My site - feedback welcome

What is the web address of the site?

Randy

Boy am I lost in space. the site is

Talk about senior moments!

And screwed up again. It's

Hay !!!!! Damn good work !!! Jerry

On Mon, 12 Jan 2009 06:47:32 -0800 (PST), ebd wrote:

Feedback on the site:

Ditch frames. They're so '90s and problematic on a number of levels, one of the main ones is it's hard to bookmark a subsidiary frame. Better (in my opinion) to use popup windows for the images. See my site to copy solid working code to make popups (almost all of my images are thumbnails to popups). If you're unsure how to read the code, let me know and I'll send you a sample.

Edit images for size. I didn't check all of them, but the zebrawood bowl second from the bottom, for example, is 1200x1600 pixels. Almost no one is going to be able to display that full size, so why make the servers (yours and the user's) transfer all those bits and make the UA (browser) work to resize them?. I generally size images to 500 or 550 pixels high (and then whatever width the aspect ratio makes). If you don't have an image editor, check out Irfanview

download. Make use of the "title" attribute in the coding for the images, particularly the thumbnails. Merely repeating the image filename isn't useful, but having the same material as the description under the large image would be. I also use that same description for the "alt" attribute, which is important to include so your page validates. "title" and "alt" may have the same content, but they serve different functions. Use both. Don't bother to tell the user how the site looks best. There are so many variables in the user's setup (UA, monitor size, desktop resolution, full vs partial window, etc.) that the best practice is to write code to a reasonable size (1024 x 768 is a good compromise) and make it as scalable as you can. Then the user can select how he wants to see the site. I don't try too hard for the 800 x 600 people anymore, but user resolutions above 1024 x 768 should be happy with your code if you use scalable units such as ems and %s for your dimensions, rather than pixels. Excepting image size, of course, which should be done in the actual pixel dimension of the images.

Good on you for using an external style sheet (and also for having a DOCTYPE declaration). As stated above, setting dimensions for and should be done in scalable values such as ems or %s. If the user specifies a larger text type, his UA may not treat the heads the same as the other text if you use hard pixel dimensions.

Do a search on "Jakob Nielsen" and see his essays on "Top Ten Design Mistakes..." and the like for some good ideas on website usability and how to design for it. Much of it is commerce oriented, but there's valuable guidance there, nonetheless.

Further::

I looked more closely at your source code. I see you're defining each image as "class=image", which is good, but the class definition is mainly a 1 pixel border. Then, when you code the image, you add a border=0 command. WTF? It almost looks like the border=0 was an add on or afterthought. In any event, the 0 should be enclosed in quotes.

I see you are using the "title" attribute in the (anchor) commands, which is great, but you still need the "alt" in the command. I would actually put both the "alt" and the "title" in the string.

In the part of your code, you specify the as "WRK". WTF? The should be a descriptive of you webpage (it's the content that is displayed in the top bar of the UA).

Also in the (and everywhere else), almost all arguments should be enclosed in quotes. Your line:

should be:

In your style sheet, you have defined class=index using three lines of "margin" commands. Those can be combined for ease of coding and rendering thusly: margin:0 2 0; " You can specify all four sides of the object in the order: top, right, bottom, left. If you only specify one parameter, it applies to the entire object. If you only specify two parameters, it applies to the top and both left and right margins. If you only specify three parameters, it applies to the top, both left and right, and bottom margins. Quite a powerful capability.

Some great stuff there. I'm envious of your skill. Thanks for sharing them with us.

The site worked well for me but it would have been nice if the main photos had fitted themselves to the available screen so that I could see the whole of each piece at once instead of having to scroll left -> right to see it. (I'm sure it can be done and that someone else here will be able to suggest how to do it!)

Thanks again.

Ian

And screwed up again. It's

Ian,

Thanks for the kind words. I've changed the text on Home a bit to explain what to do. The easiest is to change the zoom on your browser from 100% to about 75%. That shrinks everything down so you should be able to see everything at once. If it's still to big try 50%. Hope it works for you.

Thanks for your critique of my code. But, after 35+ years of programming in Assembly Language, COBOL, Pascal, and a few others, AND more importantly after retireing, I've got not the least inclination of getting deeply into HTML. I used a program to generate the skeleton code then modified it some. I'm working on sizing the pictures better and getting them to load faster. Other than that I'm not interested in spending hours and hours studying the fine points of HTML so that I can spend hours to optimize the code for pages that will get very few hits.

The layout seems to be agreeable to most people that replied or emailed me. The page seems to serve the purpose of showing my work and telling something about me. I'm going to be producing a special limited edition (custom turned handles) of a product and will have a link to my site from that companies site. We just wanted to give people who were interested some idea of who was signing, dating, and numbering the limited edition.

Thanks for your input.

Wow. I totally misinterpreted the "I would appreciate any and all comments. Please, be brutally honest," part of the original post.

Actually, you didn't. It's just that at this stage of my life I'm not into learning another computer "language" in depth to use on a single project. If I were going to use HTML extensively I would find your comments about the intricacies (sp?) of coding HTML useful. In this case, since I'm not going to be creating even one more site, not so much. The stuff about sizing was helpful though.

Where are you getting this from? I'm going nuts trying to follow your ideas on size but I'm missing something. When I look at the properties of the Zebrawood bowl it is 973x730 pixels. What am I missing?

I see it too. (BTW, cool bowl.)

Clicking that thumbnail gets

. That page (in the HTML) gives a *display* size of 973x730. But if I select "view image" (right click in Firefox), it shows me that the image file is 1600x1200 (and 625,603 bytes). If you scale down the image file, to the size you are displaying, then things load faster. In this case, you should end up with a file ~36% the size you have now.

It isn't causing me a problem. I just can't resist the occasional tech-support question that I know how to answer.

Drew,

Thanks for the help in clearing that up.

Larry