Hi D.P. Community, I have created a website thats sells instrumental music for artists and im not a pro in the web design area. I would appreciate it if you could look over my site and maybe give me some pointers on what to change or add. I made the site with dreamweaver cs3 and cs4 and it's basically tables. Do you think I should rebuild the site in photoshop cs4 and slice it? If Yes, would that take a long to load? since there is alot more pics. Thank you very much in advance for taking your time to review my site and giving suggestions on what to change, add, or remove. Have a Great Day.
thanks for responding zachatus, ya i guess i could do that, but what do you think of the overall layout? I guess im going to have to learn css. Any other suggestions? Thanks again.
Table less coding has no real purpose, as tables do the trick and are not invalid or dieing as of yet. You're fine sticking with the tables, but keep in mind that more images and their size means more loading. Your best bet is to use small repeatable images. For example, if you have a sidebar and each section within that side bar has a title, then each header would be an image. The best way is to use one image (repeated if possible) and then put text on top of it to reduce load times. Check out sites like http://www.w3schools.com/ for help working with css. Also to utilize your site in the most efficient way possible, try using the validation service for xHTML (currently the most desired and standard doc-type) and CSS. xHTML - http://validator.w3.org/ CSS - http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Thank you very much JeremyM, I like that idea about the side bar, using one image and just adding different text. Im going to try and teach myself some css, looks like i got a lot of work to do. Thank you very much for the advise and the helpful links. Have a great day.
Do you think i should change the font size and font type? If yes, what kind do you use and what do you think would be suitable for my site. Thanks in advance once again.
The layouts fine, that's something you can change once you get some traffic. I would closely monitor how long users stay on your site, what pages are most trafficked, and what pages people are exiting on. PLEASE get rid of the music when you enter the site. I know it's a beatz site, but let the user choose to listen when they come to the site. I had my speakers up and nearly sh*t my pants. That's just as annoying as having a video play when someone enters your site.
It is web2.0 times. I suggest tableless layout too . Personally, you need to find a graphic designer to redesign the site and have someone coding html/css for you .
I think that the design is great and that tables are just fine. The only thing about tables is that everything inside the table has to load before the table itself loads. When I entered your site I found that it loaded fairly quick, and I didn't have my speakers on but I would suggest letting the visitor decide on the music playing when the website loads. The only thing that I could see right away that could be improved with the layout is the navigation at the top, I think that you should put some mouseover effects on it. But overall it is a very nicely designed website, just needs some fine tuning.
Thank you for the advice Software Techniques. I was talking to some of my friends and they said they liked the music auto playing on the home page. I'm just thinking now which method is better. Sorry for scaring you with the beats. Right now im using statcounter.com the free version. whats is better statcounter.com free version or google analytics? Here are some stats from statcounter.com for the last 20 minutes of illbeatz.com 34 Less than 5 secs 5 From 5 secs to 30 secs 13 From 30 secs to 5 mins 1 From 5 mins to 20 mins 0 From 20 mins to an hour 0 Longer than an hour
Thank you for responding, I might consider doing that but I really want to learn to do this myself with a little help of course.
Hi pokerpenguin, Thank you for taking the time to look at my site. you too, think i should disable auto play, hmmm... I like the idea of the mouse over effects.
Hello, I took a look at your site. Absolutely don't have the auto-play music. I've left countless sites because they started blasting music as soon as I got there. Didn't even try to pause it. I agree with the others, make sure you take advantage of CSS. It should be in a separate file, and take care of ALL of the formatting. Content in the HTML files, formatting in the CSS. Since you're using Blogger for your blog, I'd set it up to publish on your own domain. You can use FTP or SFTP, and put it in its own directory. Use Google Analytics. It has pretty advanced features for a free analytics program. Good luck!
Thank you bweller for looking at my site. Right now I am learning how to use css and i have to say there are a lot of rules and specific coding you have to learn and fully understand to utilize the power of css. Wow, I didn't even know you could host blogger on your own domain, thanks for the tip. If you guys say Google Analytics is a good tool, well then i guess i will try it out. Thank you again bweller for your help.