Yes! another upgrade to my site...

[Proteus]

Hi all!

These last days I've learning and practicing .ssi and .shtml files. I've working on my site mainly to make it easier for me to handle all the pages and to make the site as easy to use as I can for my visitors.

Now, could you guys please tell me what you think about this new format?
Is it well displayed in your screen? ( I did it 800x600 px)
Does it take so long to load?
What about my homepage?
And the usability?

By the way, I still need to finish a few pages, but most of the site is done.

Well, I hope all the time that I invested in this new format was worth, please let me know if you find a broken link or something "wrong" I will appreciate your feedback :wink:

This is the link :arrow: http://www.the-pinata-maker.com

[trackerm]

Hi Proteus,

It looks good!
My 2 ideas are:
Remember to explain what a Pinata is on the home page. I never knew till after I hit my first one. I didn't know there was meant to be anything inside! OK I'm from a different culture :) On 'How to Play the Pinata Game' explain it like someone has never seen the game played before. if they need to see the 'how' page its because they have no idea :)

My other suggestion is not to make your site too 'professional' looking. If it looks like some lickety-split commercial site it may lose a bit of the wonder of a cherished childhood activity.

Perhaps you need some 'adult' Pinatas too. The one we had was at an adult party.
The web can bring the whole world together, people from different cultures can learn something of others whilst having a bit of fun. That can do a whole lot more than all the politicians put together :)

Mark

[Arne]

The opening page (homepage) is best to be as fast as possible to download
Yours is in total 152 kB and that is far away to much! 50 kB should be the absolute max size in my opinion, if you don't wont anybody to hit the back button before the page downloaded.

Most of the 152 kB comes from the large images (128 kB) because they are very big and/or animated, for no real reason at all. "The_Pinata_M_14447.gif " is 57 kB, "little_pony_pinata_red.jpeg" is 46 kB, and the HTML is "only" 16 kB (could be less with better use of CSS). Now it takes 30 seconds to load whole page on 56K connection.

But apart from that, I like the look of the pages. Clean and straight on, easy to navigate and read the content. You are using a lot of CSS, but only(?) with the HTML tags. Why not separate to "indipendent" CSS, maybee in a external stylesheet. :?

You have also made efforts to make the homepage valid Transitional and that's very good! :D But I guess the other pages could validate also, with a little effort. I guess most of them only missing the doctype declaration only? And with only a little more effort on the coding the pages could also valid as HTML 4.01 Strict witch is the recommended doctype for non framed pages.

[Proteus]

Thanks for your feedback.

How about the new warm welcome explaining what is the site about? It doesn't take more than a minute to read and decide if is worth to browse more...

Adult pinatas... mmm I prefer to stay in the kids birhday side, Maybe I'll add a link to another adult pinata site later on...

I renewed a section: "Ask The Pinata Maker!" instead of "F.A.Q"... I believe this could attract visitors to establish a person to person question and answer... we'll see.

I don't know if you can notice it, but I try to talk in third person, and in "Ask The Pinata Maker" I write in first person. I was wondering, how do you feel about this? Do you think that I should write in first person in the whole site or it's fine the way it is?...does this make you feel any difference in order to convert you in a possible customer?...

Also I'm testing an experiment: Since I have some space in my navigation columns, I'm trying to attract possible sponsors.


Thanks again :wink:

[Proteus]

It should be working now... what do you think about my experiments in the home page? :wink:

[webado]

It should be working now... what do you think about my experiments in the home page? :wink:
Oh, that might be a great intro, unfortunately it stayed too long (40 seconds) on that first page (index.html) before I got redirected to the next page (home.html) where all the interesting stuff is happening. I expected a redirect of sorts so I didn't give up. But others might just say,"Bah, nothing much is going on here" and move on.

Don't forget, most pageviews last less than 5 seconds, so 40 seconds is too long. I'd think if you want anybody to stay pout you first have to tell them "In 10 seconds you'll begin to experience ....." and move on in about 15 seconds. Like I said, 40 seconds is too long.

It would be neat if you could have an actual countdown displayed. I think I saw something for that in javascript, I used it as a countdown to New Year's, but it could be adapted for sure. I'll try to dig it up and post it.

[Proteus]

Thanks for your great feedback Chris!!

How about 20 seconds? Are you able to read my welcome message?

and about my home.html page?
Is it worth as a visitor to have the directory looking so you have everything in one page?...

My main goal is not only to sell, but to have one of the most useful websites about my site topic:
for my visitors: a whole directory about pinatas, where to buy, what they are, reviews, critics, questions and answers, etc..

for sellers, a place where to give exposure to their products, specially the sellers that make crafts...

All of this without missing the warm human touch in my website... to make feel that there is a human with feelings behind (I sound dramatic? uh? :( )<~~~ That's why my welcome message (yes, I was thinking: why not to place the welcome message as a link inside, but I'm not sure that everybody will read it...).

Am I achieving my goal?... :wink:

[webado]

thanks for your great feedback chris! I'll work on that countdown.. :wink:
Here are a couple of stopwatch applets: http://javaboutique.internet.com/stop_watch_applet/ or http://www.shodor.org/interactivate/activities/stopwatch/index.html .

There are many others, just a matter of finding the simplest one to use.

It should start automatically when the page is displayed I think (so it may start on the onLoad event handler).

