tear apart our new website

Humble Abode · Sep 10, 2005

Any contsructive critisism is welcome. I spent the last few days putting this together. It's my first website. I'm hoping to make it look a little more classy when the time is right to hire a professional to do it.

www.humbleabodepainting.com

Thanks for looking!

MinConst · Sep 10, 2005

HA,
The links to the images on the services page point to your hard drive. You need to edit those like to point to your server. You will see the pictures but nobody else does.
The Gallery ones are fine.

JustaFramer · Sep 10, 2005

Yep you need to change those img routes. Oh nice first attemp at web authoring. For a contractor it doesn't have to be a flashy. IMO But there is better code than &nbsp that is for indents on paragraphs. Use to much consecutively it won't look right in some browers. You need a good html 4 book. Sybex prinsts some good ones. Also think about Cascading style sheets. There is some good books and web info out there. I posted a link in the business section with free to use temps. D/L one and study the html code and the css. :Thumbs:

But all in all not bad it looks better than one I did 4 years ago.

slickshift · Sep 10, 2005

There's images on the services page?
I'm having trouble with the buttons, I can't get to the Gallery or Home
Services sorta lights up if I hover a bit, if I click way over on the right of it I can get to the page

JustaFramer · Sep 10, 2005

Oh yeah one more thing you need to change you <head> it isn't indepth enough. I have some snippets I can post later. After the concert.

slickshift · Sep 10, 2005

I figured it out
I had to dust off and crank up the I.E.
Looks good, except for the red Xs on the service page
That Dwyer Res. looks like it was a fun job

Too bad the site won't work with FireFox

I didn't even get the red Xs

Humble Abode · Sep 10, 2005

MinConst said:
HA,
The links to the images on the services page point to your hard drive. You need to edit those like to point to your server. You will see the pictures but nobody else does.
The Gallery ones are fine.

OK fixed the services page. Thanks!

Humble Abode · Sep 10, 2005

slickshift said:
That Dwyer Res. looks like it was a fun job

It was. Great customer, and she gave us one of the best testomonials we will ever get.

slickshift said:
Too bad the site won't work with FireFox
I didn't even get the red Xs

That sucks. I have no idea what to do about that.

hauoli63 · Sep 11, 2005

Too many keywords ....

Here is a link to an SEO forum where you may find much helpful info:
http://www.top25web.com/bbs/index.php?sid=1d07ed63693a6bcf1269fb2ba168e4e3

Humble Abode · Sep 11, 2005

hauoli63 said:
Too many keywords ....

I have no idea how the keyword thing works so I just saturated it with them... thought it couldn't hurt until I could figure it out.

How are you seeing the keywords? are you vewing the source code?

donb1959 · Sep 11, 2005

Also might want to get rid of that horizontal scroll bar at the bottom, its a pain to have to scroll left and right to read the text.

Humble Abode · Sep 11, 2005

donb1959 said:
Also might want to get rid of that horizontal scroll bar at the bottom, its a pain to have to scroll left and right to read the text.

I think I fixed that... I forgot all about people having lower screen resolutions than me.

ProWallGuy · Sep 11, 2005

Humble Abode said:
I have no idea how the keyword thing works so I just saturated it with them... thought it couldn't hurt until I could figure it out.

How are you seeing the keywords? are you vewing the source code?

Yep, lot of keywords. I would definitely ace the one that says "milwaukee discount painting".

I don't want anybody thinking discount with me, I would be scared it would bring price shoppers. If they are searching for 'discount painting', just sounds like trouble.

JustaFramer · Sep 11, 2005

It's not that you have to many keywords it the fact that you use the same word's over 3 times. This gives lousy placement in search engines. But don't use more the 420 keyword either. The fact that you don't have above your head tag what kind of html doc your using. You should put in <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0
Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> but yours would be more like html 4.0 transitional. check out w3c for more info.

Also put in <meta name="Robots" content="index,follow" /> this will allow search engine bot's to read your page and follow links.

as for %nspb use tables instead if you don't feel up to css. :Thumbs:

slickshift · Sep 11, 2005

ProWallGuy said:
I would definitely ace the one that says "milwaukee discount painting".

Yeah, sorta sounds like an Earle Schiebe/Maaco cheepo thing
Ya know, "oh sorry lady, you wanted us to use drop clothes?...drop clothes are extra" type deal

hauoli63 · Sep 11, 2005

If you want good rankings for your keywords, you have to also include them in text on your site .... google is very hard to get ranked well. We were on page one when searching for "northern virginia plumber" but somehow we've dropped all the way past 200 pages in google :evil: , but still rank well with yahoo and msn. Ranking is important to be found on the internet. You'll also need to exchange links with other sites and get listed in some directories such as DMOZ. Have fun, but be prepared for some frustration.

slickshift · Sep 11, 2005

hauoli63 said:
... We were on page one when searching for "northern virginia plumber" but somehow we've dropped all the way past 200 pages in google :evil: , but still rank well with yahoo and msn...

You're still #1 with Accoona
http://www.accoona.com/search.jsp?q...mpaign=null&affTrack=null&charset=utf-8&la=en
That's you right?

DecksEtc · Sep 11, 2005

Small suggestion...you may want to add a bit of discription around each of the pictures. You know, to explain a bit about what was done, etc. People generally like to have a bit to read, nothing long winded, just something to describe the pictures.

Mike Finley · Sep 11, 2005

Humble- the site looks really good for your first attempt at something like this, really good. It will only get better from here.

Not to piss anybody off, but I would take the search engine placement stuff with a BIG grain of salt. Sure it would be great if all you had to do was sit at home and get 25 people a day calling you from your website. In reality - well reality dictates that the vast majority of your paying customers will not ever be generated by a true 100% pure internet lead from your website. I would concentrate more on using your website as brochure ware to direct your potential customers to and not as an initial lead generator. That can come later, you've got to walk before you run you know?

Humble Abode · Sep 11, 2005

Mike Finley said:
Humble- the site looks really good for your first attempt at something like this, really good. It will only get better from here.

Not to piss anybody off, but I would take the search engine placement stuff with a BIG grain of salt. Sure it would be great if all you had to do was sit at home and get 25 people a day calling you from your website. In reality - well reality dictates that the vast majority of your paying customers will not ever be generated by a true 100% pure internet lead from your website. I would concentrate more on using your website as brochure ware to direct your potential customers to and not as an initial lead generator. That can come later, you've got to walk before you run you know?

Thanks Mike, and thank you to everyone else for the suggestions. The point of the webasite being thrown together in the last week, by myself, was just to get something on the internet. The mass mail campaign we are launching next week has our web address on it and no one who was willing to design it for me was willing to do it on my time frame.

Eventually I want those clusters of pictures to be thumbnails that open to a new window, higher res, and some short description.

Justaframer,
I like your suggestions and eventually they will be put to use, but I didn't even know what 'casscading style sheets' were until last night, lol.

Thank you all again, and keep checking back! :Thumbs:

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