DIY website

  • Thread starter Thread starter Steenamaroo
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Steenamaroo

Steenamaroo

...
Hi all,
I'm makin a website for a friend.
It doesn't have to be fancy, and i'm gona be using iweb, but i don't want it to look really cheap and crap either.

Having scraped together some basic photoshop 'skills' and after some googling about stuff here's what i've come up with

Pete Gardiner Music.

The primary purpose is so he can give out an easy address at gigs to lets fans buy his music.

The question is, what would you add, or indeed, take away?
I was thinkin, the hover link of pete himself could lead to a sortof bibliography page or something?
 
Looks nice. I like the fonts and the change to bold white when you flyover. On my screen, the picture is too big and I have to scroll... only to find there's nothing at the bottom to see. I suggest making the overall size a little smaller to fit most browsers. I may not have the latest and greatest monitors and you should account for that.

I also suggest making the youtube and facebook icons less dominating. They just don't fit the feel of the rest of the page.

I guess the rest of the site is linked to BandCamp...
 
great feedback,,thanks!

I've adjusted the size now.

funny, the youtube/facebook links were at the top because i knew no one would scroll to the bottom :P:P
 
Alt text. There's no actual "text" on the page, which is bad for both blind fans and google.

As a splash page, it looks alright. If you're going to want more dynamic content (such as upcoming tour dates or whatever), you will need to install some kind of Content Management System such as Drupal or Wordpress. Of course, that will require a complete redesign...
 
good catch, although there wont be dynamic content. It's literally just a tidy way to have the same domain linking to any sales or uploads or whatever.
 
Yep, no text for Google to latch on to or for text readers used by the visually impaired to read. Frames are not valid in HTML 4.1 Strict, and they are obsolete. There are nine code errors according to the W3C HTML Validator, some related to using frames in a Strict document type and some from using XHTML tag format in an HTML document. They also suggest putting the character encoding in the document itself rather than depending on the server.

Other than that I think the image of the artist is too dark. There should be something to latch on to visually. I kind of like the rollover effects, but the About Me link is a classic example of "Mystery Meat" navigation.
 
wow....

i don't know what any of that means,

but i have google!
thanks.
 
hmm...maybe i'll hand this over to a friend to look at.
like i say, it's done in iweb, but i opened index.html in an html editor, and the first thing i see is doctype declared.

i'm officially out of my depth :P
 
If that's what iWeb does then it is a badly flawed program.
 
i duno if you're subtly slaggin me, or slagging iweb, but either way you're right :P
 
Not slagging you. I like the graphic concept. It's the machinery behind the scenes that needs serious help. The page is just a bunch of pictures which are essentially invisible to search engines. There are ways of attaching text to pictures so search engines have something to relate to. The code errors are a little less critical, but fixing them will help the page work better on a wide variety of "clients" like browsers, readers and mobile devices.
 
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i'm not so worried about the text thing, cos it already shows up 3rd on google "pete gardiner" behind his facebook and bebo (booooo,lol), plus 99% of traffic is gonna be verbally directed from gigs etc.

but if there are errors/faults/problems, i'd like to fix them...

Is it feasible to ask for your help on this or is it too much to take on; I genuinely don't know.
 
Google is pretty location dependent, actually.

When I google pete gardiner from Iowa, I get:
1. The LinkedIn search page for the name
2. photos of the hockey player
3. Stats about the hockey player
4. A writer named pete gardiner's home page
5. A YouTube video that looks like it might be the right guy.
6. Some d-bag's facebook. (Seriously, he looks like a horrible person.)
...
9. Your Bebo page
...
end of page 1.

So clearly you could use some google fu on your page.

Also, if you tell people "visit our webpage!" at your shows, they will ignore you.
Heck, I give out stickers with our URL on them to anyone who'll take one, and we barely get hits from that. People re-posting links to worthwhile content, and Google are how you get hits to your site.
 
ok,fair enough..

what would you suggest? baring in mind i'm a proper noob to this.
 
Add text to the page that reflects search terms you want people to find your site with.

Specifically add alt and title text to all of your images. (In html, this looks something like <img src="path/to/img.jpg" alt="This text will pop up when a user hovers his mouse over the image" title="some more text" />)
Display text as text instead of images whenever possible.

And very-importantly, link to your site from other locations in the Internet. Google compiles its listings based largely on what is linking where. So put a link to the site in your signature on this page, and google will say "Woah! there are 1600 links to this site labeled Pete Gardiner. I guess this site is pretty important to fans of Pete." If you post on any other forums, do the same thing there. (If all of your links come from one site, it has less weight than if they're spread across several.)

You can check how your google-fu is by comparing your results with some of google's international versions:
google.com, google.ca, google.co.uk, google.jp, etc.
 
ok thanks, i'll look into all that stuff!

Very much appreciated info guys.
 
Alt text will help but I don't think the OP is up to digging into the code. A better webpage generator might help, or just handing it off to someone with more expertise in web design.

By the way, alt text doesn't pop up when hovering over a picture in all browsers, e.g. Firefox. It's intended to appear in place of the image. If you want some words to pop up in other browsers then you should use the title attribute in addition to alt text.
 
all those image are inserted as 'html snippets' in iweb, so i've added title="Pete Gardiner Music" or whatever to each one.
Hovering now works.

Hopefully that goes some way to helping.

I've also put the addy in my sigs on all the forums i use, and i'll make a point of trying to get his addy listed on other local sites etc too.

Thanks again.
 
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That should help. Go ahead and put the same text in an alt attribute in each img. Also, put a meta desc tag in the head section with a short blurb about Pete Gardiner. That will eventually show up in Google search results under the name of the page.
 
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