Hi everybody out there! Its a windswept, rainy morning in England and I would be grateful if you could check out www.wirralgrammarboys.com, my first attempt at web design (and I'm not even being paid overtime to create and maintain the site!) The old site was dreary and outdated and I have tried to add a fresh look to the site using images and animations to bring the pages to life. This is the beginning really, and the site will hopefully evolve successfully using forums such as this one! One thing I have lost though, the old site allowed staff to access their Emails from home, can I set up something similar via the new site? And Brad and colleagues, can I now be included on the usual search engines? One more thing, I have included a link to the vodahost site from my homepage but I am not sure how the affiliation etc works...advice please?

Have a great day everybody!

Tony B.

Hi, think you may of set the page a bit wide (800 is the usual) . Think there are 2 many things going on in the page. The welcome icon nearly made me fall off my chair.

As for the email side of things! If you don’t want to give staff access to the site (which is a good thing) you will have to set up an account for each member of staff with there own password. They can then just login with there normal email program by just setting up another account in? (Outlook) to go & get there messages.

Good luck.

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Regards Chris,
Sites are view in FF & IE, with res @ 1024 x 768 on 19” screens.


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Hi great idea... a lot of your pictures are fuzzy which is a bit off putting an I agree with Chris the welcome sign a bit much needs to be toned down a bit maybe to just swing rond once... also could not get to home page so you need to put that in on your other pages..

www.costarock.biz
www.costa-localbiz.com
www.the-chill-zone.com

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Spanish Senora

Thanks Chris, yes, probably agree that too much is going on, needed the home page to standout during the launch, the welcome sign can easily be tamed or removed, appreciate your comments though, cheers. Tony.

Hi Senora!

Thanks for that, some of the images were poor to begin with, especially images of the school! I think I can feel a student assignment coming on which will involve digital photography and website design! Did you miss the home navigation button which features on each page (top)? Welcome sign will be toned down or removed, on that we all agree! Hasta la Vista! Tony

good ideas - really need to work on reducing size of page though - lots of scrolling -

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Ann

www.movingon1.com travel
www.beadedcustomdesigns.com jewelry

I agree with the above - page is too wide - and I didn't last more than 2 seconds with that welcome sign. So when you tame it let me know and I'll look again.

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Beth
A Child's Palace - Pinata Palace - Moxie Enterprises

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Good start,
You will need to do some tweaking to better reflect the quality of the school. Not only follow the advice offered above, but also double check your grammar; for example: "headteacher" should be "headmaster" and "short cut" is one word "shortcut".
Also, your pages need to be titled.

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Bill
www.blueearthtea.com
www.ftaaconsulting.com
www.iaval.com
www.theemeraldbay.com

Wow, alot of flash toys lol. Not TOO bad for a first attempt. Good use alot of work tho.

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Clan FFA-Halo 2 MLG, Machinima, and Glitch Clan
http://www.ffaproam.com/

Hi Tony! You've done a lot of work putting together your site so far. You still have alot to do. In addition to the comments already made...
1. Your Top Nav bar--I would choose a different button and not blue vodas. Also, on both your nav bars, you should include alt text. In other others, when you put your mouse over say news and features, what shows on your mouse cursor is " http://www.wirralgrammarboys.com/news_and_features.html. If you click on properties on your nav bar in your web builder and put an alternate text in, say something like "Check out Our News and Features", that will look much better than what you see now.
2. Your Business and Enterprise page loaded very slowly for me. Could be all the bobbing going on or the pictures, etc. I would recommend using pixser if you haven't already found that for all your photos. A great tool that Vodahost offers.
3. If you are going to use a lot of clip art, I would choose them wisely and make sure they are of high quality resolution.
4. As Bill says, check and double check spelling and grammer. Have a few other people at the school review it as well. Can never have to many eyes.
5. I think your maps are too big and overpowering. May want to reduce their size a bit.
6. Most of your pages are not titled. You do that by going into page properties and typing in a title.
7. Before you spend a lot of time updating your website with everyones suggestions, I would highly recommend searching the forum for threads on all the suggestions given here. I learned the hard way. I kept doing and redoing. Finally I stopped and did alot of research myself on how to property do titles in pages, what keywords to use in meta tags, etc. Mine is still a work in progress, but I too am getting there.

Good luck to you and let us know when your ready for us to view again!

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Morning!

Thanks for that, seems to be a common theme, if I have time I will look at altering the page properties today.

Have a good day!

Tony

Hi
Thanks for the advice, we have a new "Headteacher" who has implemented the title himself (all previous heads were indeed known as Headmasters!).....out with the old I suppose, will change the construction of shortcut though, thanks.

Tony

Thanks Dream Lady

As a novice any advice is good advice and I appreciate you taking the time to offer some constructive criticism. I totally agree that there is plenty of "tweaking" to be done and I will start to look at properties etc today (time permitting, this seems to have pushed aside my day job!!!) Having said this I am pleased that visitors to the site have been able to navigate and find the information they were looking for with relative ease which is the primary aim, secondary aim is to make the site look more prrfessional and user-friendly and this is where the support from yourself and other forum members comes in handy.....have a great day wherever you are.

Tony.