Wedsite launched: feedback welcome

[edmason]

As regular readers will remember I've been having difficulties with the web-design company building my website (the advice you guys gave has been helpful: thanks).

Well the site has finally gone live, and they have said they will give me a copy of the code. I'd appreciate people having a look & giving me some feedback, as long as its not too technical: this is the first web-site I've had and I don't understand lots of the technical stuff!

Does it work reasonably well & is it fit for purpose?
Have I been had?
Will I be able to add/develop it in future?
I was disappointed that it sits in the middle of the screen, like a page, rather than filling the screen, but they assured me this was the way to build it so it would work properly on any computer.

Its almost all CMS so I can ammend text & images as much as I like, which is better than I'd expected.

Not sure if I should put link here

http://www.everydayclassics.co.uk/home 

or rely on people going to my profile, but no doubt someone will put me right.

Thanks

Ed

[edmason]

randlemarcus said:

Good luck with the very very restricted warranty though - there are a fair few threads about the Sale of Goods Act and cars....

How is it very restricted?

The Trading Standards advice for purchasers of used cars says

"When you buy from a trader, you have the right to expect the car to be:

* of satisfactory quality;
* fit for its purpose, including any particular purpose made known, and
* as described.

The law defines goods as being of ‘satisfactory quality’ if they meet the standard that a reasonable person would regard as satisfactory – taking the description of the goods into account, the price (if relevant) and all other relevant circumstances. So, when you have bought a used car, you must consider its age, the price you paid, the description which was applied to it and anything else which is relevant when deciding whether it is of satisfactory quality. Your expectations should be different when you are buying a low mileage, two-year-old car than when you are buying a high mileage, ten-year-old one, for example. However, it must still be:

* fit to be used on the road;
* in a condition which reflects its age and price, and
* reasonably reliable."

http://www.tradingstandards.gov.uk/cgi-bin/calitem...

I would have thought my warranty was pretty generous in the circumstances.

I have seen reference to used car dealers being obliged in law to offer 3 months warranty, (although I can only recall one instance when I have been offered that in the past), but I don't know where that idea comes from, given the advice above from Trading Standards. Any clarification would be appreciated.

Thanks

[edmason]

bingbong said:

I like it, looks good, but, I would move 'stock' up the menu. It's nice that you've got lots to read, but ultimately most people visiting your site will be looking for a car, so I think the stock button should be second on the list after home. Also I would move most of the text off the home page and move the featured cars up the page, if you didn't want to get rid of the text prehaps move it round, so the cars are near the top, I had to scroll to see them, and probably would have missed them had I just been casually browsing the site.

Get rid of 'recently sold' and 'to order' in the stock section at least until you have sold a few cars, I hate clicking links and getting nothing back, also you might want to explain 'to order'. Also having nothing 'recently sold' would make we worry that you are not very well established.

You could also do with optimising your images, especially those in the stock pages, I managed to get one of your pics down from 144k to 44k with no noticable difference. Doing this will make the pages load much quicker and possibly bring down you bandwidth charges.

Your Image - 144k


Compressed Image - 44k

Thanks Bingbong, that's helpful. I can't take the Recently Sold & Coming Soon links out from the CMS, but its a good point & I'll ask the developers.

As for image sizing the developers did raise this as an issue but haven't given me very clear advice. They seem to think its just one of those things I should automatically know about! Sadly I didn't. I have reduced the size of the images of the green roadster to 640 x 480 (which means from about 600Kb on the camera to 70kb) using Ms picture re-sizer, but I hadn't done this with the red Midget. Do you think the images of the green roadster are a better size? Thanks.

[edmason]

Fetchez la vache said:

Looks good Ed.
As has been noted - there is some good info on there, may well bookmark and reald later myself, and stock menu item needs to go up the list.

Only point i've noticed -
a) On the what we do page - the red mg image was 500k. May be fine on fast broadband connection (i could see it loading on a 1mb line) but heaven help anyone on dial up. If you have access to the images (presumably they're in the same directory) take a look at the sizes. There's no ecuse for a 500k image unless you click for a hi res version.

If you can, try an view the site on dial up to see if there are any ultra-slow pages

Overall though site looks nice

ETA just seen bingbongs post - hadn't spotted that - it even has pictures in it doh!

