Gemstone cameo portraits does site work on a widows pc

Gareth Eckley · #1 (**permalink**) 07-03-2006, 12:55 PM

Comprehensive redesign of my website. Previous site was www.eckleygemcarving, a 5 year old, frames based site hosted on designers software. Realised that all links other than to home page were to his website and not my own. Waiting for google to transfer links from old site to new one.

This site uses lightbox-photo.com software as the basis for the photo gallery and shopping cart. This is tables and php based and encoded. I am not able to change any of the encoded software. Issues I am aware of is that the lightbox html does not validate as html 4.01 transistional, uses deprecated tags and does not allow me to add "alt" descriptions to my images.

My work of carving gemstone portraits from photographs to make jewlery is almost unique. I am aware of only 22 other gems portrait cameo carvers in the world.

My goal is that my site is the most accesible and informative in my field and works to both inform visitors to what a portait cameo is and persuades them to order one.

I also have a blog linked from the "artists journal" link on the nav bar. Purpose is to broaden my writing, posiiton myself as an expert in gemstone portraits and of course generate links and search engine referrals.

Do i manage to do that well ? How could i improve my copy ? Do you like the design scheme and colors of the site ?

I work on a mac 100%, any issues with windows explorer and firefox, aol and mozilla ?

A. Smith · #2 (**permalink**) 07-05-2006, 01:55 AM

Hi,

Your site portraitsinstone worked well on my Windows XP Pro PC. The old site didn't come up, even after I removed the extra comma from the hyperlink.

Beautiful Work, btw!

HTH :)!

briguy · #3 (**permalink**) 07-05-2006, 11:04 PM

http://www.portraitsinstone.com looked nice on windows 98 but had a hard time with the other site that you listed ...every link that I clicked on worked and a very eye appealing site also did a google search on http://www.eckleygemcarving and this is what I found http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=...e+Search&meta=

Gareth Eckley · #4 (**permalink**) 07-06-2006, 05:09 AM

Thank you for the replies and for the editors featuring my site in the newsletter.

Don't try to find the old site- eckleygemcarving.com. There is a 301 redirect from it to my new one. Sorry i mislead you there.

Yesterday I fixed an issue that had been driving me mad for weeks. I could not figure out why the search box was displayed correctly on firefox and opera but other browsers were adding padding to the height.

Safari added 5 pixels at the bottom and IE 5.5 and IE 6 added over 15 pixels. This would break out the search menu.

It turned out that the search was a form inside a div and I had forgotten to zero margins and padding for all forms in the CSS. Now that area works OK. Except for some reason IE 7 puts the GO button on the left instead of to the right of the text box.

Have been remote testing using the excellent: www.broswercam.com for testing and it seems to be OK in all browsers except for Netscape 6.2 which breaks the header, Netscape 4 and IE 4 on windows.

I am thinking of adding some message for users to click on the top row of images to get the pages explaining the product and process as some people might not realise that the content is there.

Once agin thanks for the feedback.

BTW- Bill Haig over at the "Logo review" part of the site did the great job on my Logo.

sands · #5 (**permalink**) 07-06-2006, 08:36 AM

Would be a good idea to have some introductory and explanatory text on the Home Page.

Quote:

My work of carving gemstone portraits from photographs to make jewlery is almost unique.

Something like the above. Just brief text on what you do, materials used, type of items created etc. This would also help the SEs. Use the words in your keywords META tag in the text.