www.devonkaicollections.com

devsdough · #1 (**permalink**) 06-22-2004, 10:03 PM

basically, i appreciate your 2 cents on any aspect of my site. this is my first ever site and i have a lot to learn so please get me on the yellow brick road to oz.

please keep in mind, though, that the is a first time effort so i don't know a lot about coding and what not. i started this in december 2003 and this whole thing has been incredibly time consuming. i'm running a one woman show doing the website, financals, marketing, etc all on top of the jewelry design & creation and my day job. so if you say i should change some weird code, i'd really appreciate it if you could give me a suggestion of what to change it to.

thanks a lot!

btw, i have a computer with windows xp pro and i use a cable modem so if run on something different, please let me know so i can make the adjustment. ie: i didn't know older versions of windows didn't have my main fonts so my pages looked weird on windows 98 computers.

thanks again

www.devonkaicollections.com

greeneagle · #2 (**permalink**) 06-23-2004, 03:04 AM

devsdough,

What I am about to do is not meant to demean your efforts or massacre you!:

Let's start by looking at your "head code":

<html xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40">

<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us">
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 5.0">
<meta name="revisit-after" content="7"><meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">

<title>DKC ~ Hand-made jewelry with semi-precious gemstones, sterling silver or gold.</title>
<meta name="description" content="Original hand made jewelry created with genuine semi-precious gemstones with silk, sterling silver or gold / 14k gold filled wire and findings.">
[b]<meta name="keywords" content="jewelry, necklace making class, jewelry making classes, necklace making classes, jewelry making class,
classes, gemstone, designer, earring, earrings, bracelet, sterling silver, gold filled, gold fill, original jewelry,garnet, amethyst,
jade,pearl, citrine, peridot, gem stone, devon kai collections, semi precious, semiprecious,bali, jewelry, bali, making, jewelry making classes,
jewelry making, jewelry class, jewellery, jewelery, classes, hand made, beaded, genuine, gemstone, gem, stone, jewelry, necklace,
earrings, bracelet, garnet, amethyst, peridot, citrine, onyx, sterling, silver, gold, bali, marcasite, pearl, freshwater, turquoise,
coral, bead, rose, quartz, mother of pearl, flower necklace, rose necklace, abalone, topaz, sterling silver, gem stone necklace, handmade
<meta name="resource-type" content="document">
<meta name="classification" content="Gifts">
<meta name="distribution" content="Global">
<meta name="rating" content="General">
<meta name="copyright" content="Devon Kai Collections">content="Devon Kellgren">
<meta http-equiv="reply-to" content="devonkell@aol.com">
<meta http-equiv="Page-Enter" content="blendTrans(Duration=.75)"<[/color]style fprolloverstyle>A:hover {color: #800080; font-weight: bold>
<meta name="author" style>
</head>

First of all, does anyone recognize what is in bold orange as a valid DTD (Document Type Decloration)?; I have never seen it before.

Secondly, Out of all earnestness, is it ever possible to validate FrontPage Sites with W3C, without cleaning the FrontPage special code? Could this document ever be considered valid code by W3C?

Your keywords are not search engine friendly, didn’t count, but you have a boat load (red bolded) and the search engines don’t see very clearly past the first 10-12, hope you are not getting penalized there.

I am leaving your "FrontPage" tags alone for now, but if you know what is good for you, code to blow them out, follow W3C recommendations! -

Where is "handmade" and "made by hand" in your keywords? You have it at the top in yout Title and your Description metatags?

The metatags listed below and the one above in bold green serve no purpose at all. Current thinking is to minimize to the "Title" tag and the "Description" and "keyword" metatags only!:

<meta name="resource-type" content="document">
<meta name="classification" content="Gifts">
<meta name="distribution" content="Global">
<meta name="rating" content="General">
<meta name="copyright" content="Devon Kai Collections">content="Devon Kellgren">
<meta http-equiv="reply-to" content="devonkell@aol.com">

Why the "tilde" in the Title Tag?