Edited by Fetchez la vache on Monday 12th May 12:16

Yes, I'm beginning to understand now. The web-designers just asked me for pictures, and I supplied them. In the light of your comments they really should have told me what size images they wanted, or re-sized them before loading them. They seem to have just dumped what I gave them in, without checking or re-sizing them. Guess I need to go back and do that image by image. Its a pain but the feedback is helpful. Thanks

[edmason]

bingbong said:

There is a difference between resizing images and compressing them, compressing will leave the picture the same size on screen, but the file size will be smaller, there are loads of tools that will allow you to batch compress images, so you can do a load in one go, I've just had a quick look for some free software that will do it for you and it seems picasa has just what you need, select the images you want to compress, then go to file > Export picture to folder and you will see this window,


Change the quality to 'custom 85%' and that should do the trick, around 85% should give the best trade off between quality and file size, the lower % you go the smaller the file, but you will start to lose quality, much below 70%. If you want to you can also resize the actual size of the file from the same window.

Make sure you make a copy of the original files before working on them though, it should be straight forward, but it pays to be cautious.

Well what do you know - I've actually got Picasa on my PC but didn't know what it was! I hadn't twigged the issue about compressing files, & will do that in future. When I went back through the site there were a few images that were 500kb+ so I've re-sized them. Thanks again

[edmason]

Gazzab said:

It comes across as being an MG only site. That would put me off. Add a lotus, porsche etc pic and I might start to be interested.

Yes I know. That wasn't my intention at first, but this is a new venture, and MGs seem like a fairly safe bet to test the water. There are lots of them around, spares are plentiful, and they're easy to service, and cheap to run, so I think it may be easier to persuade people who haven't had a classic before to go for an MG than something more exotic. If I can build up with MGs I'll look at a wider range of cars. Thanks for the feedback anyhow.

[edmason]

mc_blue said:

The images of the What We Do page need to be resized. Couple of little minor things but very easy to fix. Overall I like it.

Thanks for pointing that out. Don't know what happened, but I've done a quick fix. May go back & tinker some more later, bur at least its back on the page!

[edmason]

Scraggles said:

nice site and first thing was the whois check

The registrant is a non-trading individual who has opted to have their address omitted from the WHOIS service.

Thought the site was about buying cars ?, not that hard to put the address of the dealer on the whois form, unless the web coder also owns the website, which might be a bad move when it comes to proving ownership

whois on the webcoder also suggests they do not trade at all

nice site btw

<meta name="KEYWORDS" content="" /> suggests no keywords and unless someone knows your site, searching for it might take a long while for passing trade to drop in as it were

That's interesting. I imagine that when I registered the domain name I was asked some questions, although I don't now remember. I may have not disclosed my address just because in these days of concern about identity theft we're urged to be cautious about sharing personal data, especially on the web. I don't know what the convention is about domain names, and whether people wil see this as suspicious.

If you could bear to explain <meta name="KEYWORDS" content="" /> that would be helpful. I know search engines look for key words. I assumed key words were just words that appeared often in the text, but it sounds as if I need to specify some keywords that I think are relevant to my site? Is that right. If so how, and where do I do that? nThanks for your feedback.

Ed

[edmason]

Scraggles said:

edmason said:

Scraggles said:

nice site and first thing was the whois check

The registrant is a non-trading individual who has opted to have their address omitted from the WHOIS service.

Thought the site was about buying cars ?, not that hard to put the address of the dealer on the whois form, unless the web coder also owns the website, which might be a bad move when it comes to proving ownership

whois on the webcoder also suggests they do not trade at all

nice site btw

<meta name="KEYWORDS" content="" /> suggests no keywords and unless someone knows your site, searching for it might take a long while for passing trade to drop in as it were

That's interesting. I imagine that when I registered the domain name I was asked some questions, although I don't now remember. I may have not disclosed my address just because in these days of concern about identity theft we're urged to be cautious about sharing personal data, especially on the web. I don't know what the convention is about domain names, and whether people wil see this as suspicious.

If you could bear to explain <meta name="KEYWORDS" content="" /> that would be helpful. I know search engines look for key words. I assumed key words were just words that appeared often in the text, but it sounds as if I need to specify some keywords that I think are relevant to my site? Is that right. If so how, and where do I do that? nThanks for your feedback.

Ed

Keywords are words put into search engines to search for your site, they can be single words or phrases

eg car, classic cars, classic

good example is http://cart.podiacare.co.uk/index.php?p=home, viewing the page source in firefox:-

<meta name="keywords" content="chiropody, podiatry, footcare, health, feet, trycare, chiropodist, chiropody,supplier,distributor,shop,online,mail,order,equipment,sundries,supplies,buy,information,technical,data,links, podiacare, "/>


you just need to think up some phrases

another good test is to search for your site, but not to put in the address, eg goto google and type in something that the punter from your area might enter to find your site and competitors, see how easy or not the site is to find

Right, I understand so far. Once I've decided on my key words & phrases what do I do with them? How do I attach them to the site, or is this something else I need to pay the web-developer to do (Grrrr!)

