I have completed my website!

[joiner_sim]

I don't know how many of you have had a look in probably to be honest, the last year! But my website has been stood still looking messy, and uncompleted.

:arrow: Well, now I have finally got round to finishing it off properly! :roll: About time......

Anyways, thought you might want to have a look around, if you've been checking up on the site's progress, or even if you've never seen my site before. There's tonnes of wood work photos on there! >any comments you have are welcome on my site's guestbook.

:arrow: www.simonswoodwork.tk :wink: Yes, it's true I have finished it :P

 

[OPJ]

Thanks for the update. I think you could do with some better quality photo's but, apart from that, it's not bad at all.

 

[Shultzy]

Nice site Simon. I wondered where my brother bought the model bench from. He lives in Holland and came over at xmas, its for my impending 60th.

 

[Raggy]

As soon as i looked at it i got this message

A script from "http://www.freewebs.com" is requesting enhanced abilities that are UNSAFE and could be used to compromise your machine or data:

 

[PowerTool]

Works fine for me - and yes,it looks good.
I like the links from keywords on the homepage,and you've got a good variety of work on display.Generally well laid out,and easy to navigate.Adverts that are there are not overpowering or intrusive.I agree with Olly that some of the photos could do with being replaced by better ones (guess some were taken on a camera phone ?) and "ArchitectuRal joinery has another "R" in it :wink:

Otherwise,very nice,at least four out of five

Andrew

 

[Argee]

It gave me a "Malicious Code" warning.

Ray

 

[duncanh]

worked fine for me in Firefox.

I hope you don't mind, but I've got a few suggestions...

The one problem I immediately noticed is the size of the images.
When you put an image into an HTML page you should try to resize it to the size that it is used on the page, and not just use the width and height style for the element to resize it.

The most obvious example is on the Architectural Joinery page. If you look at the properties of the image (right click and choose properties, in Firefox at least) it says
Image Dimensions: 1600px x 1200px (scaled to 596px x 519px)
This causes the page loading to be slow because the browser has to load a larger image than is needed and then spend time scaling it. On that page there are 5 images being scaled.
If you save the images to the size at which they display then you may find that they are better quality, as you can control the scaling on you computer (this may not be the case, just a guess!).
As a test I just saved one of your images, resized it in Photoshop and saved it with average JPEG quality and it shrank from 211kb to 69kb with no noticeable loss of quality.

Another place where resizing could perhaps be used is when images are clickable to go to another page. An example is on the projects page. The clickable images are downsized versions of images that appear on the pages they lead to. Although it's simpler to have just the one image some people have a smaller one for the menu (so that page loads faster) and required size ones elsewhere.

I hope all that is useful. If you need help with any of that then just let me know.

As others have mentioned - the quality of some of the photos could be improved.

One other thing is the mildly annoying refreshing of the background when you go from page to page.


Other than those niggles with the website, the actual woodworking looks great.


Duncan

 

[brianhabby]

The site looks nice and clean and as mentioned above is easy to navigate, something that is often not thought out too clearly on many websites. You have obviously spent a fair bit of time on your site and it shows, well done.

Some of the comments above are quite valid, but no site is ever perfect, especially a new one.

Duncan's points about your images are worth taking on board and if you have access to Photoshop there is a further saving of file size to be made if you use the save for web option on the file menu.

regards

Brian

 

[joiner_sim]

Thanks for everyone thats took the time to view my website! Just checked it said I'd had 114+ visitors today, which is probably a first since the site went online a couple of years ago. > My apoligies for the topic first message. I did post a message, quite a long one, but nothing has seemed to appear :? Not sure why?

Thanks for the comments about the woodwork, and also the general layou of the site. The navigation of the website was something I really wanted to try and get right. Which was the main reason the website had been half-complete for a year! I took off the old site originally, because it got too full and untidy with pictures scattered everywhere. Now hopefully this new layout does what I intended it to do, help navigate thru and see it all.

The photo's quality in some of the pictures is down to them being taken on a rubbish camera phone, and some of the bigger images are slightly "jagged" because of having to re-size the images using HTML. I realise that while re-sizing images would help them to load up quicker, especially the thumbnail pictures, however doing this is something that becomes such a huge job, as all the site's pictures are re-sized to fit the template. It's probably a lazy attitude to take and I probably should get round to doing it at some point. :roll:

Quote:
A script from "http://www.freewebs.com" is requesting enhanced abilities that are UNSAFE and could be used to compromise your machine or data:
- I would imagine this is down to your computer's security level settings, as there is nothing I have loaded onto the website thats malicious.

ArchitectuRal joinery has another "R" in it - I did a visual spell check all over the site n all, dont know how I missed that!

 

[Richard Findley]

Hi Simon,

I'm a bit late on this one, sorry. Yes, it's a good little website. I agree about the comments previously re: photos being too big. I've got a pretty fast connection but they still take a few seconds to download .

I do like the background image of the wood. Where did you get that from? The other thing I was curious about is the address... I've never seen a .tk address before.

It is great having a web site and all these things will be improved over time and it will grow as you add more pages and images. I spent about 3 hours this morning messing around with mine, adding bits and tweeking it!

Good luck with it all,

Cheers,

Richard

 

[joiner_sim]

You get .tk websites for free. Just visit http://www.dot.tk

The image of the wood on the background, came from the web host.

I have just paid tonight for it to be upraded for my web space and bandwidth, so I could add more webpages, as it said I've hit my maximum limit. Just added a new work in progress project. Anyways, that also means, the website has got no more adverts!

 

[duncanh]

I have just paid tonight for it to be upraded for my web space and bandwidth, so I could add more webpages, as it said I've hit my maximum limit. Just added a new work in progress project.

Resizing the images would help you use less web space and bandwidth, and so save money...

You could probably get some software to batch resize them for you. I know Photoshop can do it with actions.

 

[joiner_sim]

The upgrade was mainly required as theres a 20 page limit for free users. Now its unlimited with the upgrade.

 

[Shultzy]

If you want a free batch resizer try XnView, it does lots of other things as well.

 

[jlawrence]

As someone who does webhosting for a living I'd say only go free if you can live with the limitations. If you're running a business then free isn't the way - unless you really know what you're doing.

The only thing I found fault with, with the site was the image of the workshop.
It looked a mess and it looked small.
Yes, I know many people (myself included, though I don't do it for a living) have a small and messy shop. For the advert (ie website) you need it to look as good (ie professional) as possible. If it's a small back garden shed shop then I'd advise don't even show an image - let your work do the talking not where you've done it.

 

[bjm]

If you haven't got Photoshop an excellent free image editing package is FastStone. The main program - Image Viewer - has a very good editing capability or you can just download the Photo Resizer. I highly recommend it.

Brian