Very good, what a difference! Now you can really see some details. Your characters are Poser, are they not? Very nice work.

Thanks Artlife! Yes, I tend to use Poser figures a lot, mainly because they're plentiful and straightforward to set up. Then I export them to Lightwave or Vue for the actual renders (and scenery work), because those applications have tremendously superior materials editing and lighting and much better render engines. I'm given to understand Poser 8 has improvements in both areas, but I only upgraded from version 6 this week and only installed it yesterday so the jury's still out.

I'm currently working on another piece where a dragon is involved, but this one will be an original build in Lightwave. I haven't done any serious modeling in a long while and it's high time to wipe the dust off.

Thanks for the feedback. I can put both jewelry spellings in my tags. Right now I'm not planning on sellling outside the US. One of the reasons is that PayPal shipping does not allow International First Class Mail, which is the best way of shipping my jewelry. I do sell Internationally on 2 other sites that I am on. Which reminds me of a question I need to post for the Cart Creator.

Marilyn
I live in Italy and have given up buying products from the US because the taxation on imports is so incredibly high. Quite apart from the actual postage costs which are often pretty expensive also. I used to buy a few bits and pieces from the SouthWest Indian Foundation as I love some of the indigenous hand crafts, but was finding myself with an import tax almost as high (about 50% in fact) as the cost of the products themselves. I bought a few small bits and pieces of jewellery from a US Etsy seller this Christmas for my daughter - and sure enough, upon arrival on my $80 bill I had to pay an extra $38 I seem to recall. One of the problems is, if I understand correctly - that the import cost is calculated on the product cost + the postage. What is equally distressing is that even gifts which have been sent to me from the US have been subject to this taxation!

So if you do decide to sell outside the US, you would be best to warn your potential customers that they may have to pay additional import taxation in keeping with the regulations of their own country. It might be worth your while doing a little research into this issue so that you can include some up-to-date information for your users.


And Phil - you are absolutely right - a few misspellings would be in order too!

Hello all I just rebuilt my site http://www.Bestsites4you.com and I would love to hear what you think of it.

I am offering website & logo design now so if anyone needs anything please let me know.

HI Bob,

it looks great. I really like the images, the navigation buttons and the sleek style.

Just a couple of things I found difficult to read...

the text on the home page was a bit small for me

I found red and white text on the logo difficult to read.

You've done a lovely job.

I am a beginner in website design - tried to learn DreamWeaver MX2004 Education version several years ago on the fly - gave up, then started last summer to takeover a very simple site to maintain as a volunteer for a local high school booster club. Tried to see if I could get back into DreamWeaver - too much to learn in a short time and way TOO expensive to come out of my pocket to upgrade to current version. I did some research and chose Coffee Cup and bought the Super Package -- (the CC support guys have been the best in the industry I have dealt with in my 30 years + of dealing with computers!!).

My first site was for some friends that have a local hamburger shop - they wanted simple to project their brand and logo style. I used CC VSD, CC Video Player, CC HTML (upload a file at a time), CC Form Builder. Used Vista-Buttons.com because of the flexibility of style - here it is:

www.jcsburgerhouse.com

You can go to the LOCATIONS tab and rollover with mouse to see maps or click on MENU to download a printable PDF or click on CONTACT US and each site has its email contact. The owners (who are a local mom & pop shop) wanted this site to be about the food, how to get something quickly - not about reading about them or selling franchises first - it worked and has been effective for what they wanted it to do.

Next up was building an informational site for the local high school Boys Soccer Team who happened to win the 5A State Championship in the Texas last year - for those of you that know soccer - this is a big deal. I started learning Photohsop Elements to build the header and other graphics. I used CC VSD, CC Web Calendar, CC Web Form Builder, CC HTML, CC Jukebox, and Vista-Buttons.com. I have used some online HTML & Javascript libraries for other things such as Current Event, News Headlines, and Picture viewers. I have learned the hard way about conflicts in using JS files and absolute vs. relative postitioning (Still don't understand a lot of this). This is all volunteer work - so you see what you get. Here it is:

www.planowildcatsoccer.com

It meets the need of getting the information out to the parents and the fans with weekly upcoming events, scores, photos, etc. This is a growing pain site. I keep the latest news articles going, a change in a weekly slideshow using backbox lightshow type script from a dhtmldrive library. You can access these on the bottom right of the fron page. The jukebox is hidden on the TRADITION=>FIGHT SONG page. Best website in the district - check the links to prove it. The parents love the maps I created on the schedule pages for them to download to tournaments, etc. I ahve crammed a lot into a small area - but that is what was needed - they were using one of those "free" sites before with no flexibility. Now - I can hardly keep up with them for weekly status and scoring changes on the fly.

