Hiya,

Not to rain on your parade, but have you checked with Weight Watchers to be sure you aren't infringing on not only their copywrited name but also their paid content? I'd hate to see you end up in some law suit for providing items on your site that are not supposed to be free. If your items on your site are not affiliated with Weight Watchers itself you may want to put a disclaimer on your main page that says that as it is very much portrayed as if it is sanctioned Weight Watchers recipes and such, and of course your shop not being anything that you'd find on Weight Watchers itself is pretty misleading.

No offense meant, just saying that it doesn't look legit to me and if not to me could be that it's not looking right to others and someone will eventually point this out to Weight Watchers and I would hope you'll have discussed it with them already by that time

Other than that, the site looks good, well thought out and balanced.

Interesting point, Jo Ann! When I briefly looked at the 'Weight Watchers Recipies' site, I was just assuming (without giving it much thought) that it was somehow affiliated with "Weight Watchers"... If it's not, I would change the name!

Graham,
Nice, clean, straightforward site, and as Per says - all the better for not having lots of bells and whistles!
My one comment would be that you seem to have downscaled the header image in the page, rather than sizing it properly in an image editor and optimizing for web use. As a result, even with a fast connection, the header takes quite some time to download onto my machine.
Anyone with a slower connection would quite possibly find themselves waiting a fair while before the page appears completely.

I regularly use Coffee Cup's Pix Converter which is very easy to use when I do not need to make elaborate changes to my images.

Fair point Janys - I had wondered about how quickly (or not) the banner pictures loaded. They are all quite small - about 100kB on average so I presumed they'd be OK for most PCs. However, they are indeed downsized (resampled) from the originals, so I'll look into optimisation. If PhotoShop Elements can do the job, I'd be happier than learning a new bag of tricks.

-- Graham

Hello Graham,
Funnily enough I always use the PhotoShop Elements myself for any extra image editing. That will be perfect.

I attempt to keep my main front page image down to about 60kbs at most and any other pages can be a little "heavier" as your visitors will be a little more forgiving the deeper they get into your site! So a fast entry is good, and then if the attention has been captured, a slight wait will be more acceptable. But the main thing is to make sure that the dimensions of the image are right so that the image knows which "size slot" to slip into in the html. Certainly image weight is less of an issue with broad band these days, but optimization does no harm.

Well, just finished my first hand-coded web site. It's for a client who runs a home-based dog kennel and various pet-related services. Main tool used was Notepad++ for the coding. It's written under XHTML Strict and CSS 2.1.

CoffeeCup software used for the photo gallery and the contact form.

http://www.brandykegkennels.com

Thanks to Inger, Tom and Cary for assistance getting a pesky alignment issue worked out. I learned an invaluable trick.

Thanks for the link, I'll check it out.

Those bottom links are odd. Somehow extra stuff got inserted after the end of my files, there's duplicate crap after the last html tag that I didn't put in there and isn't in my source files. Those pages validated at w3c before I went to bed, now they won't. This is the second time today. If it happens again I need to yell at the server people their machine is corrupting my files.

I just uploaded the whole site again and checked, clean. It goddamned well better stay that way.

The end product is very good, Spinny! A nice and clean site!

So 'Seargent Pepper' has been climbing the ranks since the days of the Lonely Hearts Club Band?

Very nice site, Spinny! Page design, as well as content, is quite inspiring.