Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Hi Craig,

That would be nice... but I haven`t seen a program to do that. FrontPage had something similar (a graphical representation of links). You could create a site map, but it still will require looking at each link line to check if they are linked to where you want them to be linked.

~Roland

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Good morning. O.K. I thougth I had fixed the baby page, but my sitebuilder crashed twice yesterday. I blame my computer, but it is fixed now. Craig, I moved the welcome to my page writing to the top, AND, I found out about the picture and link or url. It was laziness on my part. I`ll explain, When I put a new basket on my website, I load the picture on my home page, and since it takes awhile for my computer, I copy and paste the picture on the page it is related to, instead of having to reload it . I believe that is what happened, so I will go on my website and pass the curser over each picture and then I can tell if I had copy and pasted or just loaded it. You guys are awesome. Thanks.

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kkrafts
"Treat every day as a new adventure"

O.K. I`m back. I went over all my images and the only one that takes you back to my home page is the baby bear basket. I know sitebuilder has a site search, so I need to go into that and figure out how it works. And I will get started on redoing pictures. I also clicked on the pics and once they completely loaded the size seemed fine on my computer. But that could be just me. I, also, know that I should have been reading, "11 steps to create a website" . Duh! And I will figure out a way to cut done on my buttons.I, also, made sure that when people contact me they are taken to a reply page and not a blank one. Except for image tags, Anything else?

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kkrafts
"Treat every day as a new adventure"

My suggestions (from a non-technical, marketing perspective):

1. Create a single style to make your layouts and pages consistent (print out each page separately and spread them all out on a table so you can see the variations that need to be adjusted).
2. Upgrade your photos to a more professional quality (sorry, I`m on the east coast, so I can`t easily help you on this one, [with or without a shameless self-promotion] but I`m sure you can find someone who will).
3. Consider including your own photo on the home page, next to your business description/philosophy. It could be a simple portrait or it could show you preparing a basket. Just make sure it`s professional quality as well.
4. Eliminate the extraneous auto, family, and camping photos and eliminate texts with gift suggestions that appear on various pages (this is just my personal opinion - to me, it doesn`t present as professional an image to include these, and they don`t make a meaningful contribution to your product line).
5. Standardize the style of listing each basket`s contents (I`d suggest using succinct bullet points rather than narrative descriptions). Customers want to quickly scan a list of what`s included. You might also want to include dimensions of the products too.
6. Correct all the grammar, punctuation, and inconsistent fonts, styles, and justification of your text. Find an editor/proofreader to read over each page and find the discrepancies. I have someone I can recommend, who would love to do it for you without charge, if you`re interested.
7. Consolidate your list of categories. Personally, I`d prefer to find one page with all the products on it, rather than having to click back and forth between so many different pages (especially when some of the products are duplicated in more than one category). And I`d be inclined to eliminate your page on "the art of gift giving".
8. How about creating a "build your own" basket product? Have an assortment of items shown that can be mixed and matched to fill the container of their choice. Price the items individually, or price the products using a menu format (choose any 5 items), or use a tiered-price menu format (2 items from each price category - A, B, C). A drag and drop feature for this would also be cool.

Excellent advice from Denise! We tend to not so much talk about publishing stylization in these Web critiques, taking it sort of for granted that it`s part of the layout and design. But maybe it`s because so few Web sites have any kind of organized consistency. Nice to be reminded every so often. :-)

Roland,
Thanks for the response on the graphic mapping concept. Maybe someone could develop a utility like this? Seems like it would be useful to the development community. :-)

I am going to run out of ink, by the time I`m done typing up all the suggestions. Ha,Ha!

Steve; with my cold and the cold meds my brain just isn`t functioning at normal. It took me a good 24 hrs. to figure out what you meant by a products page. O.K. That`s done and I only have 5 or 6 buttons now.

Just to let everyone know, I didn`t give up my "Art of Gift Giving page", but I only have a sentence linking to it on the home page.

OHDenise, I will do the bullets for descriptions. My own photo? Are you trying to scare people? Sorry couldn`t resist. As for the camping page, I still haven`t changed it. The photos on it with captions, bring in quite a few hits. What I mean is that when someone types in "Puddingstone Lake" (just an example) in a search engine, they come up and so does "My Unique Baskets".

I will be working on this over the course of the next couple of weeks using everyone`s helpful ideas. So keep checking back to see the changes. And let me know if I`m forgetting anything. Hope everyone has the day off tomorrow and Happy 4th.

Karen

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kkrafts
"Treat every day as a new adventure"

Okay, now we`ve got another problem. I noticed (Firefox 1.x) that the home page is loading slow....about 30 seconds on a DSL line, and I don`t know why.

However, I clicked various photographs and they loaded very slowly. So I took a couple and looked at them in Paint Shop Pro. Good grief! These originals are up in the 1500px plus size! Yes, they`re 72 ppi resolution, but holy cow....Hyooge images!

What I`d like to see (although I don`t think it`s why the home page loads slow) is that you do some basic image editing. Reduce the sizes to say, 600 pixels high (whatever width--use the same aspect ratio). Then you can use the small thumbnails from there.

When you have a gigantic image on the server, then tell the browser to re-size it, that takes time. Even so, it still reads and transfers the whole picture across the connection line, before making that size change at the end. These images are just too big, and I think it`s affecting the site.

I really like the new navigation bar, with only a few buttons! Much easier to understand. I know you`re in an organization mode as you work on the layout, so let`s see where it all stands when the layout`s complete. Then we can take another look at content organization.

:-)

O.K. over the course of the next couple of weeks, I will be redoing the pictures. So, I will make sure to look into their size as I go along.

I have come a long way, but still have far to go. I still need to look into the site search. You should have seen it 6 months ago.

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kkrafts
"Treat every day as a new adventure"

Google has free code for site search.