Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I apologize for posting twice. My first post the text was all in bold and I could not change it. Unfortunately, I am not able to delete the first posting.

 

My name is Angelea Morris and I am the owner of Created for You. My url is www.createdforyou.biz . I sell a variety of personalized gifts. Outside of my custom made gifts I sell gifts for holidays and special occasions.

My website is product driven.  I designed this website with the help of the osCommerce shopping cart. Creating this website with this cart took some time but I learned alot in the process.

Right now my business is home based / internet only but my goal is to open a gift shop in 2009.

I appreciate all comments.

Thank you very much for all responses.

Amgelea Morris

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Bill Clanton
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Nice full site and it`s great you`re listed on Google products search. Try to get some reviews to bump your listing.

I agree that the header needs some tuning. Make the font larger, and smoother like Ariel. Also, the title: `Personalized Gifts ...` should be in HTML and not in the picture for SEO. I would leave the email in the picture but other functional information like your address and number should also be HTML not image.

Perhaps move your name, position, and email under your logo on the left and keep them all in a nice squarish image. Turn all the other text (of the header) into HTML, enlarge the size to H2 or H3 and make the font like the rest of the site.

I would also change the contact page into a one-click fillable form to email your main address with questions/concerns. Provide a drop down Topic list so you can manage the mail.

Good job so far

Regards



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Colin Winter
Small Business Website Management and Marketing

I have a large 20 inch screen and like to keep a big browser window.  Your site dynamically stretches to fill the width of the browser.  So for me, the site doesn`t look very good.  The welcome paragraph on your home page is 4 lines tall and way too long that it`s uncomfortable to read.  The product photos are spaced too far apart.

There`s nothing wrong with making sites that stretch like that but you have to keep in mind people with different screen sizes and web browsing habits.

Hi Angelea :-) We`re right up the road from you, in Batavia.

The site looks normal to me, and yes, I see it going side-to-side. That`s usually a good way to do things, but on a 20" monitor, it really gets a bit hard to handle. If I have my numbers right, the common monitor at the moment is 17"?

Two things that bothered me are the yellow tagline, and yellow for your name. They`re almost impossible to read against the white background. But that`s just little stuff.

As for the overall look and feel, maybe you could reduce your columns of products to two instead of three, then make your "thumbnails" larger. It`d work on both smaller and larger screens, I think.

The size of the font is hard to judge. I`m using a high-resolution 1280x1024 screen, but I`ve learned that what looks good to me comes across huge on a more normal resolution. To solve the problem, I`m making my font sizes "small," instead of points or percentages. "Small" is pretty much the "normal" size in any browser with default settings.

Overall, I like the site enough, but it isn`t strongly attractive. I suspect it`s partly due to the yellow and white color scheme. But another issue is that you start right off talking about "candy wrapper and gifts." What do candy wrappers have to do with anything? I couldn`t seem to find that on the site, and it was confusing.

You could use some more description in your products, I think. The pictures are very nice, but it just seems very sparse....not a lot of selling going on.

These days, the common standard in width for a web page is 1024 pixels.  You`ll find people that argue otherwise (for larger or smaller) but that has become the current standard.  I don`t mind pages that stretch but there should be some fixed maximums.

That`s what I`m finding, too...with the 17" monitor. I try to view our site either on Kathy`s monitor, or by changing my resolution to 1024x768. The problem with changing the resolution is that it doesn`t give a "real" sense of what the pages look like. I suppose if I wanted to really do it right, I`d have a 17" monitor next to my main one, and change monitors. Aren`t there switches for that?

In the meantime, I have a couple of pieces of masking tape on the edges of my monitor to show me where`s the outline for a 17" monitor. :-D (Hi-tech solution.)

I`m using a dual screen setup, 28" and 24" (most recent graphic cards support two devices Craig) running 1920x1200 on both. Everyone I know that uses good tech will adjust their browser to not be maximized. If they are running a laptop with a large resolution, most people never open a browser full screen for exactly this reason. My browser is most times set at 1280x1024. You can set smaller and exact resolutions through the Web Developer extension for Firefox.

From my experience of managing sites in various industries, the most used resolution is 1024x768 and that is how most top sites are designed. However, it`s never been more than 50% of site traffic. 1280x1024 comes in a close second at around 15%, followed by the widescreen version of that one. Even though this data might 20-%-points by each distinct market, I think it would be safe to assume Angelea`s market will be using the lower end technology and probably don`t even know what is screen resolution. This only makes the topic of resolution compatibility less important.

The easiest fix for this debatable issue is to just restrict your overall design to a width of around 1000px. However I think anybody with a large enough resolution to be ticked by the wide lines of text would know how to restore their browser size.

The argument against restricting widths of a website is for the people like me who want more information shown. Larger screens were made so we can fit more information as well as display it at a physically larger size. I hate sites that bind the content section of their website to an even smaller width due to their poor design. Startup Nation is an example of a mild case of this situation. On this forum page, the entire site is binded to a certain width, and then they have a half-page-tall right bar feature that makes every succeeding post a smaller width. On their classic version, the width is even more restrained by the Member information displayed on the side. The worst case of this problem is when you have a flash website with features on the side of content that wont expand with the browser width.

Webmasters should be aware of width restrictions and should loosen or restrict them based on how they want their content perceived. Content rich sites will most likely have a dynamic width, while business sites with static and in most cases less information will keep a restricted width to `fill` the page better.

You don`t have this kind of design conflict, but it`s important to understand why binding widths `can` be bad. In your case, it`s fine. Sorry this subject has taken over your thread.


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Colin Winter
Small Business Website Management and Marketing

Before this thread I did not realize that the way you design a site will display differently on monitors. This is great info but I will have to figure out how to adjust my site because of using a pre-built template such as oscommerce. This shopping cart is great but you must have alot of knowledge about web programming and unfortunately I don`t. I must pat myself on the back for what I have been able to achieve. Thanks for the input about the standards.