alchemist

Hi guys, My website has been running well for months with my host Vexxhost. Last night I couldn't access my website www.tony-hart.com and this problem continues at present. According to some friends on twitter the website is not available, but my girlfriend and http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ have no problems accessing the site. The same problem is apparent for my other sites hosted with Vexxhost such as www.prideoflions.co.uk. It's bizarre. I tend to have my domains with 123-Reg.co.uk and my hosting with Vexxhost, but I don't know where to begin with diagnosing this problem. Is it Vexxhost, 123-Reg or my ISP? Any help on this would be hugely appreciated. Thanks for the insight guys, Tony

Hi guys, Wasn't sure where to put this, but can't find a good Facebook/social networking specific place to put this: I have just moved my blog to a new template and have decided to integrate some social media buttons. They all work fine with the exception of the facebook button. Basically, it works, but not on the blog homepage. On any other page, it does what I'd expect it to do and load a Facebook Share page dialog, but on the blog homepage, it simply loads a blank browser window. I can't for the life of me figure out what the issue is here. To see what I mean, first visit this page and try clicking on the Facebook icon in the top right: http://www.tony-hart.com/files/westend_heathfire.php In contrast, visiting this page and clicking the same Facebook icon has a different result: http://www.tony-hart.com/blog.php Any ideas as to what might be the problem here? Many thanks in advance! Tony

Thanks Wickham, that's really useful info. I might have to give that a whirl. I've spent so long getting everything to fit just so, so I might have to spend some time testing such a solution, but it would certainly work. What effect does a Frameset have on SEO and search performance? Cheers, Tony

Hi chaps, I redeveloped my site back in the summer. I'm now toying with the idea of using some quiet, low key, mutable music on my website. Thing is, the site is structured in HTML. That is to say that each new page is just that, a new page. Can anyone suggest a method - if one even exists - of adding a sitewide MP3 track that would play even when the user changes page? I really am not up for redesigning the site from the ground up again (it nearly killed me last time!), and I'm merely investigating the possibility. I know music is very controversial on websites, but if there's a method that might work, I'd be interested to hear about it. Many thanks all, Regards Tony

Hi, In the end I changed the first image on the page (which happened to be my Logo) to have the same Alt text as the Meta Description. I don't know where exactly Google is picking up the description it's using in the SERP's from, but this looks to be the description I was aiming for, so either way it's working. I know sticking this sort of info in an Alt tag isn't best practice, but I'd like my site to look like something other than spam in the SERP's!

Ah. Well that's very annoying. Can you suggest a non-dodgy, non-penalised way of getting round this? Text is simply not appropriate for the homepage of my site. I used to get ripped to shreds by other photographers for having way too much text and not enough imagery on my site. Now Google is screwing me over!

Hi guys, I've recently redeveloped my website and after testing it, I tried to be conscientious and added independent meta descriptions to each of my pages. I added a new sitemap.xml and verified the site using Google Webmaster Tools. My website is appearing in the SERP's, but annoyingly, my well written description is not. Instead, the description is a string of image alt text rather than the meta description. It goes without saying that this isn't the most informative and will more than likely cause some potential customers to skip the site over. Any ideas how to correct this? I've changed the title of my page ever so slightly to try and get Google to reindex the page and have redone everything in Google Webmaster Tools, all to know avail. It's pretty annoying, given the improvement to the website, that the SERP listings are all screwy! If you're interested, google "Tony Hart Photo", it's that top one. Cheers all.

1024x768 is pretty much the smallest screen the site is designed for. I know that breaks a whole load of UI guidelines, but I have to target the market and based on these figures: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp I'm not alienating too many people. For me, it's all about making the images sell me as a photog. I will have to have a look at adding a bit more space for 1024x768 screens and similar though!

Thanks chaps, Useful feedback. Can I ask what monitor resolution you are both running? I think the content might be quite tight on a 1024x768 screen (but should fit) but it won't scale smaller than that. Cheers and yep, agreed on the white background. Have used black in the past and it looks fab too. It's an either or thing for me.

Hi Scifunk, Thanks for your feedback. What browser/platform combo are you trying? I've run this in Safari and Firefox on Mac, IE7 and Firefox on PC all without problems? As far as the black and white shots go, that's a style thing. I place an emphasis on black and white imagery. Fair play if it's not your thing, but I'm not going to be changing that I'm afraid! Cheers mate, Tony

Hi all, After receiving some help on this forum, my new website is now finished. I used to be a web designer/graphics designer/photographer when I first left my 'proper' job a couple of years back. Now I've narrowed that down to photography, with a speciality in wedding photography and as such have tried to build a website to reflect that! Before I was coming across as far too much a jack-of-all-trades and IMHO wasn't presenting the images as well as I should. I've now got a new system with a backend that allows me to pump whatever images I like to the slideshows, though I've still got to trim the slideshows so they show only my best work. Anyways... I'd love your feedback/reviews on the new website: Tony Hart Photo - My New Website For those of you who might be interested for comparison's sake, the old website can be found here: Photography Site Design Site You'll need access details as this is now archived: User: archived Pass: site All the best, Tony

