My first website!

Joined
Mar 27, 2009
Messages
99
I finally finished my website, its my first one and I am pretty satisfied with it. But it doesn't matter what I think, you know? What do you think?

Some things I'm working on are an about me page, seperate gallery for just photos, and the damn background isn't centered.

www.frankfischerknives.com
 
It's a good start :) And cool knives.
Couple things, button titles on the home page have _ in them, I figure you need space instead.

Another thing you might want to consider is removing your email from the contact page. I don't mean to disallow user email, it is necessary, but right now you have it in the open format mailto:...
Because this is a domain, in a month or two,every moron with a spambot will have that mail in his database and you will be bombarded by spam. I made the same mistake long ago and daily spam count is well over 2K for that email.
Consider javascript email address encrypter, or php emailer. I donno how your host is set up. Otherwise, that email address will soon become very difficult to manage.

Well, that'd be it. If you listed available steel(s) for each model or in general that would help too.
 
Hi Frank

I didn't bother about restricting my page size and centering it on my Knife page but have had to deal with the same problem on a site I put together for a friend. I nested tables and centred the first one. Have look at this site http://westcoastmercantile.110mb.com/ Then on your Command Bar got to View/Source and you will be able to see the coding.

I also concur with Gator about your email adr. If you look at this page or my knife page you will find that the email adr's are in java and even in a remote directory in java that is called when needed.

Nice Knives.

Regards Dutchy :)
 
Hi Fank -

Your page looks very good - Congratulations on your first page!

I noticed that your title is "home" - each page can have a title, and that title is the text that shows up when someone bookmarks your page - and it also is the tab name of the page when people are using tabbed browsers which are in vogue right now.

The title tag is found in the heading area of the page, and has the following syntax:

<TITLE> Franks Web Home Page</TITLE>

You will want to give each page a descriptive title.

Also you will want to put in some "meta tags" to describe the contents of your pages. I can tell you are using Yahoo sitebuilder to make your pages. Look in the source of your pages and you can see at the top of the page a tag that looks like this:

<meta name="generator" content="Yahoo! SiteBuilder/2.6/1.6.0_07">

Right before that tag is the title, and you can insert something like the following right after that tag -



<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Frank Fischer Knives - a maker of custom folding knives for the discriminating knive collector and user. ">
<META NAME="KeyWords" CONTENT="knife,custom knives,Fischer,damascus,quality folding knives">

You can insert whatever description you like in the description - this is what shows up on the google or yahoo results page when your page is a hit on a search.

The KeyWords are the search arguments that the search engines use - so insert the types of things that you think your customers will search for.

To clarify on your email on the contacts page - you never want to put your email address in text on a page because web crawler programs pick them out of the pages and compile them into lists that are sold and used to spam you. Unless you really like to get daily emails touting the cheapest viagra etc., I always use an image of your email address, with a clickable link that runs a small program that builds your email dynamically. That way the web crawlers cannot find your email address.

Let me know if you have any questions - I'd be glad to help you out.

Good luck!

best regards -

mqqn
 
Frank, I don't have any technical advice for you. But as a knife lover, I just have to say, I love your designs. List the steel, scale material, and dimensions clearly (as if explaining to a first grader) and you will go far. Best of luck to you!
 
minor niggles

in your introduction on the home page, i think you mean fluidity instead of fluidness.

im not a fan of a repeating background. i like to keep it a solid colour and put whatever i want into frames etc.

I think a major factor is consistency.
-HOME and CONTACT have the same background yet MY_KNIVES has solid black.
-If you have all 3 pages open at once and flick through them everything shifts slightly from page to page. I think the heading should be the exact same size in the exact same location on everypage, same goes for the nav buttons.
Personally, i would create the heading in photoshop and save it as an image, that way you get much smoother looking text due to anti-aliasing

such as
frankfisher.jpg


-On the products page the description for the "Flipping Folding Fillet Frame Lock" is NOT in bold, yet all the others are.
 
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