liquid

Yahoo.com

Hi Andy I think you will need some of the other members to comment on your code...there are people here far better qualified than me to help you with that. Visually I think you have a heavy header which feeds into a borderless main section and because of that that it appears to "fizzle out". This feel is then further increased by centering the text which I am not a great fan of. Maybe you could reposition your contact details and links to balance out the header. I find your philosophy a bit difficult to grasp. I had to read the rest of the page to understand what you are offering. You also need to correct "tobring" in the text and page title Maybe something more simple... Hope that helps Richard

I like it very much Do you think the text /background might be a bit tough on the eyes after a while? p.s. I am an old git.....>40

I dreamed of being a rock star..... I always thought playing a musical instrument was like riding a bike...you never forget. When I was in junior school I played classical guitar in music festivals and I suppose I wasn't bad. I now have an 8 year old son who has an electric guitar and I had a go and the strange thing is is I cannot remember a thing. So now it's Air Guitar only for me...preferably when no one is looking. My son has been influenced by a friend who now has his own band and they have a couple of pages on myspace if anyone's interested in checking him out.... http://www.myspace.com/factisfictionband

fly away ....to......

That is absolutely spot on... I had a friend who ran his own design business and many (possibly the majority) of his sites came from miniature furniture and dollshouses retailers. He designed one site for a dollshouse maker and then everyone else came to him... His work came from personal recommendations made by stallholders at craft fairs. They did his marketing for him.

to a sticky

Firefox 2 Safari Opera and occasionally IE 5.2 (which I think was that final version???) As for "importance" probably Firefox and Safari, followed by Opera and finally IE

Yes It looks great to me too (on a Mac). One thing that caught my eye (only a minor point) but the images of the climbers and the daffodil top right appear to be compressed horizontally. Please recommend a good optician if no one else can see it!!!

I can see both sides of the argument.... The client may well be thinking of it all in terms of how much money it is going to cost him for something that to him (on the face of it) doesn't look much different. The world of computers/IT/web does have the long standing image of there never being a good time to purchase the latest gizmo/fad etc because tomorrow it will be out of date. For me the best approach would be to say that (although you understand what he is saying) it is your policy to design to current standards and you are unable to take the job unless you can maintain this. As Babyben says some things are best not mentioned when selling your product. You can then build the cost of putting all this right in with your quotation. Although I am less experienced than some of the guys here I think any meeting with a potential (commercial) client should centre around who their customers are, how are they going to be brought to the website and most importantly what will entice them to hand over their cash. Some of us (including myself) may see things from the angle of producing a good looking standards compliant website but the customer is saying to himself "If I give this designer a £ 1,000 what am I going to get out of it?"

Fetch for me too... Not as much fun as the duck but the Dog is okay

I think there are problems at both ends of the spectrum with people on one end producing low budget websites using pirated software etc. but at the other end of the scale you have companies who are just taking the **** I know of a company that paid a few thousand for a fairly ordinary website and when I looked at it I saw there were no metatags, title etc. I pointed this out to the owner and made a few suggestions along with a couple of tweaks to the text to get the best out of the page. The design company (grudgingly) said that they would add the tags but there would be an additional charge as this was an "extra". Can this be right??

Well looking back it seems a bit lame and definitely not very polished. My standard line is something like... Hi I've just launched a new website for blah blah blah and I wondered if you would add a link to us on your site as I feel that our two businesses compliment each other. I have taken the liberty of adding a link to you on our links page. Please let me know if you prefer not to be included on our site. Thank you for your support. etc. etc. Some people do ignore me completely but I get a fair bit of positive stuff.

I look for sites that compliment mine, e.g. I recently completed a website for a boat hire company. I emailed a nearby holiday complex for a link. The boat hire company is now getting bookings and a steady stream of traffic through the link. It took me a fair bit of time swapping chatty emails with the owners (compared to automated methods) but its better for the client to have 5 visitors who make a booking than 400 who don't. Richard

Thanks for the replies. I'll have a look at the links. I had thought about Wordpress. I successfully loaded Wordpress onto my own webspace last year for blogging and had wondered whether I could use it for content management for this project. I was just a bit troubled because I wanted to have full control over the design of the site and wasn't too sure about creating my own templates and also making the site look right. The guy I'm working for has very definite ideas about how he wants the site to look (I have just completed another job for him!!!) and I did not want to be restricted by my weaknesses creating a template for Wordpress. The crazy thing is that he only wants to make minor alterations to the prices and delivery dates on 20 or so products each week. He does not want an online shop becuase of the nature of his business. Anyway don't know if you have any further thoughts but appreciate your help so far Richard

Hi I'm new here and have enjoyed reading posts/replies. I have been asked to design a website with a page that the owner can update without my involvement. They simply want to alter their prices against a small range of products on a regular basis. They are computer literate but not experienced enough to use a web design package so it would need to be VERY user friendly. Do any of the members have any experience of a product that would be suitable (and preferably inexpensive) that I could build into the site to facilitate this. Thanks Richard