Another one is a timer applet, which may in fact be a better choice: http://javaboutique.internet.com/Jtimer/ or http://javaboutique.internet.com/Timer/ .

[graham35]

Proteus & Chrisooc

Well I am a little lost by whats going on here, I have visited Proteus web site and just as I was finishing to read the page, it changed - now I understand why this is done like this, however if I had not been viewing the site because of this board, I would have clicked away instead of reading all that text..

I have checked the links that Chrisooc displayed and they all seem to be of stopwatch types, where the visitor inputs information regarding time - well thats how I see them, if not then how can a webmaster be sure of how long it is going to take the several different speeds of the users connections (28bps, 56bps etc etc) to open the next page.

What you seem to need is a loading bar of sorts on your welcome page, which displays a bar filling with a colour as the page is being downloaded in the back ground, indicating that another page is loading and at what speed/time its going to get there - driven by the visitors internet connection speeds.

Well thats how I see things, from my years of web browsing

[webado]

Proteus & Chrisooc

Well I am a little lost by whats going on here, I have visited Proteus web site and just as I was finishing to read the page, it changed - now I understand why this is done like this, however if I had not been viewing the site because of this board, I would have clicked away instead of reading all that text..

I have checked the links that Chrisooc displayed and they all seem to be of stopwatch types, where the visitor inputs information regarding time - well thats how I see them, if not then how can a webmaster be sure of how long it is going to take the several different speeds of the users connections (28bps, 56bps etc etc) to open the next page.

What you seem to need is a loading bar of sorts on your welcome page, which displays a bar filling with a colour as the page is being downloaded in the back ground, indicating that another page is loading and at what speed/time its going to get there - driven by the visitors internet connection speeds.

Well thats how I see things, from my years of web browsing
The next page is not downloading in the background. The first page simply redirects to another page after 40 seconds, using a refresh onto a new page url.

The applets I found are stopwtach types (perhaps they can be automated to be turned on on page load) but also some are simple timers.

A timer applet could be used together with a message saying hang on, more is about to happen. :lol:

[graham35]

A timer applet could be used together with a message saying hang on, more is about to happen

This written in big bold letters is enough to tell viewers whats going on, with out all the rest of the text

But why does it take 20 - 40 seconds to re-direct, if the page is not taking this amount of time to download!!!!

[webado]

A timer applet could be used together with a message saying hang on, more is about to happen

This written in big bold letters is enough to tell viewers whats going on, with out all the rest of the text

But why does it take 20 - 40 seconds to re-direct, if the page is not taking this amount of time to download!!!!
Because Proteus put 40 seconds in his refresh tag. He could have put 10, 15, 20, anything, or nothing and that's how long it would have taken :lol:

[Proteus]

I've just set the refresh to 20 seconds. So it's faster... however, as I was reading in your posts, this method is not well received by visitors... oh well

Also my home.html page is getting a little larger and I believe has the look of a link farm... Of course this is not what I intended. I just wanted to have text to make it download faster, and it worked! but that look... mmm I don't know... probably if I break the home.html in three parts: Learn, Shop and Have Fun... let's see how I handle it..

I know some of you may think that I'm crazy :) but this is my hobbie, to create and design webpages... sorry!

Thank you all for your feedback! :wink:

[ScottyDM]

The applets I found are stopwtach types (perhaps they can be automated to be turned on on page load) but also some are simple timers.

Oh that would be fun!

I have a splash screen on my SkunkWks site (http://www.skunkwks.com/). It is a bit graphics heavy (one pic that is carved up and put in a table), and I have a 20-second timer/redirect on the page. At first I had my WWW link (below) go to this splash screen, then I decided I really wanted people to see my home page first. The splash screen is an artifact of the directory layout on the web server -- I have a few things in parallel with the HTML site itself.

I had noticed that some people would link in from this message board, then reload that page up to three times -- I don't know if they were looking for my content (missed my link), a bad thing. Or if they loved my graphic so much they wanted to see it again and again.

Some kind of countdown somewhere on that splash screen would be awesome. Give visitors a clue that something was about to happen.

Scotty

[Proteus]

You are absolutely correct. The exact spelling of pinata is "piñata" instead of pinata.

The reason I use "pinata" is purely a search engine optimization strategy.
But I will clearly remark the spelling fact in my website.

(By the way, I'm redesigning the whole website again, and this time will be really great... you will see!)

Thanks for your comment
:wink:

[webado]

LOL! I'd love to type piñata but I just spent at least 10 key strokes trying to find the ñ using the Spanish keyboard settings (that's how long it took me to stumble onto the ; key which mysteriously spells out ñ but then of course I have no clue where the semi-colon is hiding any more :lol: ).

Why, oh, why in 2004 are all the keyboard layouts just sufficiently different as to be a major headache?

I use a bilingual keyboard (English/French) with the alternate characters actually written on the keys in addition to the "regular" ones (whatever the heck regular may be here) but that's only valid for one particular French keyboard type. I have to hit the right one or else half the special characters aren't where they seem to be. Every time I install Windows it's hunt & peck time for the French keyboard settings. The Spanish keyboard settings are still a mystery to me, requring my going through all the special characters to find the little whachamaycallit ¿ or ¡ and others. As for the Romanian keyboard settings, lo and behold I discovered that of all keys, the Z and X are switched around :? Go figure! :lol: