My first website attempt

Subject: My first website attempt
From: theleveller
Date: 25 May 11 - 07:28 AM

As a complete novice to the technicalities of websites, this is the very first one I've actually built myself – for our acoustic duo, Whipstaff. Actually, it's more of an online songbook. Now that it's up I can see that it needs a bit of tweaking: some of the text boxes need adjusting, there are one or two annoying spelling and grammatical mistakes (doh!) and I can't work out why the home page starts off over to the left but, on the whole, it has a 'homespun' look that reflects our music, I particularly enjoyed writing it, and I'm rather pleased with it – I think I'd give it 6/10 for a first effort.

http://www.whipstaff.co.uk/


Now, on to version 2.

Subject: RE: My first website attempt
From: GUEST,Paul Burke
Date: 25 May 11 - 12:40 PM

Impressed!

Subject: RE: My first website attempt
From: Old Vermin
Date: 25 May 11 - 12:51 PM

Just to show I've had a look,

- is it worth promoting the best photograph of you to the top of the home page?

- 'amateur'? Is this declaration wise, unless you intend never ever to charge no matter how much you are in demand?

Subject: RE: My first website attempt
From: theleveller
Date: 26 May 11 - 05:02 AM

Thanks Folks. Thanks for the advice, OV - we are definitely 'amateur'; this is our hobby and we don't do many gigs, more singarounds and folk clubs so we don't expect to get paid. I think your idea about the photo is a good one.

Subject: RE: My first website attempt
From: GUEST,Jon
Date: 26 May 11 - 05:14 AM

Good info, easy to follow etc. Overall, I like it.

On the negative side, I don't like the way the pages linked to from the main page align to the right (the whole page seems shunted over - at least on Firefox, Opera and Chrome on Linux) and the w3c validatior throws up quite a number of errors you may (or may not) want to look into.

Subject: RE: My first website attempt
From: Dave Roberts
Date: 26 May 11 - 05:33 AM

It's very good. I've certainly seen professional sites which are much much worse.

Subject: RE: My first website attempt
From: treewind
Date: 26 May 11 - 05:42 AM

There's a horrendous amount of markup ("show source" reveals it) ~ 90k file size is a lot for very little actual text on the home page

Also the main text panel on the home page is an image - why? Google won't be able to index a word of it.

It been created with a MS product that shouldn't be used for making web sites. I don't think there';s any MS product suitable for that job. Exporting as HTML from a Word doc is not a good way to do it, neither is MS Publisher. That may account for the W3C validator errors (256 of them!!!) and also for the inconsistent positioning.

The song lyrics are all graphics too. OK if you don't want anyone to copy the words (except by typing them out again) and you don't want Google to find them, but it does make the pages slow to load. Anyone on dialup will soon give up.

It looks quite pretty...

Subject: RE: My first website attempt
From: theleveller
Date: 26 May 11 - 05:48 AM

Yeah I realised MS Publisher was a mistake about three-quarters of the way through. Version 2 will NOT be in publisher - thanks for the advice.

Subject: RE: My first website attempt
From: Jack Campin
Date: 26 May 11 - 06:50 AM

Ugly fonts. (In Firefox - I've tried it on both Mac and Windows versions).

Slow to load for what it is, but you already know the code is bloated.

Subject: RE: My first website attempt
From: theleveller
Date: 26 May 11 - 06:57 AM

I know that the question some people will be asking is, "Why bother?"

Well, Sir Thomas Beecham once said, "Try everything except incest and folk dancing", but I would narrow that down even further! So, my answer is, "Why not?".

By profession I'm a writer – not a designer, a web technician or even a musician – but I like new challenges that take me out of my comfort and knowledge zone. My grandfather once said to me, "Once you stop learning, you're dead", and he lived to be 94. I'll settle for that and I'm looking forward to what I'll discover in the next 32 years!

Thanks for looking.

Subject: RE: My first website attempt
From: Geoff the Duck
Date: 26 May 11 - 04:11 PM

If you are on a Windoze PC and want a programme that will lay out your web pages, have a look at THIS - nvu portable.
It is one of many Portable Applications which you can run on a Windows PC from a USB stick, or install on any hard drive on the computer.
Even better - it is FREE and does the same basic job as much more expensive software.
Quack!
GtD.

Subject: RE: My first website attempt
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 26 May 11 - 04:19 PM

I only went to the first page but it looks fine on my Firefox. Just be ready for it to be hijacked by our right wing friends when they see the FaF symbol:-(

Well done so far anyway - Far better than anything that I have attempted.

Cheers

DtG

Subject: RE: My first website attempt
From: Ebbie
Date: 27 May 11 - 12:49 AM

I like the look of it. It's easy to read- with my cataracts I despise print on colored backgrounds. And I tried a few links and it has nice follow through. I know nothing about any of the techs and I have no clue how to go about creating a website.

But I would love to create an ongoing one where I would present various people in the arts- I would probably call it something like Juneau's Arts and Artists, maybe JAAA.

In it I would feature some of the talented people around here, musicians, painters, builders, etc, with clickable thumbnails on paintings and song clips from various CDs and with links on how to purchase the products.

I imagine there are classes available in how to do this- are they online or would one have to go to a physical classroom?

Subject: RE: My first website attempt
From: theleveller
Date: 27 May 11 - 09:34 AM

Thanks a lot, folks. Ebbie, why don't you do a blog - my cousin does one onf feasts and festivals with appropriate recipes and it's been so successful she's got a publishing deal.

Right, off to Ryedale FDolk Weekend now - back on Tuesday.

Subject: RE: My first website attempt
From: Ebbie
Date: 28 May 11 - 03:26 PM

Thanks, leveller. I'll look into it.

Subject: RE: My first website attempt
From: GUEST,Martin Dardis
Date: 28 May 11 - 05:30 PM

Heres a link to a site http://www.picresize.com/ where you can adjust the file size of the images and the pages will then load faster, the home page image is way too large [ bytes that is]