Your Website - - OK it's online - Page 2

KevinBE · #16 02-16-2003, 10:13 PM

Thanks for researching that problem Doug. I deleted those horizontal lines and now the site should compress down to 800 easily. That is the reason I designed the site like this so that it would compress and expand to compliment all resolutions.

OK Greg I'll post the business card and see what you guys can come up with. Thanks.

Doug Nelson · #17 02-17-2003, 12:56 AM

I'd advise using an obviously antique photo for your card, or people will think that it's a picture of you (this happened to me). Of course, if it IS a picture of you...

BigAl · #18 02-17-2003, 02:00 AM

Kevin, I found some difficulty in the navigation:
Main Page and Home Page make me think they should be the same thing.

On the Products page, you suddenly get extra menu items. Some kind of break between the "regular" items and the new ones could be useful in grouping them (you'll probably be stumped by FP on this one

). What sometimes helps is to have the main menu across the top, and submenus on the side.

On the Restoration page, there a new menu items again, with no way to the Manipulation and Archive pages.

Expanding menus could be what you're looking for.

On the manipulation page, I'd change grey scale to black and white (the man on the street won't understand greyscale). In the same sentence, I'm not sure of the American spelling but in UK English, the last word is spelt "blurring"

On the archiving page, it appears there should be a picture on the left of the paragraph (part of the paragraph is indented). In the first paragraph you say the following:
"We use only the highest quality Gold impregnated CD-ROM disks. The normal CD-ROM disks you see on sale for a low price use blue or green dye recording media and can be erased with exposure to sunlight. The CD-ROM disks we use are guaranteed to last in excess of 100 years, excluding physical damage of course."
The CD is not impregnated with gold, but rather has a gold reflective layer. Also, unless you have your discs (note the "c" used in spelling for optical media) checked regularly by someone like Media Sciences, you should be wary of claiming 100 years longevity. All discs suffer from degradation in sunlight, regardless of the dye used.

Ed_L · #19 02-17-2003, 05:43 AM

Hi Kevin,

I'm a little late on this thread (been busy). I think the site looks fantastic! One thing I noticed is when you said " Whether you visit us on the Web or at our place of business, please feel free to browse,". I think this gives you credibility, and gives the potential customer a better feeling about doing business with someone they don't know. Regarding the business card, I really like the looks of it, but I agree with Doug. I also thought it was a picture of you when it was loading. Super job! You've put a lot of work into it, and it shows.

Ed

KevinBE · #20 02-17-2003, 09:51 AM

Good morning.

Doug I think you are right about the business card. I had the same thoughts. I need to re-think the design on the business card. I don't think that most people would notice that one picture was restored and the other not. The pictures are too small to be effective. Those pictures are of my father-in-law and not me.

BigAl, you really have given me some good information. I appreciate the work you put into the responce. I'm not satisfied with the menus either and will give them a lot more thought. I am thinking of removing the splash page ( the Home page) and making the Main page the Home page. I just need to figure out how to do it. I am using Frontpage 2002 and I'm far from being an expert at this.

Ed, you aren't late at all. I hope this thread keeps going for a while longer. This has been invaluable help for me. Maybe I will get most of the bugs out of my site with everyones help. I thank you for the flowers Ed. There were a lot of other things I should have been doing while I was working on this project. But, I am glad I have spent the time learning how to do this myself.

It's hard to find your own mistakes. I appreciate everyone helping me get this site right.

Paul · #21 02-17-2003, 10:43 AM

Kevin, it looks like you've been busy on your site

I hope we don't come across as nickle and diming your site to death as you are obviously working hard at updating and improving it as you go and thanks for the opportunity to see your progress as it's a great learning experience for us as well.
The size of the images on your restoration pages are too small IMHO, consider resizing them to match the sizes you use on your manipulation page and by the way you did a great job on the Father and the Bride image.

Good luck
Paul

Vikki · #22 02-17-2003, 11:02 AM

Just visited your site. Very professional looking, clean, easy to navigate, and fast loading.
My observations:
I'm not sure why there is a "Gallery" heading, when there are seperate links to the restoration heading/galleries.
Regarding restoration photos: Have you though about grouping the photos, so that when one clicks on an image, a side by side comparison is available? Also, as mentioned previously, the images are rather small.
Vikki

KevinBE · #23 02-17-2003, 11:32 AM

Hi Paul and Vikki.

Paul I appreciate all comments. Thanks for your comments on the work I did on that wedding picture. I have made many changes so far and I am sure I will make many more before I am satisfied. I have moved a working copy back offline so I can make some major changes. I am glad I did because removing the splash page and making the main page the new Home page didn't go well at first. But now I have it and all my link bars working like the should have. I have more work to do on the horizontal link bars, recently added, to make them more visible. I also did away with the pages I wont use, like the Gallery.

I agree that the pictures aren't large enough I will make adjustments to them before re-publishing the site. I like your idea Vikki about combine the pictures so they can be viewed side-by-side. I am going to test the site at 800x600 to see how they appear at that resolution.