Thanks

ED

[edmason]

Scraggles said:

if you can edit and upload via ftp you can do it yourself, simple thing like opening notepad loading the file, forgot what it was, typing some words in...

good to have a copy of the website on the hard drive so that you can test that it looks ok and you have not fluffed it, so a backup copy is also good as if you overwite the original and it does not work, ti will be difficult for you to work out where it went wrong

not sure why the web maker did not do it himself ?

hope that you have the username, password and ftp details, eg the url where to send files, mine simply goes to my site name

edit,

' could not help noticing that you have images which show a copyright to some photo company in the picture - they are of drawings and hope you got permission to use them ?

www.everydayclassics.co.uk/img/fck/Image/gt601.jpg

found it strange that your files in album dir are 10 to 14 and not say 10.htm, 11.htm etc

Edited by Scraggles on Sunday 18th May 13:23

Hi Scraggles.

Translate some of this for me:

'edit and upload via ftp' what does this mean?

'username, password and ftp details,' all I have is access to a 'back-office' control panel for the CMS controlled parts of the site???

'not sure why the web maker did not do it himself' nor me! I'm pretty fed up with them, and reluctant to give them more money when they don't seem very interested. Nort sure though how easy it is to get someone else to work on the site for me. They have (eventually, after some haggling) promised me a hard copy on disc, but it hasn't arrived yet, and I'm not confident it will, or that if it does come that it will be any use!

'found it easier to rip the whole website to the hard drive,' Does this mean you have managed to copy the whole site, & now have access to 'hard coding'?'

'could not help noticing that you have images which show a copyright to some photo company in the picture - they are of drawings and hope you got permission to use them ?' Yes. Have negotioated a deal with Tim, & included a credit & links.

'found it strange that your files in album dir are 10 to 14 and not say 10.htm, 11.htm' sorry, what does this mean?

Thanks for your time & advice. Much appreciated.

ED

[edmason]

Swoxy said:

What's going on with the capitals?

I understand why you want the word 'classic' to have a capital 'C'.
But in the menu the only second word in a page title to have a capital first letter is 'Health Warning'.

On the 'Why a Classic' page the second words in 'Simplicity & Affordability' and 'Social Activity' are both written with capitals but the second word in 'Style & enjoyment' isn't. Neither is the second word in 'Driver’s cars'.

Edited by Swoxy on Sunday 18th May 17:41

Well spotted. After you've been looking at something for a week or two you stop noticing things like this. I';ve cahnged the ones I can in content. Can't do anything about the meenu from her, although I take your point, it should be 'Health warning'.

[edmason]

WOW. My mail server has been down for 48 hours, and I come back to this. The thread seems to have taken on a life of its own, but I'm still not sure what, if anything, I can do myself to make my site more effective and search engine friendly?

Non technical advice would be welcome.

Thanks

Ed

[edmason]

miniman said:

First things first: you need to sort out the keyword tags. Take a look in the source code (View... Source in IE / View... Page Source in Firefox) and at the top of the file you will see:

[meta name="KEYWORDS" content="" /]

(except it will be < > brackets not [ ])

Where it says content="" you need to fill in some keywords for each page, with a comma between each one. For example, on your homepage, you could start with

content="classic, car, MG, Triumph, Stag, MGB" and so forth.

Don't put in too many, or Google will start penalising you. Also, make sure that the words you choose actually appear in the page. This means different keywords per page. If you use keywords that are not on the page, Google will penalise you.

Also worth filling in the meta description tag:

[meta name="DESCRIPTION" content="" /]

Whatever you enter in the content="" area here is what users who search for you will see in the Google search results. e.g. search Google for "bbc" and you will see "bbc.co.uk offers a range of sites including news, sport, community, education, children's, and lifestyle sites, TV programme support, radio on demand".

Next, start linking to other sites from yours, and try to get other people to link to you. A good starting point would be to put a link to your site in your PH profile (surprising how much traffic this can generate!) and also add yourself to the PH Oilypages directory (www.oilypages.com). It matters not a jot how good your keywords are, or many many times you submit your site to Google, if you don't have inbound and outbound links you won't get anywhere.

Feel free to mail me if you want any help with doing any of this!

Oh and by the way, why no Dolly Sprints on your site!?

Edited by miniman on Wednesday 21st May 21:09

That's really helpful, and clear. Thanks.