Hiya Mike,

Sites look great, I'll assume the carolinemike one isn't finished yet since most of the pages were empty? If that's not the case let us know too so we can help see what might be wrong. I went to the Calendar page first but no calendar is there, and there's an image in where the calendar should be with an "alt" tag that has a typo for the word 'black' in it Other than that if it's how it all should be then it's looking really good, I love the clean layouts, very nice.

I'm a noob here at the coffee house, but I'll share our current website:

magicmarxie.com

Purpose: retail sales of our line of 1/6th scale action figures

Made with: Dreamweaver, soon to be completely obliterated and rebuilt with VSD, Shopping Cart, Menu Builder, Image Mapper and Photo Gallery (for starters). Photography by me with my trusty Sony Mavica 6.0 using Photoshop for image editing.

Made by: Just me me and about a thousand hours learning Dreamweaver by the seat of my pants.

My apologies if you look around and get stuck in a corner. The site is a mess right now. Our product line has gotten to big for simple HTML galleries and tables. I researched about a zillion shopping cart packages before landing on CC. The pluses? Price, service, support, friendly forums, and the intangible 'attitude.'

I start resizing about 1000 pics this weekend and loading them into the Shopping Cart (drat those square pics in the template!). So, keep the coffee brewing!

Terri

Hi Terri... you certainly have a fun product there.

Wishing you well with the rebuild as there is obviously a lot of work to do.

My initial reaction was that every page looks as if it belongs to a different web site. I think if you could get a more harmonious overall look it would give the site a much more professional feel for your potential customers. You have that fabulous red, yellow and black header logo for the product - you could maybe use those colours, or slight variations of the same, throughout the site. That would also give some colour harmony to it all.

It might help to create a maximum page width of about 900 - 1000 pixels too so that you can be sure it maintains all the content within those limits, yet again lending more continuity to all the site pages. I see on some pages you have 925 pixels then 948 pixels... keep just one constant throughout. Make sure you centralize the page.

It is commonly accepted (by industry standards) that about 12 words in a line is about as much as any eye is happy to read, so a narrower width for your pages would also limit the lines of text to a more comfortable reading span.

One thing you must do is make sure that your users can easily find a way to get back to the home page from every page on the site. Better still if you have a full menu on every page, which is one of the reasons why a horizontal menu is so useful as it does not interfere with other stuff on your page leaving you the full width for the key content.

Anyway, yet again, all the very best with this project. Look forward to seeing how you get on.

Link (text readability)
http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-usability/web-page-readability.shtml

ps. Don't forget to check out the specific forum areas for each of the CC products you mention if you need any help with their use. You will find a wealth of information already up for reading, but obviously, if you can't find the answers, just post your questions there.

I have 3 main websites

www.fieldmedics.com

www.fieldmedicsweb.com

www.fieldmedicsjobs.com

Thank ya Janys!

You hit the proverbial nail on its pointy little head. As I alluded to, what started out as a kitchen table company grew very quickly and outgrew my webby skills ever quicker! Basically I was over-writing the same old tired out table configuration over and over again and errors and inconsistencies began to creep in (and creep and creep . . .)

Unfortunately the cool logo has to go. Some business changes make that one obsolete and I need to nudge the brand identity in another direction.

I'm using the fluorescent dusk template as the starter for the webstore and will keep to the darker 'sunset' colors throughout the site with the occasional infusion of western themes.

I spent today learning the differences between Photoshop and Photoshop Elements so I can do the design work on my laptop instead of being chained to my desktop. The grunt work will be resizing all those photos for use in Shopping Cart - just can't stand the off color borders around the rectangular pics.

Thanks for checking us out! Terri

Hiya Terri,

One thing you can do to make your photos look nicer and fill in the area around rectangular photos is what I and a bunch of others have done with our shops. Create an image with a nice background and border that you want to use and then put your product photos on top of it. I created my backdrop image to be 480 x 480 and then adjusted the product images accordingly so they would fit inside that image.

That size works very well with SCC so that you don't lose much if any image quality either so it works out pretty well. Good luck with it

BTW, I used Photoshop Elements 2 to make the gold raised border on my images, I then put that onto an image I had already created with Paint Shop Pro 12 which worked out pretty well I think

Terri... I use Adobe Photoshop Elements too which is more than sufficient for my limited needs. I do some photography - mainly for web work - and for that I use the Elements also. I cannot justify the price of the full program!

You talk about the off colour borders around the images - you are probably talking about those images which are linked for clicking through to purchase areas of the site for instance. What many people tend to forget is that images are links just like words are, so unless you remove the borders completely, they are going to show up in the same colours as the links in the written text (unless you specify different colours for image links).

Why don't you download and trial the CC Pix Converter which is really speedy for batch conversion of images. You can customize the size and optimization really fast. I use it all the time for creating thumbnails or set sizes for albums and similar. Quite apart from anything else, it opens up real fast whereas Elements is sluggish and presents an overload of information for such small projects.

Well, I look forward to seeing your progress, so good luck, but don't let it get the better of you!

Domain: http://www.jemexpressionsontile.com.com

Description: Website for my ceramic tile company

Tools Used: Visual Site Designer, Form Builder, Photo Gallery

Authors/Team: Me

This is my 3rd redo of this site. I went with the slide show to demo various uses of our tile. Comments and suggestions are welcome

Love the site Joel, looks great, well done and easy to navigate, and I love your tiles too, very nice

Nice, clean and tidy looking site Joel, and as Jo Ann says - your product is absolutely beautiful. I seem to recall having seen one of your previous sites too. This is certainly a nice one.