Redesigned site for search engine's visibility - Need Critics! 10

[JoJoH]

Hi all,

I've just completely redesigned my site for the purpose of increasing visibility in search engines. I like the look of my old site better... but my old site is absoltuely not search engine friendly... so here I am with the new site! Please give me some comments/thoughts on my

1) Site overall design
2) User Friendly-ness
3) Speed
4) Improvements I could make for
increasing rankings in search
engine visibility.
5) Any other things you could think of!

http://www.jadeboutique.com

Your comments are highly valued! Tell me the truth!

Thanks in advance!

JoJoH

http://www.jadeboutique.com

 

[JoJoH]

Hi Lebisol!

Thank you very much for taking your time to review my site! I appreciate your comments! Yes, too much and too big graphics on my site! I am currently redesigning my site(again) I am planning to change my navigation bar to text using SSI, I am also planning to use what you said about thumbnail/enlarge approch for my product images. Well, for the long URLs, they are for Search engines... hoping it will help in my rankings (some books say it would, some say it wouldn't...) Good thoughts Lebisol, thank you once again!



JoJoH

http://www.jadeboutique.com

 

[ChrisHirst]

Hi JoJoH,

The very long file names won't do a lot for SEO they will start to annoy you though. Not forgetting of course there is a size limit to HTTP responses (page headers) of 2k which some firewalls may block as being suspicious




Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

 

[JoJoH]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the tip! Yes the long files name ARE already starting to bug me now! Well since it won't do much for SEO then I guess I will get rid of it as soon as possible!(Added to what you mentioned about a size limit to HTTP responses!)

Thanks Chris for all your help!

JoJoH

http://www.jadeboutique.com

 

[lebisol]

Hi JoJoH!
If you need help with images and slices and all PS work let me know....I think I can help you out.
comapre the image sizes from this:

http://mostarNET.com/template.asp

(Save AS)to anything outhere and look at the image sizes ;-)
good luck man!

> need more info?
:: don't click HERE ::

 

[JoJoH]

WoW Lebisol! I am impressed at the tecniques you used to cut down on the page/image download size! I love to study good web pages, and through this page alone you've taught me many great tips as to how I could cut down on my unecessary images/image size, neat tricks too etc! For example for your navigation bar on the left I thought they are all image buttons but instead you use text/background color to achieve the same effect! And I found alot other neat techniques I could incorporate into my webpage too! Neat! Thanks Lebisol!

One question , is there any reason why you use images as your <td> background instead of using <img src> inside your <td> tag?

Thank you once again Lebisol!





JoJoH

http://www.jadeboutique.com

 

[lebisol]

Hi JoJoH!
thank you for the kind comments!

&quot;s there any reason why you use images as your <td> background instead of using <img src> inside your <td> &quot;

<td> vs. <tr>
it's so I can have it displayed in NN and IE and
also if images are just instereted/sourced <src=&quot;&quot;> they will remain their size while used on the background of an element (eg. table) they will &quot;tile&quot; unless specifed otherwise.
so for example if u need an image to cover entire row of a table that might be 15x600 pixels-> instead of making an image of the same size and Inserting it in the row...well u can use a small imege of 15x1 px and it will &quot;tile&quot; entire row when set as its background.......(I think mainBM.jpg is an example of it)
... the page u saw is not finsihed ass u can see many little imperfections in HTML tags as well as the pixel shading etc....

Anything that has to do with a &quot;digital&quot; and &quot;image&quot; (for me) = Phototshop and with the Dreamweaver it is a great combo for the interface design....and much more !

If ur are looking to cut down on image sizes & have & wan to learn PS ...let me know...
all the best to you!

> need more info?
:: don't click HERE ::

 

[Ladyhawk]

It's nice to read a thread where someone asks for comments and when they get some which are not all peaches and cream can read them constructively (unlike the some other threads I will not mention). Well done JoJoH and nice looking site.

