Your valued opinions/suggestions appreciated

[GrahamL]

We're at last within a few days of launching our new (and first) Actinic site.

www.venus365.com

So before we send out an awful lot of emails to our current customers (who've been using our current/old site), we'd really appreciate any opinions or suggestions from others on this forum.

We know some sections are a bit light on products (particularly the offers and beauty sections), but that will be corrected in the next few days.

We'd also be interested to know if anyone has experience in using 'Constant Contact' for their email marketing? Or knows of other good programs for sending about 5000 emails a month.

I'd also like to say a big thank you on here to Jo at Pinbrook.net. Jo and her colleagues have been brilliant in their help designing and now hosting the site, and I couldn't recommend them highly enough to anyone else who needs Actinic hosting or design. Thanks Jo.

And finally, if anyone wants to purchase products, we've added a coupon until the end of March which will give you 20% off anything in the store. Just use 'Actinic' at the checkout.

Thanks in advance.

Graham

[DaveT]

It's very nice. Very nice. I particularly like the way the search results are displayed in rows like that. The drop downmenu is classy and the design stylish.

Good job.

And yes Jo/Pinbrook is good.

edit: do you think it might be worthwhile compacting your html before you launch?

[giant_u]

for what's worth, I really like the look and layout - lots of eye catching elements, arranged in a nice griddy style. particularly like the section headers.

[Mistral]

Graham

Superb site - you (and Pinbrook) should be justifiably proud of it. Lots of great features - a credit to Actinic and what can be done and achieved.

I'm Jealous! ah well, back to thoughts of re-designing my own!

Best wishes for the future etc
Cheers
Patrick

[BPJSURF]

It’s a nice design. I like the general feel of the site all be it a little too busy. Seems to be getting rave reviews from everyone so I don’t want to be the pit in the cherry but….

I personally do not like the fly out menus but some people do. I think you need to invest some time in lowering the load times on your page. We have a very high speed line in our office and it took 30 seconds to load your pages. So I ran some tests and your page load times and page file sizes are off the chart. You’re hoping that folks will be very patient waiting for your pages to load (which is not likely going to happen). Here are some tools and results for you too use. I could be off because you’re in a test hosting environment or something? As well were in the US so that a long way for those bits to travel.

http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/page_size.cgi

1162235 bytes Images and html combined

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
Download Times*
Connection Rate Download Time
14.4K 238.49 seconds
28.8K 119.34 seconds
33.6K 102.32 seconds
56K 61.47 seconds
ISDN 128K 18.97 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 1.83 seconds

Overall nice job, the site code validates and it’s compatible with IE and Firefox browser. I did not try opera. I hope it serves you well.

Brian

[jont]

the site code validates

Hi Brian,

which validator did you pass it through?

[BPJSURF]

There are loads of html validators out there.
Here is a cool one that you can get a quick picture of your sites compatibilty with browsers as well as other html testing
:
http://www.netmechanic.com/cobrands/zd_dev/

I always like to test the site code by user testing in the actual browser. We test IE netscape and firefox as well as opera.

brian

[webyourbusiness]

but it fails this one MISERABLY...

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...us365.co.uk%2F

[BPJSURF]

I like to fill all the empty alt tags with misspelled keywords. for example if your keyword is ecommerce you can add an empty alt tag "e-commerce" or "ecommerce software". I would be careful not to fill up those alt tags with spammed keywords but fill the empty ones with keywords conservatively. It will help with your validation and it will also help with the seo.

Gregs is absolutly correct the web site is not 4.01 transitional validated. It works in the browsers without errors but you will be penialized in the page weighting of your site with the search engines unless you fix the errors. Most of the errors are very very minor.

Brian

[cdicken]

Hi there

I have taken the liberty of moving this to the 'Any Other Business' forum (with a redirect in the v7 Support topic) in order to try and keep the v7 topic just for Actinic support issues. Hope that's OK.