Wedsite launched: feedback welcome

[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

[Scraggles]

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

[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

[Scraggles]

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, found it easier to rip the whole website to the hard drive, 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 ?

http://www.everydayclassics.co.uk/img/fck/Image/gt...

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

[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

[Swoxy]

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

[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'.

[Swoxy]

Nice one.
Some people won't notice it but to people that do it makes a big difference.
If I spot a website with dodgy grammar that always leads me to believe there is something else dodgy about the operation.
I really like the way the website has a down to earth and friendly feel to it rather than being too slick for it's own good.
Good luck.

[Globulator]

Wedsite?

Your coming soon stocklist page contains a 1980 1500cc midget that has round wheel arches and a 1275cc engine.

Which was clever I thought.. like to see a photo of that!

The rest looks fine (viewed in Safari).

[Scraggles]

edmason said:

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 ?

http://www.everydayclassics.co.uk/img/fck/Image/gt...

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

just got back from pub - playing petanque and won

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

means the ability to edit your site and upload via an FTP client the stuff that you have edited onto your website

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

to upload and change files on a site, one needs a username and password for that site, this is usually set by the web host

'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'?'

Yes - used a freeware web ripper, it missed some stuff as it gave me error messages, but the copy I have of your site is 20.5 mb in size 211 files, 9 folders

'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.

drawings of the pictures show the copyright fineline in ultra small print, did not notice it until was viewing the images on my hard drive

'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?

with windows, the 3 letter extension at the end of a file tells windows what a file is, eg file.doc is a word doc, file.htm is a website document, file.jpg is a picture, file by itself is not the usual way to do stuff

http://www.quadsucker.com/ultraweb/ for a shareware program to rip websites - used it on some forums and one site revealed all

[miniman]

Sorry to be the harbinger of doom, but it's poorly built. They have used tables to set up the layout, which is bad for accessibility, standards compliance and, more importantly, SEO. The design is nice, though.

[madrob6]

miniman said:

Sorry to be the harbinger of doom, but it's poorly built. They have used tables to set up the layout, which is bad for accessibility, standards compliance and, more importantly, SEO. The design is nice, though.

Agreed, ditch the tables and use semantic html with css. It's a fairly simple design to code for css and would make it much more search engine friendly.

[bingbong]

Scraggles said:

'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'?'

Yes - used a freeware web ripper, it missed some stuff as it gave me error messages, but the copy I have of your site is 20.5 mb in size 211 files, 9 folders

This will copy the site to your hard drive, however the content management features won't be available in the downloaded copy.

[Scraggles]

yeah, the downloaded site missed some stuff, but if could have been bothered, would have taken a not of what they were to rip them as well, glad someone else sgged it off first

Websites not all that hard to do, bit like using word and dropping in text and pictures and links to other documents, the advantage is that the OP then owns the code, can tweak it himself

tend to use a free editor in the form of netscape composer,need to find a better one, but until then....

[Globulator]

madrob6 said:

miniman said:

Sorry to be the harbinger of doom, but it's poorly built. They have used tables to set up the layout, which is bad for accessibility, standards compliance and, more importantly, SEO. The design is nice, though.

Agreed, ditch the tables and use semantic html with css. It's a fairly simple design to code for css and would make it much more search engine friendly.

Never heard tables being bad for SEO, search engines will simply ignore layout commands.

Also table is a very simple and effective layout tool, they do not flow, but that's only a drawback if you expect them to - table is the bast way of creating non-flowing rows.
Doing 'tables' in CSS is a pointless fad that it doesn't do very well. CSS is best left for flowing blocks.

The only issue with the site regards layout is the fixed width, the width should follow the browser window size (example: look at www.cutedating.net - this uses tables for the fixed layout with flowing CSS blocks as appropriate and scales properly.)

[bingbong]

Scraggles said:

yeah, the downloaded site missed some stuff, but if could have been bothered, would have taken a not of what they were to rip them as well, glad someone else sgged it off first

Websites not all that hard to do, bit like using word and dropping in text and pictures and links to other documents, the advantage is that the OP then owns the code, can tweak it himself

tend to use a free editor in the form of netscape composer,need to find a better one, but until then....

