Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Marcy,

I did specially for you so you are very welcome to forward it to your designer/developer and use it  Please let me have a look at it when the changes are done..

I have also noticed your current website doesn`t utilize CSS for controlling the appearance....the page source needs to be cleaned and made using CSS (you can see the difference if you right click on your page and choose "view source" and compare that to my design source).  CSS will allow you to easily change the look of your whole site by editing just a single file and definitly your page will load faster and be more search engine friendly.

As for the navigation buttons (tags) the way they are done now (as an image) is not nice both loadwise (the filesize is 23 kilobytes) and is also not search engine friendly for web crawlers and spiders that index sites.  This doesn`t mean that you should give up your design idea but my suggestions is to:

1) Make the links in text links (as they are in my design) and make your button design a background image (although I am not so sure they will position properly on top of each other) or otherwise save the buttons with the text as images but it is better to make them 5 images, one for each link, as opposed to one single image)

2) Make the background lylac color a background color in html instead on being part of the image

Making them smaller is also a good option....they will load faster...

Let me know how it goes:)

Cheers,

Riham.

Riham, you need to be congratulated. You, as a professional designer, have helped show Marcy, and others here at SUN, just what exactly a "professional" design team can offer. Without getting into all the technical goggledy-goop, you provided a "solution" to Marcy`s website issues.

A big applause goes out to you and your team. Great job, great solution and suggestions.

Marcy, if you don`t hire her, then what can I say ....

I second TJG`s praise.  Riham, you made some excellent design tweaks that should provide immediate improvements to the usability and overall product promotions on the website. 

I also agree that much more can be done with it...but it`s key tweaks like this that make a HUGE difference!

Looks like we`ve got another superstar in the community!

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Brian Cleveland,
Web Producer,
StartupNation

Riham,

Again, your are wonderful! and I will be contacting you soon... it`s hard to work out all the kinks when I work a full time job too... I try and do as much as I can while a lunch.  I`ll be talking with my site developer about getting these changes, but if he can`t, how can I get a hold of you? To find out costs on transfering over hosting (if you do hosting) and making the proper changes.  I do not have a contract with this company, but I did want to give them a chance to `fix` it.

TJ - I also I want to thank you!  You have been wonderful with all your tips and expertise! I look forward to talking to you again!

Thanks Marcy

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Marcy Shuler
www.ScrapbookSpaceStation.com
Scrapbook Furniture and Organizers

TJG, Brian, Marcy ...what can I say?  Thank you very much for your kind and encouraging words...they really made my day and I hope I can input more and more to this active community

Good luck with your web developer Marcy but in case you want to contact me I am reachable at riham@tittainment.net and the rest of my contacts are in my profile page.  My company doesn`t have a hosting server but we are affiliates of a good company where we are hosting our own domain as well as the domains of several other clients so the transfer shouldn`t be a problem at all.

btw Marcy, It`s nice to see your face at last :-)

Thanks again and have a nice day,

Riham.

Thank Riham, I will be contacting you soon I`m sure! I did not get a chance to get with my developer last week.  Hopefully, this week I can...  I did go back and change the homepage... it`s not as wacky as before with all the colors etc...

Thanks again for all the input! Marcy

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Marcy Shuler
www.ScrapbookSpaceStation.com
Scrapbook Furniture and Organizers