Thread: 75% Finished, Awaiting All Comments!

Hi, everyone!

Well, I've been plugging away at redesigning my website so that I can switch my nameservers over to VH.

All my main navigation pages are complete, and if you go to "Cartoon Designs", then "Kids", the top row of designs takes you to their order page. I'm still working on all the other product pages.

I've used the "gallery" feature so you can click on any image and see an enlarged version. I've learned .php and created menu, footer and blue bar at the top so I can make changes easier.

I anxious await all your comments, good or bad. (I can take it, just let me go and get my Pina Colada first!)

Can't wait to move this site over to VH . . . I'm getting really close!

Sheryl Tupa
http://cust-m-cartoons.custmcartoons.com
Personalized Cartoons for All Occasions

I like you site alot, Sheryl. Lots to look at, bright and cheerful and fun to look at. Good Job.

Here are a couple of comments.

I am not a fan of page transitions in general, though the one you have chosen is the least objectionable in my opinion. If you really want to use them I would make them as short a duration as possible, so that if other people are annoyed by them, as I am, they will at least tolerate them. (Understand that I may be in the minority here - this is just my opinion..)

The only other thing is the listings of SPORTS, MILITARY, etc that are around the pictures of personalized things -- I think they should be links. I realize that after you click the start to shop they are right there, but I think making those words links would provide another way for folks to 'get to the goods'

Good luck, Sheryl

Thanks, Liz. I appreciate the input. I do intend to make the words you mentioned on the home page links. Just hadn't decided which exact picture to "link" them to yet.

I didn't think the transition was too slow, but I'll experiment on a couple of new pages, to see the difference. If I'm going to change it, I should do it before creating all my product pages.

Sheryl
http://cust-m-cartoons.custmcartoons.com
Personalized Cartoons for All Occasions

Sheryl,
I think you've done a great job - you've got your title tags and h1's in place :)

A couple things - in BV - occasionally it shows a line with extra space between it - look at the space between the last 2 lines in your footer. An easy fix - after the last character on the last line always put in another space or enter - and it'll not do that. Not sure why it does, but that easy fix takes care of it.

And, personally, I'm not a fan of that green background you're using. Maybe a darker green or a pale yellow or even red - but it just doesn't have a happy effect for me - and your site should project happy! The green in your name works, but not in the background.

See what others think - if it's just me - then ignore my feeling there.

Personally, I like the transition and it's fast.

Liz - you should use firefox - then you won't get the transitions!

<waving> Hi Sheryl,

I agree with Beth on the green, unless maybe you can do something to break it up with .. i dunno cartoons or something on it. I know its there cuz it goes with the green in the name, but it kinda clashes with the blues of the menu etc. Other than that I think it looks great. You do good work anyway.

Karen

Thanks ladies . . . no sooner said than done! Switched home page to pale yellow background. Whatcha think?

Think I got the footer fixed too.

Well, darn - I don't like this yellow either. I think you might want to try some bright colors - like the yellow in the middle of the page - or the blue color you use on the home page - with the white text on it.

Usually I don't say to use bright colors, but try it and see if it works?

Good thing I'm not trying to change this in SOI or Dreamweaver!! Home page is now "bright yellow" and if you click on Personalized Items, I did that one in the same blue as the banner.

Hi, your site has the right feel to it & makes me smile.
But most of the thumb nail images are fuzzy. Sorry to put this on a downer on this side of things. But if you’re selling a form of art, the images should be the most important & of the best quality. Its hard to reduce this type of image without some problem. But have you tried having just 2 columns with the full size image? Or are you planning to have many more on each page?


Beth might give you some advice on the next part. Using the .php method, you may have to be careful on your m/tags & all this side of things, so you don’t end up with 2 lots of conflicting tags.

Chris, thanks for input. I agree that the thumbnails are fuzzy. The images are supplied by my distributor on a Web Disk. The reason I didn't go just 2 across is that there are soooo many images on some of the pages, that I didn't want customers scrolling down, down, down, forever trying to find a picture they liked. That's the reason that I used the gallery feature so each could be enlarged when clicked.

