my first website

ntj9 · #1 08-24-2006, 04:56 PM

hi,

we run a family business and ever since i first got us a website built i wanted to know how it was done and spent a fair bit of time interrogating the guy who built it, searching google, reading up on html and wysiwyg programs and the like, and after a bit of experimentation i eventually bought adobe go live which i find to be a lot more useful than dreamweaver (although it just loves to crash on shutdown.)

anyway, i was sick of the website we had so i bit the bullet and rebuilt our site from scratch. it was a bit of a mission for me cos (according to windows search) it now has 126 html pages.

i would be interested to know what all you experts think of it, as i am not a web developer; i am a steeplejack who likes playing with my computer to see what i can learn.

i also did the flash spinning logo and the alternative home page (link on index.html).

let me know what you think. if you think it is

then don't hold back. i won't cry

the url is http://www.bcmsteeplejacks.co.uk

ritey · #2 08-25-2006, 10:48 AM

nice site and wot i like is that it loads fast with grafix. cos im from uk as well.

only one thing doesnt seem quite right and thats the welcome text on the front page. i got no suggestions tho cos im not very artistic

maybe one more suggestion on the pages that have lots of text is to make line spacing larger. maybe 140%, cos ppl who have been surfing for a while may get a bit

and miss a line.

ntj9 · #3 08-25-2006, 10:53 AM

glad you like it and i'm also glad it is loading fast for you. i spent a lot of time using save for web in photoshop getting the file sizes down and i went to a library with a slow connection (my connection is 6.5 meg) to test it myself once i'd uploaded it to the web and was fairly pleased with the speed.

i am going to have a look at the welcome text. what did you think was wrong with it - or does it just have an overall crapness about it

ritey · #4 08-25-2006, 10:55 AM

it just seems a little bit plain for the front page.

Pitrow · #5 08-25-2006, 11:46 AM

You may want to check the meta tags for your encoding. For me it didn't automatically use UTF-8 so some of the characters were messed up. I had to manually switch to UTF-8, then everything was fine.

ntj9 · #6 08-26-2006, 04:49 AM

hmm.

i used adobe golive to build the site and i don't know all that much about encoding.

here is the relevant source. what have i done wrong?

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />

TheMule · #7 08-26-2006, 05:17 PM

I would align the text on the front page ("out if we really are any good.""
to the left. Pretty nice looking site.

Pitrow · #8 08-29-2006, 08:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ntj9

hmm.

i used adobe golive to build the site and i don't know all that much about encoding.

here is the relevant source. what have i done wrong?

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />

Hmmm... maybe it's a problem on my end. I noticed another site doing the same thing today, and your code there looks fine. In fact, I just went back to your site and it displays correctly. So I guess it was my fault... sorry to mislead you.

ntj9 · #9 08-30-2006, 12:37 PM

thanks for all your replies. feedback appreciated.

i am building a website for my new web design company. it will only be a hobby (as i earn my cash as a tradesman) but i am interested to see if i get any enquiries.

one thing i've noticed is that since i've built these 2 websites i have been forced to learn a lot in a short time. i've been messing about with dreamweaver and golive for quite a long time, but you don 't really start learning properly until you force yourself to get in at the deeep end.

how the lot of you manage to build php database driven sites is still a mystery to me though, but i'm sure in time i might figure it out............................

slapshotw · #10 08-30-2006, 04:22 PM

PHP/MySQL used to feel daunting to me as well, but it actually (at least for my fairly simple applications of it) isn't as bad as you'd think. If you can get the source to a php/mysql site, do it-- then start deleting and changing things and see what gets screwed up. That's how I started learning

There are also some great php/mysql books.

-Matt

Eric · #11 09-03-2006, 09:19 PM

Adobe GoLive is obviously a very powerful program, and very expensive at that. You should have just gone with the open source Joomla and also bought a nice template to go along with it. Then you wouldnt have to worry about any of the html coding. I used joomla with 24fans.net.

L146705 · #12 09-16-2006, 02:57 PM

I like it, it looks quite similar to my first website, in the way it is layed out. I suggest you put a heading tag around <h3>Welcome to the website of BCM Steeplejacks</h3>