Ladyhawk.
** ASP/VB/Java Programmer **

 

[JoJoH]

Lebisol: Thanks Lebisol for the offer! Yes I will definitely let you know when I need help with PS! But how could I learn from you/let you know if you say:

> need more info?
:: don't click HERE ::

J/K

Seriously, yes I would love to know if you have instructions on PS and Dreamweaver, would definitely love to learn from someone who knows what he is doing! Thanks you once again!

LadyHawk: Thanks LadyHawk for the peaches and creme! Yum!




JoJoH

http://www.jadeboutique.com

 

[lebisol]

find me on: lebisol2@_NO_NO_hotmail.com and I will start u of with some links..tuts etc.
all the best!

> need more info?
:: don't click HERE ::

 

[travmak]

All of your product images are way to big in your product listing. None of the pages fit in 800 X 600. I use an after market asp componant to allow a user to upload an image of any size and then the componant resizes the image, file size and dimentions to automaticaly create a thumbnail.

an example of this is at

http://www.localwebdev.com/inventory

All thumbnails are the exact image I uploaded, the file was resized before sent to the browser. When you click on the thumbnail you get the full sized image.

for example the picture of my car that I uploaded is 768 X 512 100k The automaticaly created thumbnail is 150 X 151 only 5k

I can't remember the name of the componant, if you are interested i can look it up.

 

[lebisol]

JOJoH:
> need more info?
:: don't click HERE ::
maybe click --> lebisol2@_NO_NO_hotmail.com




> need more info?
:: don't click HERE ::

 

[JoJoH]

Lebisol: What a peculiar email address!

Travmak Thanks for taking your time to review my site! THe ultility you've mention sounds extremely useful! If it does not take you too much time, would you please look it up for me? Thanks in advance!

JoJoH

http://www.jadeboutique.com

 

[RISTMO]

That email address given was to stop spamming...another way of writing it would be lebisol2 (at) hotmail.com.

About the site....It's looking great. I'm assuming that you will, however, change the images to text, where possible. For the menu part that you want to keep as images, you can do this:

<a href=&quot;page1.html&quot; title=&quot;Page 1&quot;><img src=&quot;page1.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Page 1&quot;></a>

For the search enginges, that will pretty much be as good as a link like this:

<a href=&quot;page1.html&quot;>Page 1</a>

You do need an ALT attribute for all your images....W3's validator will tell you as much...

One thing--the front page still does look kind of like an advert....Could you not stick some text somewhere saying &quot;Welcome to....&quot; and &quot;use the navigational menus to view our products&quot; or something to that intent? I'm not sure where or how, but you need something to let people know that that's your homepage and not an advert. I see that you still have to implement lots of the above suggestions, but once you do so, I think it will be a really great site, both for your users, and for the search engines. A user-friendly site *should* be search engine friendly. On your subpages, you NEED a rollover for the sub-menu links. Make the links slightly lighter when moused over. Other than that, I'd say it was great (once you implement the above suggested changed) :-D.

Rick

-----------------------------------------------------------

http://www.ristmo.com/

RISTMO Designs

http://www.arabchurch.com/

Arab Church

http://www.reference-guides.com/

Reference Guides

 

[JoJoH]

Hi Rick! Thank you for taking your time to review my site! Wow are you still 15 yrs old? I am 17 so it is interesting to see someone around my age here(people here are usually around twenty thirty something yrs old and Up, just guessing, I might be wrong though). Anyways regarding my site, yes I still need to do a major reconstruction, next time I put my site up for review, it might look quite different from now. And yes, putting a rollover my menu is a good idea, I will do that too. For this

<a href=&quot;page1.html&quot; title=&quot;Page 1&quot;><img src=&quot;page1.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Page 1&quot;></a>

Sounds great but will the search engine like it?

Thanks in advance for your help!