KevinBE · #24 02-17-2003, 01:09 PM

Well now I am upset. I tested the site on 2 of my other computers and I find that the font I used in all my titles and logo, monotype corsiva, is not displaying. I guess this font is only available with Office XP. It displays just fine on my laptop, which also has Office XP with Frontpage 2002. Why would Microsoft do this. It allowed me to use a font that is not compatible with most computers and didn't warn me. Now I have more work to do.

CJ Swartz · #25 02-17-2003, 01:39 PM

Kevin -- I see the monotone Corsiva typeface, and I use Win98SE.

I really like the look of your site --- it is very attractive in color and line, but clean and readable and usable. Others have given good ideas about possible changes, but I just want to reiterate that the general over-all impression is one of a professional business website that exemplifies good taste and customer service. I really like how you included the image that could NOT be perfected as an example to show folks the limits of digital restoration.

Pat yourself on the back for all that you have accomplished and learned. Then, just keep up the good work -- there will always be reasons to make modifications, and this is great practice to learn how to make adjustments without changing the over-all scheme.

I heartily agree with the recommendation to change your contact page to list Suggestion and Praise before Problem and Complaint. In fact, I would avoid using the word "complaint" just because of the negative feelings it elicits. "Problem" should be a strong enough term and can cover any issues someone would have with either the website or with their restoration/retouch project.

Congrats on a great start!

KevinBE · #26 02-17-2003, 02:18 PM

Hi CJ, thanks for the kind words. If that font displays on your PC I wonder where it comes from, Office maybe? In any case I will have to change it to a font that is more common. It changes a lot for all the text to display as Arial. It sure looks better with the Monotype Corsiva font.

I have changed the contact page to your and Clare's recommendation. I have made changes to the Galleries. I'm not real happy with the way the Gallery works. Its too restrictive in the way comments are displayed. I may dump it and place the pictures on my own, but there are limitations to that too. Oh well it's all a part of the learning curve.

clare · #27 02-17-2003, 02:37 PM

The navigation is much better now

with a far easier system of finding what you want.

Another thing to think about....
When you click on one of your images it would be benifical to have a direct link back to your main site without having to hit the back button - maybe you can incorporate this when you place the images side by side. Also the image pages seem not to have the same interface as the main site. Just an idea but maybe you could use your page layout to view the images with them above and below as restored and before.

Your site is looking and becoming better and better by the day, you've done a good job - it far exceeds my first attempt at a web site and I have also learnt loads from the comment here, thanks for sharing

Clare

KevinBE · #28 02-17-2003, 02:52 PM

Well the monotype corsiva font doesn't come in Office XP. I just checked the other computers and they have Office installed. I wonder where it comes from?

Hi Clare, noticed your post just as I opened this new message. I have made several changes off-line that I haven't uploaded yet. As I said before I am not happy with the gallery. I don't seem to have control of how the viewing page looks. I'm either not looking in the right place or this is another limitation to the Gallery feature.

I have removed the horizontal lines, which were too wide and now all the pages can compress to whatever screen resolution the viewer uses, down to 800x600 at least. Don't know why these lines were a fixed width, the other graphics I used have the ability to compress or expand. At least the top bar graphics can adapt to screen size. I'll play with the lines to see if I can get that working too.

Yes, I have received a lot of good help here. This site is the best!

CJ Swartz · #29 02-17-2003, 03:04 PM

While searching for the origin of "monotype Corsiva", I found a good reminder here:Fonts and web design

"The only way to have a typeface display exactly as you intend it to display on a web page, you must put the typeface in a graphic image.

If you desire to force a typeface in the text of your web pages, we recommend that you use the most common typefaces already installed on computers. The most common serif typefaces are Times and Times New Roman. The most common sans serif typefaces are Arial, Helvetica, and Verdana."

So, you can still use your decorative monotype Corsiva type by making it a gif or jpg image for your logo at the top, and your copyright info at the bottom. Don't know if that's practical for headings, but at least you can make some use of it, and I would hate for your visitors to just see Arial.

I found this webpage:Where Monotype Corsiva comes from It's found in these applications - products - Access 2000, Access 97 SR2, Excel 2000, FrontPage 2000, Greetings 99, Home Publishing 99, Office 2000 Premium, Office 4.3 Professional, Office 97 Small Business Edition SR2, Office 97 SR1a, Outlook 2000, PowerPoint 2000, Publisher 2000, Publisher 97, TrueType Font Pack, Word 2000

CJ Swartz · #30 02-17-2003, 03:45 PM

For all of us who are either working on developing our websites, or editing our websites, here's a site to help find possible errors

Dr. HTML

You can check up to five pages for free each day.

On your Main Page, Dr. HTML found this minor error: Table 2, line #32 - TR -- "A close tag was found without a matching open. This is probably an extra tag that you should remove."

It gives you an idea of how different browsers will fare with reading the page also -- there are some HTML attributes that may not be readable on some browsers.