Not sure what you mean by m/tags. Beth didn't mention anything about that in her earlier message. BTW -- what is your feeling on the background color? Beth and Karen didn't like the green, and the more I look at it now, I guess I really don't either!

Hi, I think the images are one of two things. If you are using the BV picture gallery, you have to be very careful on using the blue tab handles for sizing the gallery after you have loaded the images. I haven’t used this part in BV before so I have pinched some of you images to test it. & found that you cant squeeze the gallery inwards to make the images smaller as it distorts the images badly.
If you put 4 images in the gallery, you have to pull the blue tabs out top & sides slowly until the images are no longer getting any bigger or distorted. You can see what the difference is if yours have been squeezed inwards.

You can make your pages load a lot faster by reducing most of the images that are shown on the web, but not the ones you sell. Here are a few I reduced http://www.collectors-info.com/testing/imagetest.html to test the gallery. The only thing is that you wouldn’t be able to use the gallery using reduced images. You would have to manually link the small images to the large ones.

As for the yellow part, I like yellow but that one is a bit bright & distracts you from the goods. Maybe try a boarder around the center panel like the one on the link above. This one is set at 10.

On the boarder side of things! I think a lot of the images actually look better with boarders, only because most of them have a lot of white space near the edges.

The other thing I noticed is that the pop ups work fine with IE7, but don’t seem to work with firefox. I get a full page open on my machine. But let someone else confer this 1st.

The m/tags? Just to make sure you don’t put any keywords & alike on your .php template/menu page, or you will have 2 lots on each page.

Good luck.

Wow! You did a nice job on the pictures. So if I understand you right, I shouldn't use the "gallery", but there is a way to put a link with each image to make it enlarge for viewing? I know VH has what is called a Pix Resizer? Is that what you used to reduce the image sizes?

Before I get too far into this website, I could change pictures on the category page to just 3 across. The most pictures on one page that I would have would be 49. So if you don't think scrolling down 17 lines would be to awkward maybe I should try that to get a cleaner look on the pictures.

Chris, could you give me the steps you took to resize images? If I'm going to redo them all, I might as well get it right?

Using the gallery shouldn't hurt the pictures at all. I use it on all my products and it doesn't distort them, because the gallery feature will NOT take them out of proportion. The regular image one will but the gallery one always keeps them in proportion, even when you resize them by making them bigger or smaller.

And you do NOT want to resize the images down - then it does no good to use the gallery feature - because if you click on them you'll get the same size. You want to use the largest image you can.

What you do want to do - is make sure you are checking on the box to use "thumbnail" in the gallery picture.

If the pictures aren't of the best quality- the other won't help.

However, if you use the regular image for a picture you want to size the picture first so that you can display it at the size you put in.

And on the colors - I like the blue. :)

Sheyrl

I was digging around and your personalized page with the blue background is better than the yellow.. I even think you could take the tone of that dark red thats in your buttons and use it as a background, maybe with a thin blue border.. or vice versa.. like a frame.. if you follow me.. Just a thought.. to tone down the brightness just a tad..

Karen

Okay, Karen . . . switched that page over to matching red background and blue border.

http://cust-m-cartoons.custmcartoons...lizeditems.php

I'm not real sure if I like that or not. I know red is considered a "power color", but when I was managing apartments we were told to stay away from red in marketing because it was too intimidating or scary for people. Although, my products are maded in the USA, so maybe this color scheme would work.

Do you think the blue border is too much?

I'll keep working on my product pages because I have so many to do. If all I need to do is go in and make a final decision on the background color and republish, that won't be so bad.

Maybe some other Vodies will chime in and give me their two cents worth on color scheme. Haven't heard back from Beth yet either. She must be busy today.

You must have missed my two messages above Karen's???

