New innovative business - feedback welcome

[Nayuta]

Hi everyone,

I recently started a new business, myMosaics, that develops mosaic artwork from customer's collections of photos, giving people the opportunity to express many memories in one display.

I've just finished upgrading our website at www.mymosaics.co.uk.

This is my first site and I'd love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on the it and our service in general.

Any feedback (both positive and negative) would be most appreciated.

Cheers,

John Rowlands
myMosaics

[jonny74]

i thought the site was nice.. pretty simple to navigate...
one Q though ..

why not take photos of cars, tourist attractions, football clubs, and so on and sell them ready made as well ?
sure there would be some cutomers interested in those as well as their own photos ?

[Nayuta]

Thanks for your feedback Jonny74. Glad you liked the site =)

Re. 'off the shelf' mosaics, a few customers have also suggested this and we're currently looking in to it. Which reminds me, I've got a legal question to post.

Thanks again.

[fisicx]

A really great idea - hope it works out for you.

But you need to fix your site. It's pretty obvious that it's been build using a WYSIWYG package (maybe even a template). The whole thing is riddled with errors, code bloat and repeated data. You will also have a big problem getting indexed unless you fix your navigation - the robots do not like JS menus. If you read the google guidelines they tell to make sure you have at least one text link on the page.

And from a usability point of view, make sure you include a call to action on every page - at the very least put your contact details on every page.

Other things to think about are the size of your images - the homepage image is 195kb - that's an awfully big file to download in dial up. The other image aren't much better, even your background image is 25kb.

That will do for now.

[Nayuta]

Originally Posted by fisicx

It's pretty obvious that it's been build using a WYSIWYG package...

Nodnod

Originally Posted by fisicx

The whole thing is riddled with errors, code bloat and repeated data. You will also have a big problem getting indexed unless you fix your navigation - the robots do not like JS menus. If you read the google guidelines they tell to make sure you have at least one text link on the page.

And from a usability point of view, make sure you include a call to action on every page - at the very least put your contact details on every page.

Other things to think about are the size of your images...

This is great feedback fisicx, and most appreciated. I haven't gone through the code yet, I've just let Dreamweaver spit it out. I'll tidy it up and validate it soon.

Re. image sizes, I can reduce them further but I don't want their quality to suffer too badly. I'll play around with their compression a little more and see if I can find a compromise.

On a slightly different note, I had a look at your site and noticed the following line in your homepage source:

<meta name="robots" content="NOODP">

What's the purpose of this? Oh, and the link to "/portfolio/fisicx.com" from your portfolio doesn't appear to be on your server

Cheers.

[Ian J]

>>>>>><meta name="robots" content="NOODP">

What's the purpose of this? Oh, and the link to "/portfolio/fisicx.com" from your portfolio doesn't appear to be on your server <<<<<<

It's an instruction to the search engines to use the meta description from the site and not that of Open Directory Project as both Google and MSN will default to the ODP description under certain circumstances.

[fisicx]

The page existed - it's the link that was wrong.

As to your images - you can reduce the quality by a huge amount and still see the detail.

If you go to www.valcarr.co.uk/hotch-potch-hearts/invitation.htm the main image is only 24kB and if you click on the image the full size version 600 by 800 pixels and only 77kB.

Don't compress - use the fireworks 'export' and experiment with the settings.

[www.infoebookstore.co.uk]

great idea, site is pretty good too.

Only thing to say is that on the services page, the secondary menu wraps to two lines (this maybe due to my screen resolution) but I don't personally like that.

Another thing, I find it difficult to read small text which runs across the whole page, I find it better to put text in smaller chunks (in columns or tables)

The code on the front page does have a lot of strange tables with nothing in them, am I missing the point of them?

Good luck, seems like a good prospect.

Jim

[Nayuta]

Originally Posted by fisicx

If you go to www.valcarr.co.uk/hotch-potch-hearts/invitation.htm the main image is only 24kB and if you click on the image the full size version 600 by 800 pixels and only 77kB.

Don't compress - use the fireworks 'export' and experiment with the settings.

Thanks for the tip fisicx. Expect smaller file sizes throughout the site soon

[Nayuta]

Yeah, I must admit I'd prefer a sub-menu on one line, but we'll be adding services soon that are only going to increase the length of it. We've also had feedback from visitors that suggested using a smaller font made it hard to spot the sub-menu.

Re. text across the page, that's an interesting point and one that I've not come across before. I'll look in to tweaking the layout on some of the text-heavy pages.

The site was created using layers and then converted to tables. The empty tables were automatically created to keep the original layout intact. I've still got to go through the HTML that was created and tidy it up.

Thanks for your feedback and good wishes, Jim.