And my most recent site for the football booster club at the same school - another volunteer "work-in-progress" done site for me:

www.planowildcatqbclub.com

I used CC VSD, CC Form Builder, CC Firestarter, CC Jukebox, CC Calendar, CC HTML, and Vista-Buttons.com. Still having overlapping issues with flash vs. html and abosolute vs. relative positioning. I own CC Shopping Cart and Shopping Designer Pro - that is what I will get into in Phase 3 of this layout. (I really need inventory tracking management and a bit more flexibility in delivery options that I can program before I can use it the way it will be most effective for us). I have also used Photoshop Elements v6.0 to build the header and graphics in this one also. The fans like to use their iPods to log in and look at the rosters during games - I have thumbnail images on the Varsity roster page they can rollover and see the players pictures and names...I still need to get better at my table looks -- want more zebra stripe looks...

I love CC products because in my extreme limited knowledge of building websites and the fact that these all had to be done in the past 4 months - Coffee Cup has made me look like I know what I am doing. I get better each time BUT I still have a long way to go. These may not be the most professional looking websites, but it gives us our own feel and not a canned blog or purchased site templates that other teams use. I'll get better as Coffee Cup grows and I learn how to do it right. THANKS COFFEE CUP !

Hiya D.

Some great looking sites to be sure, and very well done for an "amateur" as you say you are

I have a few things to suggest and report though:

For the JC site, some of your photos in your gallery are distorted, might need to look into resizing them or adding an extra background area behind them (making a larger picture with a solid background to place the photo into to make it fit the gallery better and not distort).

For the Soccer site, your menu subs don't work for me on the Home page at all in FF 3.6, they just show up as little dots that fly out to the right. I tried a lot of your other links and they all worked for the menu, but I didn't try every one so I would suggest you try them to be sure they are all working too. The Home doesn't work for me on any of the extended menu areas.
Looks really good though other than that.

Football site has same menu problem with the Rosters area, both of the sub menus have that problem, went to both of them and the menu subs don't work on either of those 2 pages in the Roster section. I didn't try all the rest so you may want to do that on this site too.
Once again looks really great other than the menu issue.

Nice job on them all, I'm sure we'll see great things from you very soon

P.S. Tested in Firefox 3.6, and they work fine for me in IE8 so not a problem there, just FF 3.6

JoAnn-

Thanks for the comments - never tested in FF 3.6 - only FF3.5 and IE8. I will look into it - my user community is mostly IE.

Pictures are stretched a bit because that is what I "learned" on and what the owner sent me to use ..

Small fonts are used on the other sites - trying to squeeze in a lot of info until I can move things around.

Yes, believe it or not - I am an "amatuer" at website building - just an old timer at "geekdom" in the computer world.

Thanks for your input. NEXT.. a lot of maintenance...I am just waiting on the new Shopping Creator PRO !

Hi D...
I never got to see the galleries as I waited and waited, and nothing downloaded at all. You may have too many high res images in one gallery perhaps...a little more optimization may be all that it needs. Inevitably when you look at a gallery on your own computer everything shows up fast since that is where everything is stored - but someone waiting to see your gallery for the first time may lose patience if they have to wait too long. As I have still not seen the gallery, I am not sure of course - but you may need to make a few tweaks there for friendlier viewing on slower connections.

The rest is fun and the graphics seem very appropriate for the kind of audience your site is likely to draw.

Just for the records, over the past couple of days I have developed this little site for a young photographer friend who needed a portfolio of his work. Very simple. Used CC HTML Editor for all the code changes to my original template. I added the lightbox image display code. Pleased to see that it just took a couple of tweaks to get it all to validate with W3C.
http://www.mattiabeninati.com/index.html

We wanted the photographs to play the lead role in the site and so there are no other graphics which means it all loads much faster. A couple of the galleries are still pretty empty, but now the site is up and running it won't take much to fill them out a bit more. There is also room for a couple more items in the horizontal menu if needs be - for instance some events or public exhibitions he takes part in.

To avoid putting his email link directly on site, I have incorporated a simple contact form for his potential clients or enquirers.

I have to admit that I have used some tables in this to speed up the process, but it could equally well have been developed with pure css of course.