I also thought red was a good idea to try - but like the bright yellow find it too much. However, you might want to put a border around the page in red I suggest the red border be sized from 5 - 10 somewhere) - then the blue background? I think that would give it some pizzazz.

Just realized I'm wearing a "red" shirt in my photo! I also changed the sizes of the pictures on my Cartoon Designs page.

http://cust-m-cartoons.custmcartoons...oondesigns.php

Chris pointed out that the images were fuzzy, so I think I figured out how to use the Pix Resizer. Could you let me know if the images are loading faster?

Sorry Beth . . . those must've come in while I was watching "The Apprentice".

I'll do up a page with "red" border and blue background and post that one for you guys to take a look at.

Here's a different page with red "5" border with blue background . . .

http://cust-m-cartoons.custmcartoons...oondesigns.php

This is also a page with images 3 across rather than 4.

BTW: Do you ever get "demoted" for asking for help all the time?

Sheryl .. that works too! I like both ways!

Too much red can be over powering.. but I use alot of red on charming and at xmas time on my other sites., its a WARM color to me. <shrug>

Karen

Hi, Sorry was a bit slow getting back. Looks a lot ,lot better with only 3 images. Also removing the blue BV shape bar with the rounded ends is a bonus. You can do some nice things with BV shapes, but anything with rounded corners is a no/no unless you need it to look like a carpenters saw.
Backgrounds! Now there’s a personal decision? For me!
Light green looks a bit washed out?
Blue seems bright?
Yellow was very bright.
Red seems to blend in with the site a little better.
But all of these depend on what size screen a visitors has & how bigger dose of colour they are getting. Decisions, eh!
Have a look at some big brand sites. They will have spent a lot of money making sure that colours are right for the products.
On some of the pages I see that when you click on an image it goes straight to the order page with the larger image. (Works well)
18 – 21 image per page feels comfortable as well. You won’t want more than this as the loading times will start getting slow.

Good morning Chris & Karen. Thanks for weighing in on the colors. I think that's going to be my biggest challenge!

Karen: I think both the red background and blue background looked good too. I'm kinda up in the air about the border around it though. If I ever went to change my color scheme that would be difficult to remove/replace on so many pages.

Chris: You mentioned 18-21 images per page . . . my concern going with the 3 across images is that I have three categories that have lots of images: hobbies (34), sports (34) and occupations (42). Did you feel that those were now too long? I hate to do the Next Page thing on those categories, because I've heard it's a no-no to do that.

http://cust-m-cartoons.com/hobbies.php
http://cust-m-cartoons.com/occupations.php

Not sure what you mean about the BV shape with the rounded corners . . . I don't think I had anything like that.

Hi Sheryl,

Your site looks great and loads very quickly for me (DSL) good job and I see you changed the colors.

Thank you Sharon. Color choices are tough aren't they?

The links to my category pages above was wrong. Should have been:

http://cust-m-cartoons.custmcartoonscom/hobbies.php
http://cust-m-cartoons.custmcartoons...ccupations.php

Do you think there are too many pictures on those pages?

Hi, Colours are a pain, I know after about 4 changes. lol. But seeing as the theme is jovial, I would keep it bright’ish.
You have some similar colours to eBay & they got it right? Try some of theirs. They must have somthing right.
Talking on eBay! If you look at there pages, they seem to have about 50 thumbnails per page. But these are no more than 2kb each to help with quick loading of the pages. I bet most of eBay pages are between 200 & 300 kb max, visitors will leave a site if pages are to slow.
If you have 34x10kb = 340 + header 72 = 412 +sundries like text & so on 100= 512 This is not to bad with images. But 50 images maybe pushing it a bit unless the image kbs can come down a bit more, without los on quality. The 2/300 target was acceded with just the cartoon images alone.
Take one of your images & past the url into this site http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/imageoptimizer/ & press optimize. You might be supprize on how mach you can save. & maybe get the 50 on one page.
With the changing of colours on your site, if you have it set up the .php way from Navals post, you should be able to change everything from one or two pages, accept the white area where you have your cartoons.?

