website/ecommerce design & templates too

[trainershack]

Originally Posted by fisicx

And in any case, if I were a potential customer using firefox (15% and rising), do you think I'd still be a potential customer

spot on! our %age is 15,6!

[fisicx]

That's cool.

The bloke who advised me said to change the £400 for a website offer to an odd amount. It looks as if you have really thought about the figure rather than plucked a number out of the air.

[wapurvis]

Hi John,
I would take some of fisicx's advice on board. But as a professional web designer myself I have a few bits of advice for both of you:

Firstly, if you are going to build ecommerce solutions, OS scripts which are branded are not highly professional, you would do well to learn a bit more .ASP NET scripting and use a content management system to base any complex commerce site upon. For that matter, it will provide you with much more dynamic sites if you explore scripting beyond HTML.

As for fisicx, its a nice plain site that you have developed but be cautious about over-criticising certain forms of design. Frames and nested tables are far from redundant and other scripting languages such as javascript can be powerful tools when utilised properly. As for META tags, these are certainly something you should think about exploring on your site. Old-fashioned as they are, combined with a robots.txt file, most search engine technologies still use them as their basis for indexing (including Google). Currently your own site does not rank in the first page of results on Google - statistics show that more than 95% of people do not go beyond the first page of results for a search.

Please dont take these comments as being rude, it is meant only as constructive advice. I am an experienced web designer who has specialised in optimising sites for search engines and I have an extensive portfolio of working for everyone from major political parties to small businesses! If anyone wants any advice feel free to e-mail me wapurvis@hotmail (no obligation to employ me - I can just help you out!)

[BIZAL]

Sorry but I would also like to know how you can promote a 3 page website. Has Google changed its rules?

[fisicx]

Hi wapurvis,

Thank you for your observations on my own site. Not number 1 and never intended to be so - far too much competition. Most of my work comes from referrals, which suits me just fine.

I do take issue with you comment regarding frames and tables. Frames are not indexable but the search engines. I can't think of anybody in the SEO, usability or accessibility industry who thinks otherwise.

As to tables - a CSS managed layout is far better from a usability and accessibility point of view. Strip out the tables information and look at your page - that is how the robots see the page. And because the algorithms look for keyword and key phrase relationships, using tables can work against you. There is also secondary advantage that clean code will simplify the indexing process. At the very least, John should clean out all the HTML styling - there is no reason to include font, colour and alignment information within the body. Using an external stylesheet will tidy up the whole page and make it so much easier to maintain the site.

wapurvis:
Always looking to learn more - do you have a web site we can look at?

[wapurvis]

Hiya fisicx,
I do agree with you that external CSS is a much better route to use, furthermore internal CSS tags actually breach a lot of the guidlines from W3C on mark-up and accessibility before you even consider the effect they have in various browsers. And you are right to identify that tables must be used extremely cautiously in that they can affect the robots' interpretation of key word relationships.

As for frames I am not saying they are the best method to use, but they can be a useful tool when handling large quantities of data such as databases or newsgroups/forums (especially where the data is help across different servers). Obviously the best way of handling the need for common components is the use of server side includes but the use of these may be too complicated for many individuals and thus expensive to implement, especially for smaller businesses. As for the indexing problems, these can be largely limited where necessary through providing a valid robot.txt file (as recognised by Google) to guide the indexing process. Similarly problems of 'orphaned' frames in search results can be prevented by frameset scripts. However, I still have to agree that I would recommend avoiding frames if possible.

I cant really show you any websites at the minute, as most of my work to date has been as part of larger teams, but I am intending to set up a freelance agency sometime soon, so i'll show you that site once it is up and running,

cheers
Will

[sharpendtraining]

Come in on this a bit late - Don;t know if the original poster is still onside - but would offer the following

The best advice is generally painful, because quite often it forces you to reconsider your basic assumptions

Leaving out the specific details of your business, its always worth reading anything you can about the concepts and use of the words
value, cost & worth

and think how they are used and in what context

A small piece of freeware software can be very valuable similarly something which costs a lot (££££'s) doesn't always provide great value.

If you charge low prices - the product may be perceived as low worth and you will then find it VERY DIFFICULT to increase your prices.

Don;t know if this helps or even answers the question (but its a good answer to some question somewhere...)

[fisicx]

Originally Posted by sharpendtraining

If you charge low prices - the product may be perceived as low worth and you will then find it VERY DIFFICULT to increase your prices.

Well said. Would you rather be Poundstrechers or Harrods?

[wapurvis]

Excellent point, but you need your product to appear as quality if you are to be 'Harrods', hence the use of branded OS (open source) shopping systems doesnt look terribly professional.