Hi Mr P. Thanks for your reply. I've now decided to stick the menubar up the top as haven't been able to achieve what I want with the menu flush to the top of the gallery. Take a look here: http://www.tony-hart.com/z_sandbox4/test.html I've got it mostly as I want it now, but if I scale the window, I can make the Flash gallery extend beyond the bottom of the window. Is there a way to create a container (presumably a DIV) that will: 1. Hold the gallery 2. Make sure the DIV scales to be as big, but no larger than the viewport minus the menu bar 3. Is padded on all sides. At the moment, the solution I have works great on my big 1920x1200 screen, but the gallery ends up flush with the bottom of the viewport on my laptop (1280x800). I presume this is because the DIV holding the gallery ends up being slightly taller than the viewport. I'm using this CSS code: html { overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; height: 100%; } body { height: 100%; overflow:hidden; } #menubar { margin-top: 5px; margin-left: 5px; } #content { margin-top: 40px; height: 90%; padding: 5px; } I feel like I'm nearly there, but I can't quite crack how to simply get the flash gallery to sit in a DIV surrounded by a white background on all sides, all the way down to 1024x768 screens. Apologies if I've not explained that well, please feel free to ask for clarification! One thing I've tried is giving the menubar a percentage height of 10%. My understanding is that if you have a parent DIV that's 100% of viewport height, if you then have two child DIV's that are 90% and 10% high, they will together fill the viewport entirely. Is this wrong?

Anyone? It's really frustrating because CSS is meant to be a much better for layout, but I could achieve this with tables! I'm now trying locking the menu bar/logo to the top of the screen and having some more luck. Still can't achieve a simple scaling content box though!!! ARGH! If you have a look here... I'm getting somewhere: http://www.tony-hart.com/z_sandbox3/test.html This renders close to what I'm looking for in Safari, but in Firefox the actually gallery is tiny. Like 300x200 or something like that. Would really appreciate any thoughts.

Hi guys, I've got some distance towards a solution, but I'm confusing myself because of my ropey coding skills! You can see what I've acheived here: http://www.tony-hart.com/z_sandbox2/ I've wrapped lots of things in borders so I can see what is where. The first problem I'm having is that the gallery is center aligned in it's div which causes a white gap between it and the menubar. I want everything to be top aligned. As you shrink the window, the gallery shrinks as I want it to, but the menubar becomes dissassociated from the gallery. I want it to remain flush with the top of the gallery, instead the white gap grows and it looks ridiculous. I'm trying to do this without using tables, but my CSS skills aren't brill. Here is what I am using so far: html { overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; } body { overflow:hidden; } #reference { display: block; position: absolute; top: 50%; width: 100%; height: 0px; } #wrapper { position: relative; top: -418px; left: 20%; width: 60%; height: 836px; background-color:green; padding: 0%; } #menubar { width: auto; border: 1px; vertical-align:top; margin: 0px; border: dashed; padding: 0px; overflow: hidden; } #content { position: relative; vertical-align: top; margin: 0px; border: dashed; } Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Hello chums, I'm currently looking into redesigning my website to make it less of a compromise. I'm a wedding photographer and after many moons, have finally settled on Slideshow Pro as my image viewer of choice. I now need to build a site around my galleries. I have a number of requirements which makes the layout code for my vision something of a headache. They are as follows: Vertically & Horizontally centered content area. A Content area which will compliment the dynamic resizing of the image viewer (getting smaller as the browser window shrinks) A menu bar and header (my logo) that will sit just above the content area, and remain 'locked' in this position. I've yet to find a solution that adequately even centers the content vertically and horizontally yet. I used to have ways of doing all this stuff with tables, but I'm set on developing a genuinely modern website without all the compromises of things I've done in the past. Up until now, I've used Lightroom to produce my galleries using Slideshow Pro, but I am looking into the flash component as this allows for dynamic resizing (this isn't possible currently in Lightroom). The Lightroom version of SSP does center the content in the page, but as far as I can see it does it with javascript somehow. Here is an example of the gallery to give you an rough idea of what I'm trying to achieve. URL - http://www.tony-hart.com/galleries/fran&joby_large/ USER - thomas PASS - burford I'm trying to take this layout, add a menubar between the site logo and the gallery and finally have the gallery set to a native size of 1200x800px which will then shrink if the content area is smaller than this. Ideally, I want to build the website from scratch rather than editing the code Lightroom spits out. I've got to the point where I can create the galleries I want in Flash, and now I want to create the site around these. I know that what I'm asking for is pretty complex, but any ideas about how to achieve all or parts of this initial layout conundrum would be much appreciated! Cheers, Tony EDIT - OOOhh... I may have found a way to do some of what I'm looking for using this code here but I could still do with any advice you wise chaps can offer!