Fresh Meat!

Lisa325.com

The e-mail is not set up yet, but what's there should work.
No doubt a few more pages need to be added, this is a rough draft. The TOS page has not been edited, either.
I have some material for the "partners" page, but I'd really like to get that page password protected, and it's giving me trouble, a little private message toturing would be great....

This is my very first site (virgin), so that is my defense.

TBU.

[(jj)]

TBU,

The first thing that got my attention was the load time, very slow for a dialup user.

Do you know that you have around 360Kb of images on your first page? Many users on dialup would never stick around for them all to load.

Granted, it looks as though you may be targeting the broadband user, but if someone on dialup is unhappy with the site, they won't bookmark to be able to return when/if they get broadband.

Now, that said, for the most part your site looks nice and clean. Navigation is decent, but not complete. I would suggest putting things like the "Specs" in a more prominent location, those are things that a possible customer is looking for.

You seem to use centering for most of your content, but you don't center the bottom menu options. To me it gives a look of being "unbalanced" by doing so. Just my opinion

I'd have to say, for a "virgin" site, you've done quite well. See if you can reduce the image file sizes a bit and you're off to a darn good start.

How do I remedy the download time problem without sacrificing my graphics? or...is this possible?



Thanks for the imput,

[(jj)]

TBU,

Well, you just need to resize your images to fit your needs. Right now you are using your <img src> tags to control the size. Some of your images are 640x480 and you are squeezing them into a 109x81 shape.

By resizing them to match what you need, you will make the images much smaller in file size while speeding up the load time. You should not lose any quality to the images in the process either.

If you don't have a graphics program, you can get the free Irfan View that allows you to do these things.

Thanks jj,

I thought of this, about 2:00am!
I do have a graphics package, I created most of those icons.
I had to do that in full page size, for one reason or another.
Then I "shrunk" them down on my website.

I can easily re-size them.

Thany you,
TBU

[Jo-Bizz]

I noticed you are using FrontPage to write your site. I use that program at work and in my opinion its pretty evil to graphics. I always have to manually set the picture properties for each jpeg to 100 or else FrontPage uses its default 75 which overcompresses. After you resize your images, hit the "resample" icon on the picture toolbar, and that should take care of files that are too large. (when you save, change the picture file name so that it doesn't overwrite your source file in case you want to go back to the larger image. Once you loose pixels, you can't get them back). It also smoothes the pictures so they aren't so rough after being squashed to a new size.

Try using the same font throughout your site. I noticed that most of the text is in Verdanna, and then "Helpful Information" is in Times New Roman. Also, you could either put all your nav bar words in caps, or all un-caps....

....your font on other pages changes to different fonts (Times New Roman?) and different shades of green. Personally, I think the font would look more professional as black or dark gray, but if you like green, at least make it the same shade. You could create a template for your web to make your text and headers and navigation uniform and consistent. Usually that's what I look for in a professional site. It makes me nervous about their business practices when everything is inconsistent.

I think its a great first site too. It looks like you put some of your own HTML into the FP generated code too. : )

Great stuff Jo-Bizz!

I don't know how to create a template, but I will learn.
I started with one here and strayed badly, eh eh!

I stole that html code from a business partner, thanks for noticing.

I will look into all these issues.

TBU