Thanks for the link for the optimizer! I'm definitely going to bookmark that. I checked out a lot of my pictures, and right now most are 11 or under, so I think they'll be okay. Will definitely use this on my next site.

It funny you should mention EBay because that's where I got my "inspiration" for the colors in my logo. I've decided to go with the colors that Beth suggested. All will have red border and blue background. I'm working on my last category page now which is "occupations". Then I'll start on the individual product pages.

I didn't know that I could do background set up in php too, so I've done each page individually. Will no better next time.

Thank you for your input. I'm hoping to have site finished so I can change nameserver and move from present hosting by the end of March.

Good luck with the site, i am sure thing will chage a few times yet.

Sheyrl,

Dont hate me but.. That rounded image on the bottom i think would look better just squared off, as one side runs to the square and the left side doesnt. Other than that I think its looking great!

Karen

Karen, you're the second person to see a rounded image at the bottom. I can't see it at all. I put a square box at the bottom with the footer in it, and page has a border around it. If you're seeing it at the very bottom, I can't.

I don't see a rounded image either - unless she's looking at a different page and didn't say which?

Sheryl - as to the number of images/per page - on a store you can think about it a tad different than what others would do. We see lots of sites with the page button. It's been shown on stores that many people never use that on a product page - so having the extra images is better than doing extra pages IN MOST cases. I have some pages with extra images. I try to find enough categories to avoid overdoing it - but sometimes you can't. And for the people still in dark ages on dial up - loading one page slowly is faster than loading two or three pages slowly (even with less images). For example, if one page with 30 images loaded for them in 2 minutes - and you divided that to 3 pages of 10 images each - it would most likely take over a minute each page - and they would never get to that 3rd page. Now, hopefully your optimized images won't take 2 minutes on a page (like the old host) but we have to look at it from all angles and try to get as many people as possible.

I was originally thinking about breaking up the images into pages, but when I look back at my SOI store, people had to scroll down quite a bit, as each product was on it's own line. I'm thinking I'll be okay with with I have now. Like I said before most images have been made smaller and the page with the most will have 16 lines of 3 pictures.

The blue background and red border is starting to grow on me. I like it more everytime I see it! Thanks for the suggestion.

You guys (gals) are the best.

By the way, I changed the nameservers on my other website (listed below) and it moved over perfectly! Now I won't have to worry any longer about doing that for cust-m-cartoons.

Multi-tasking are you? Working on 2 at once? LOL - looks nice - and I'm jealous all winter of where you are. I love Arizona.

Sheryl,

Hello from another forum member! I think your site looks good! I guess you are building it yourself in Blue Voda, I might do same myself for my site, and am here just checking out other sites to see what is going on.

I think your site looks good, and I saw your picture in your posts.. you look nothing like a cartoon character at all! *LOL* Great job and I wish you all the best with your site. I just need the ambition and time to do mine too!

Sheyrl

I see it in firefox. Make sure you dont still have the transparent shape of it somewhere still, would be my guess. I can see the square one too, just shorter and like over the top of the rounded one.

Also if i go to any other page and then hit the home button I get your SOL site! Not sure if thats your intention or if you are propogating the domains.

Karen

Coffee Gourmet: thanks for the comments. I put off joining VodaHost for about 2 months before I finally decided to make the jump. It's been so exciting learning the Blue Voda software, and I don't regret making the switch at all. My site is not totally off SOI yet. Still adding all my products.

KarenMac: That's why you see it go back to my SOI home page. Think I'd better go in and take that link information out until site is totally complete. Was doing come calculations last night, and figure it will take me about 50 total hours to get everything re-entered. Trying to do at least 3 hours a night after I get home from work. It won't be long!!!

Sheryl

Ya Beth told me that after i had posted.. I just didnt think about that aspect as i just MOVE! And work the details out as i go!

:)

Karen