I very much doubt you will be able to rip the content management system, not without hacking the server.

[miniman]

Globulator said:

Never heard tables being bad for SEO, search engines will simply ignore layout commands.

Also table is a very simple and effective layout tool, they do not flow, but that's only a drawback if you expect them to - table is the bast way of creating non-flowing rows.
Doing 'tables' in CSS is a pointless fad that it doesn't do very well. CSS is best left for flowing blocks.

Useful article here:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/semantic-html-a...

Tables are for tabular data. Keep in mind that if you use a table, you SHOULD use the rarely-used th tag to define the header cells (so that screen readers can tell the user what the heading is) so I find it useful to think "what would the header of this column be?" - if you can't answer that, you shouldn't be using a table. When using a table for layout, you will rarely be able to answer the th question.

Anyway, there are (as mentioned earlier) some bigger SEO issues with the site that solving would yield much better gains than sorting out the HTML. But then I am a bit of a CSS+XHTML

[Globulator]

miniman said:

Tables are for tabular data. Keep in mind that if you use a table, you SHOULD use the rarely-used th tag to define the header cells (so that screen readers can tell the user what the heading is) so I find it useful to think "what would the header of this column be?" - if you can't answer that, you shouldn't be using a table. When using a table for layout, you will rarely be able to answer the th question.

Tabular data can be represented in various ways, personally I prefer graphs.
HTML tables however are simple, portable and effective.
CSS simply has no easy, workable, portable alternative.

As for SEO,
PistonHeads uses HTML tables (with no <th> tag) and that indexes pretty well with Google...
Wikipedia searches pretty well too - also using tables.

I rest my case

[bingbong]

Globulator said:

miniman said:

Tables are for tabular data. Keep in mind that if you use a table, you SHOULD use the rarely-used th tag to define the header cells (so that screen readers can tell the user what the heading is) so I find it useful to think "what would the header of this column be?" - if you can't answer that, you shouldn't be using a table. When using a table for layout, you will rarely be able to answer the th question.

Tabular data can be represented in various ways, personally I prefer graphs.
HTML tables however are simple, portable and effective.
CSS simply has no easy, workable, portable alternative.

As for SEO,
PistonHeads uses HTML tables (with no <th> tag) and that indexes pretty well with Google...
Wikipedia searches pretty well too - also using tables.

I rest my case

I 100% agree with Miniman, CSS is easy, workable and portable if written correctly and should be the way style and layout are done by any decent modern forward thinking web-developer. As far as I can tell, and I haven't checked all 2,379,378 articles, Wikipedia mostly, only uses tables where it is semantically appropriate do so, (tabular data!). Pistonheads isn't exactly a prime example of how things should be done, and it doesn't search that well, try searching for up the oxo tower using google site search and it only finds 23 references, there are probably more than 23 references to that a day. In fact if you search google for this phrase pistonheads is not even indexed in the first 5 pages. So sorry you may have rested your case, but you've lost it.

[miniman]

Globulator said:

Tabular data can be represented in various ways, personally I prefer graphs.
HTML tables however are simple, portable and effective.
CSS simply has no easy, workable, portable alternative.

As for SEO,
PistonHeads uses HTML tables (with no <th> tag) and that indexes pretty well with Google...
Wikipedia searches pretty well too - also using tables.

I rest my case

Pistonheads gets Google results mostly because of sheer data volume and also massive inbound and outbound links. Wikipedia uses tables when they are necessary for displaying tabular data. Wikipedia is also a spectacularly poor example to use to justify tables being ok, of course, because by definition each page can be changed at will by any person on the planet, most of whom have no idea about semantically correct XHTML. There's nothing wrong with tables, if you want to display tabular data.

Your point about using a graph is moot, because a graph used to display tabular data would fail accessibility unless you also provided a text-based alternative, which would be a table.