JoJoH

http://www.jadeboutique.com

 

[ChrisHirst]

Hi JoJoH, yep we are all ancient sages in here full of words of wisdom for you young 'uns!

All you need for a rollover is a bit CSS to change the colour of the link text otherwise you'll be writing loads of javascripts to do the image swapping and they don't always work too well with asp because of the caching (or lack of it)
this is for an external style sheet;
change the colours and text styles to suit your site;

A:link {
color: #3333FF;
background-color: #FFFFFF;
text-decoration: underline;
font-weight: normal;
font-style: normal;
font-size: 12px;
font-family: sans-serif;
}
A:visited {
color: #9966FF;
background-color: #FFFFFF;
text-decoration: underline;
font-weight: normal;
font-style: normal;
font-size: 12px;
font-family: sans-serif;
}
A:active {
color: #FF0000;
background-color: #FFFFFF;
text-decoration: underline;
font-weight: normal;
font-style: normal;
font-size: 12px;
font-family: sans-serif;
}
A:hover {
color: #000000;
background-color: #FFFFCC;
text-decoration: none;
font-weight: normal;
font-style: normal;
font-size: 12px;
font-family: sans-serif;
}
and link it to your pages.



Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

 

[JoJoH]

Wow, thank you Chris once again!!! I just love this forum so much because there are so many helpful individual like you around!

Thank you once again Chris! Much appreciation to you!

JoJoH

http://www.jadeboutique.com

 

[JoJoH]

Hi Lebisol!

I've already emailed you at your email address, please let me know if you've received it! Thank you once again for all your help Lebisoll!

JoJoH

http://www.jadeboutique.com

 

[RISTMO]

Still??? ;-) Yeah...almost a year later and I'm still 15....one month from tomorrow, I won't sound so young anymore....(Is that good or bad?)

You're guess was right...there are only a very few (as far as I can tell) that are under 23...many are over 30...

I'm surprised to hear that you are only 17! I don't meet many good young web designers...There's Phil....and...uh...I think he's the only other one. :-D Congrats ;-).

<a href=&quot;page1.html&quot; title=&quot;Page 1&quot;><img src=&quot;page1.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Page 1&quot;></a> will work very well in the search engines. I think it's just as good as <a href=&quot;page1.html&quot;>Page 1</a>, because google can't read images, so it will read the alt and title instead (someone correct me if I'm wrong!).

I like the look of your site...a lot...I just think that you need to fix the problem of too many images (and too wide a width). If you could do that without trashing this template, it would be great...Let me know when the new verstions ready!

Rick

-----------------------------------------------------------

http://www.ristmo.com/

RISTMO Designs

http://www.arabchurch.com/

Arab Church

http://www.reference-guides.com/

Reference Guides

 

[travmak]

the componant can be found at

http://www.persits.com/

obviously your system has to install it. I don't know how accessable your servers are. I use aspUpload and aspJpg, both are on my servers.

 

[JoJoH]

Ristmo: Thanks Rick for the comments! As for &quot;Still&quot; 15 years old, I was just wondering if at the year 2001(the year you joined Tek-Tips) you were 15 years old or Now your are 15 yrs old(I was thinking maybe after your birthday every year you come here to Tek Tips to change your profile? ... There is nothing wrong with being young, I used to want to be older, but now I am 17 almost 18, I don't want to get old that fast anymore... I guess it was because I want to achieve as much as I can at a young age(hopefully well grounded/established before 25yrs old), but time seems to be merciless to me on this aspect! Anyways, other than you, the youngest developer as far as I can tell in this forum is 25yrs old(Wullie, you probably know him). Haven't met Phil yet... Anyways, thanks for your advice on my site, will probably post my site again for review after I've redesigned it! Good luck to you Rick, you're lucky to start at such a young age, can't imagine what a programmer wiz you'll be at age 23!


Travmak : Thanks Travmak for spending your time to look up the ultility for me! Much appreciation to you!

JoJoH

http://www.jadeboutique.com