I have decided that you people know what you are talking about, so I am opening up my site for comments. Please note that I am working on adding Shopping Cart capabilites. And I realize that I don't have a link to my e-mail, yet. It is a work in progress.

I am a Graphic Designer, so I feel confident in the look of the site. The areas I need help with are more technical mumbo-jumbo. I don't rank well in Search Engines and am frankly confused about all that. Please make comments on Meta tags, keywords, graphic size, etc. that I can pass along to my Web Designer. Is it important to have a "Links" section?

Thank you!

www.cherrywoodfabrics.com

General observation about the navigation.

Initially, the latest news dropdown was a little annoying because it is unforgiving, and if you roll out even slightly it disappears.

Then, when I went to one of the inner pages the what's new option disappeared and the rest of the navigation moved up the screen to fill the void.

I'm just not sure about it, that's all :)

There's also a faint white fringe on the what's new pop out buttons and they overlap a non-white area, so it shows up.

In the keywords, the word 'fabric' appears quite a lot.

'Cherrywood' is in three times on its own and two more times with other words.

Appearance-wise I can't fault the site - it looks beautiful and very professional.

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Sualdam

I love the way the site feels soft like I would imagine the fabric would. The way the colors on the nav buttons were done is great! My only suggestion would be to put an obvious Home button on the pages "inside" the site. I love it!

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Leisa
Wholly Wholesale - Wholesale Auctions - http://whollywholesale.com
eStoreFinder.com - eCommerce Store Directory - http://eStoreFinder.com
WholesaleLowdown.com - A Guide for Retailers - http://wholesalelowdown.com

Hey, thanks !!

One big thing I would be concerned about is that your shopping cart is search-engine friendly. Most are not.
Make sure the url has no more than 2 or 3 variables and that there is no session id

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Thank you so much for the tips. I will pass them on to my computer geek. ;-)

We are going to have the "What's New" button on every singel page, just haven't gotten that far, yet.

Do you feel the pages load fast enough? I had a comment on that earlier.

Karla

I clocked your home page at 34 seconds for 56k dialup
That's a bit high.

Your 2 product images are 17KB and 18KB respectively.
You should be able to shave the file size down, and mostly likely even cut it in half.

The javascript code for your roll-overs is cutting into the page size. You may consider using css to accomplish this.

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Hi Karla,

It is a very nice looking site. You've done a great job of designing it. Congratulations.

On the design side, I'm getting some unexpected line breaks on the home page because you've specified the breaks using
tags but there isn't enough room for the complete lines you intended. As a result, I'm seeing:

the only hand-dyed fabric
featuring
Suede Look Cotton. These
gradated
fabrics in luscious colors work
wonderfully
for quilting and are absolutely
stunning in
garments. We sell our fabrics at
national quilt shows and via mail
order.

From a download speed perspective, in addition to what the others have said, you can probably knock a couple of seconds off the download time just by eliminating some of the whitespace in your .html files in the code-view. I shrank your homepage by 2k just by straigtening the code so that it was all snug to the left of the page and had no empty spaces before each line break. Lots of utilities will do this for you.

From an SEO perspective you don't have enough content on the home page to help it rank well and your homepage is the one that carries the most weight with the search engines.

You've got a pretty good set of keywords on your homepage, although you could use to reduce the redundancy in them and definitely move them and the description tag up the page. They should be directly underneath the <title> tag.

You should also put keywords and descriptions on every page. Not just the homepage. And you should seek to make them unique, based on the content of each page, not identical keywords on every page.

You also need to use your <title> tags more effectively. You should be aiming to have your <keywords> from each page repeated in the <title> tag and the <description> tags. Repeating your company name as the first item in each title is not helpful at all. Develop your keywords by targeting a particular theme per page and then write the title and description based on those keywords.

Also, use <h> tags for headings and make sure your keywords are included in them.

As a final thought, you might want to look at renaming the page filenames to be more descriptive. For example, google is going to consider "suede_look_cotton_shirts.html" as being more relevant than the existing filename "tpl_shirts.html"... similarly, organizing your site files into directories with explicit names like "cotton_shirts" and "dyed_fabrics" etcetera is going to help as well.

I hope this helps you.
best of luck,
jade

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Jade Burnside, Ahead of the Web
What good is your web site if no one can find it?
SEO & Optimized Web Site Design

Well, karla, your design background shows.
MY tips would be few.
I'd remove all that "whitespace" in the code - it would shrink that file a lot, and make it easier to work with.
You can improve the content ratio by not using tables for layout. Use modern methods - CSS and DIVS, etc. I'd expect that most of the table code could be pretty easily removed on your site.
That would also cut the page size down dramatically.
The color use is great, very good in fact. It's appealing. One doesn't have to dig to see what you are about, and it makes one want to "look around".
I'd pack that java script into a different file, and call it after the meta tags, just before the closing head tag - just a thought as I feel funny about having such long scripts above my tags, seems like they would be in the way......
If any script is used in multiple pages, definitely off-load it to another file and call it using the src="myscript.js" sort of thing. It would be cached and shared among pages. Also if you then need a change, you change one file, not 5 or however many.
I have little experience in graphic design, but am more technical - however, I know what's pleasing to the eye when I see it. My son if the graphic artist.

Shadows Papa
open to comment on all aspects of www.thequiltjunction.com
personal fun, but out-of-date site - www.oldengine.org/members/billd

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Shadows Papa
From near a small town in central Iowa, USA
Please review
www.thequiltjunction.com and comment. Tips welcome - I love to learn and grow.
To learn about me and have fun
www.oldengine.org/members/billd

Some more suggestions:

Menu type Rollover on What's new section is confusing.
Colors of some of default rollovers (when the mouse is not over it) is very light and makes text difficult to read.

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http://www.food-india.com

Omygosh! I have been out of town for Thanksgiving and when I checked back - BOOM! All this wonderful, helpful information!

Thank you so much to Jade, bin79 and Shadows Papa for your comments.

Like I said before, I am basically a graphic designer, so my eyes kinda glazed over while reading some of your comments. I really should take a crash course on HTML. But ya know, I like to leave that to the experts. I will definately pass this information along to my webmistress so she can take it all in. And hopefully we can get things streamlined.

Again, thanks. I know it takes time to review these sites.

Karla