You may select to use the "Distribution" Tag, It's up to you

Best Regards,
Ken

RicInACloak · #3 (**permalink**) 06-23-2004, 04:40 AM

In the spirit of constructive criticism, and freindly advice.

its a bit slow to load all the images, perhaps you could compress them a bit more, although you would not want to loose quality.

try putting all the style info into a style sheet, it will make the page much samller, and make your life a lot easier when it comes times to make site-wide changes.

i would look for a better font than times new roman (which is what I see, because the other fonts you request "MS PGothic and Monotype Corsiva" are not on my system)

i would tidy up the menus at the top, so that the menu items are more neatly lined up. Im using Opera, perhaps it displayed better in your browser.

and I must repeat the previous post that said "get rid of frontpage" although one can argue that the normal user does not look at the source, the poor font display, the slowness, and the maintenance nightmare you are heading for, are all related to what the source looks like. Be kind to yourself, replace frontpage, or learn to clean its source code.

overall the site does not look neat, it looks a bit messy, perhaps some borders or other 'structural' elements. You be the artist.

big fonts like "click here for classes" strike me as either rude or amature. Not trying to be offensive, but anothe prospective purchaser might see it that way too.

Good looking jewlery, I would be interested in visiting your store/stall. In otherwords, you have the goods to sell, and in displaying them, you have some site content. But Im not in the US, and my connection is probably slower than you think, so I did not feel like browsing for the exact item, and thel looking to see if I could buy it online.

Goodluck, its a fun process to get this all right, but I personally have found it rather rewarding.

devsdough · #4 (**permalink**) 06-23-2004, 11:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by devsdough

basically, i appreciate your 2 cents on any aspect of my site. this is my first ever site and i have a lot to learn so please get me on the yellow brick road to oz.

please keep in mind, though, that the is a first time effort so i don't know a lot about coding and what not. i started this in december 2003 and this whole thing has been incredibly time consuming. i'm running a one woman show doing the website, financals, marketing, etc all on top of the jewelry design & creation. so if you say i should change some weird code, i'd really appreciate it if you could give me a suggestion of what to change it to.

thanks a lot!

www.devonkaicollections.com

devsdough · #5 (**permalink**) 06-23-2004, 11:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by devsdough

basically, i appreciate your 2 cents on any aspect of my site. this is my first ever site and i have a lot to learn so please get me on the yellow brick road to oz.

please keep in mind, though, that the is a first time effort so i don't know a lot about coding and what not. i started this in december 2003 and this whole thing has been incredibly time consuming. i'm running a one woman show doing the website, financals, marketing, etc all on top of the jewelry design & creation and my day job. so if you say i should change some weird code, i'd really appreciate it if you could give me a suggestion of what to change it to.

thanks a lot!

www.devonkaicollections.com

RicInACloak · #6 (**permalink**) 06-24-2004, 04:10 AM

well luckily you already have a start point
in your page (open using notepad rather than frontpage) the line
<style TYPE="text/css">a:hover {color: #800080; font-weight: bold}
</style>
is where you can start to put a whole lot more style info, for example take the first line after the start of the body
<p style="MARGIN-TOP: -2px; MARGIN-BOTTOM: -2px" align="center">
change it to something like
<p class="ParaTypeOne">
and then change the style section to
<style TYPE="text/css">
a:hover {color: #800080; font-weight: bold}
ParaTypeOne {MARGIN-TOP: -2px; MARGIN-BOTTOM: -2px; align=center ;}
</style>
see how the paragraph tag now has a pointer to the style section.

now you can look for all the <P.. tags that use the same style and replace the embedded style info with the <p class="ParaTypeOne".. syntax.

other examples to make into style entries
<p style="MARGIN-TOP: 0px; MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0px"> is repeated 10+ times
<p align="center">[b]<font face="Monotype Corsiva"> is repeated many times
and <td width="100%" height="28" valign="top" align="center"> ...

once you have a complete list of styles on the first page, you can move the style to an external file and reuse it on all your pages.

on my site under other there are links to a number of really good style sheet (css) resources. Also if you wiew the source on my site, you will see the <link rel="stylesheet" href="./LRS.css" /> which points to my style sheet file. If you go to the url of the style sheet http://www.littleriversoftware.com/LRS.css (you will need to type that in) you will see what can go in a style sheet. The browser will cache the style sheet, which means that a visitor will pick it up once, and reuse it over and over as they move through the site (big speed improvement)

Richard Stallman said that "code is not prefect when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to remove" and it applies here.

its also worth submitting your site on http://validator.w3.org/ to check that the html is valid
and http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ to check that the css is valid

you will be supprised at how much junk you can cut out, and as a result your site will display better and faster in more browsers, and you will be able to make big changes to the entire site in much less time.

enjoy