Apologies if you already knew this, I have learnt these things as I designed my own site).

Personally, I don't like the background of the home page, but that is just me. I really like the background of the stars & planets though, but then I would.....my main site is an astrology site lol. I do have an interest in astronomy also though so it was nice to see some of those pics too. Btw, I'm not sure where those images came from, but if they are from NASA they require you to acknowledge that with a disclaimer. (I have used NASA images on my site)

I love the buttons and your graphics are good too.

Wishing you every success :)

[Glorfindel]

Yes I was quite worried about the loading time it would required to display some of my pages. I think I will save my PHD images with less quality to lower the file size.

Thanks for your comments.

[webmoriar]

Try using the Layer -> Flatten Image and then going to File -> Save for Web (or something like that). Generally you can get a fairly good picture with 70% and .jpg but try out .gif and if it looks good you can generally save more space. Hope this makes sense. Website looks good though.

[JWJ]

I have little technical knowledge, but visited your site out of interest. It's a nice site and the graphics are great, but the loading time is a major put-off. Had I only been a casual visitor, I would have quit and gone elsewhere before the pages were fully displayed.

My site contains lots of watercolour paintings and they load in an acceptable time. They are all jpg's, and the quality is 'good enough' for what I am trying to achieve. I'm sorry I don't know enough to offer any technical advice, but the site is certainly worth the effort of trying to make it load faster.

Keep up the good work. :)

[Glorfindel]

Hello all,

First off, thank you very much for your comments.

Recently I have learned CSS (cascading style sheets) and came up with this new design of my web site.

I invite you to take a look, and i would appreciate any advice or comments.

Thank you.

http://www.inmyplaces.com

[JWJ]

Hurried back for a fresh look. The first thing that struck me was the loading time. What a huge improvement you have made. No more hanging about waiting to see what the site is about. Good job.

[webmoriar]

I like the new look and faster loading too. :D

[grannysjewelrybox]

One thing you may want to consider is screen resolution. I have mine set at 800x600 and once I left your main page, text was cut off on the left side of the page (not the menu part, but the actual text).
Granny

[Glorfindel]

Oh! Only newbies like me don't think about that :lol:

Thank you very much Grannysjewelrybox !

[pink_cloud]

OOOOooooooh
very stylish! ^_^
Although, i have one suggestion.
you know the "menu" thing?
i personally think it's a bit plain... maybe you could use a jpeg or something? i mean, your site does load up quite fast. i hadn't checked it out before you made the changes so i'm not comparing with anything. yeah. i think maybe change the menu title.
-yuki

[pink_cloud]

soz,
forgot to mention it before,
but i loooooooove the red background!
you know, the one you've used behind your graphics. it's kewl!

[Glorfindel]

Ok, thanks to Granny :-), I updated my site to be viewed for low resolution users.
The only thing is ... due probably to my very short career in amateur website design :lol: , the only idea I had was to put the "menu" DIV into my TABLE so no part gets shadowed by another for low resolution users.
I am open for inputs about that.

Pink_Cloud,
Your site is very interesting ... the content is very exhaustive and it shows that you have put lots of works in it.
I noticed though, that you made a typo for the french part of Belly ... it should be Le ventre and not ... La ventre.

[inexistence]

firstly WOW ITS SLOW!

Im on a 4mb cable modem and have no trouble with most sites. This site though i clicked the link as soon as i started to read the thread. it didnt load until after i had read the whole thread.


The menu just looks like a black box with the title MENU. wait art and maps just came in.



Some things you may want to consider.

if you use tables try and break them up so that the whole page in NOT in one giant table. This requires the browser to download the whole page before displaying because it has to biuld the tables first.

try ending your table at logical row seperators simillarly to how this mesage forum uses multiple tables.


I used to put my whole site in a table but found it slow. by breaking up the tables i increased my load speed by about half.

[grannysjewelrybox]

Inexistence, the problem must be yours because the site loaded instantly for me.
Granny

[graham35]

I am on a dial up modem connection and it loads very quick for me (just so you know) about 3 seconds for a full page, to go from Art to astronomy direct from the web and not my cache - I would say thats good

[inexistence]

i just tried again.

was an instant load as advertised.


Now that is working im very impressed with the scrolling thing with the images inside.


Very nice. i have never seen that before.

[FlyinCJ]

Running a T1 at the office, pages won't load. Running Cable at the house, page won't load. Besides that, you seem to have a nice understanding of HTML. Also, I would try a different resolution for your site. You will know what I am talking about once you look at your stats/system specs from StatCounter.

[Tamas]

I had no problems loading your site at all. You should try mine...fulep.com

The rest of the site? Not a great deal on there really.

regards

Tom

[chaz1975]

this is also my first web site trying to get into the social network game what do you guys think?

klamour.com

its been about a year since i started.

[FrankV]

Couple of things to start:

1. Start using Statcounter as your hit counter.
a. So that you get some really good stats on your visitors.
b. So that we don't think you are just here to get free advertising for your site. ;)

2. Fix the 412 Errors that W3C shows for the index page alone.

3. Consider moving the style in the head to an external css file.

4. Do the FAQ and other links at the bottom really need to open another browser page?

Otherwise, It looks ok to me. I'm not into what you are offering there and can't really comment on that area.

Oh yeah. Next time, start a new thread instead of reviving one that is years old.