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**jont** · 15-Sep-2005, 12:51 PM

Hi Pat,

welcome to the site. You may best posting your thread under the ecommerce or other section to get more reviews rather than the technical thread.

Nice looking site but you may want to look at the size of the fixed width - attached is a screen grab at 800 x 600 desktop which shows a lot of horizontal scrolling

**Pat Mac** · 15-Sep-2005, 01:05 PM

Thanks for taking a look Jonty John,

I have to agree it doesnt look the best at 800x600 Res, but after some agonising I decided to build it at the next Res size up as after researching - it seemed 800x600 was being used less, year on year (if the figures are to be believed that is)

What forced my hand was really that our trade is heavily image based - people can't visualise gardens from a garden design plan alone!

So thought this Res offered more room for bigger pictures. this also pushed me to get into flash (in a very basic way) and use a slide show format to try and keep the page lengths short - avoiding seperate images everywhere.

Thanks for the feedback,

Pat Mac.

**jont** · 15-Sep-2005, 01:16 PM

Legacy issues are always a nightmare - best to keep an eye on your visitors browser stats to see what they are doing.

Nice looking site though with some excellent pictures that load very quickly on a shared 512 connection. I was concerned about the planting design download and wondered what it contained - was about to say here that it may be worth showing an example and then realised there was a link beneath to an example - may be worth improving the contrast between the link and the background - similarly when I click through and it asks about soil types - quite hard to discern the green on green.

Good luck with the site - you have obvisouly put a lot of effort into it

**Pat Mac** · 15-Sep-2005, 01:30 PM

I was a bit concerned about page load time with the flash movies and quite large images - glad to hear you think they are ok.

I will look at the link text colour issue - it's a bit of a downfall of creating colour coded areas of the website is that I can only seem to select one set of link/hover/active etc colours globally for the whole site in the Design/Colour palette.

A case of trying to find a happy medium that is effective on all 5 different page body background colours I guess?

I appreciate you taking the time to look Jonty,

Pat Mac.

**RuralWeb** · 15-Sep-2005, 08:41 PM

Very impressive site - well done. You comments about screen res are correct as far as my logs are concerned the split appears to be 60:40 and growing as you say.

I know that people viewing on a low res quickly leave a site that requires scrolling - its a common problem that I think will be solved as people upgrade PCs as most now are set at high res as default.

**retekdirect** · 16-Sep-2005, 08:14 AM

I have a horizontal scroll bar - resolution is 1280, Firefox in window. I never use my browser maximised (as i'm usually doing 8 things at once). I'm sure a few other people do too. 1003 pixels wide is gonna be too wide for some, even at 1024 non-maximised...

Risky strategy in my opinion

**Pat Mac** · 16-Sep-2005, 08:33 AM

Thanks for the comments guys.

You may be right about the Res being a risky decision, but the way I looked at it was...I have to run the business along with the website, so really wanted to build a site which would be good for a reasonable period of time - won't have the hours to rebuild it regulary as the trends in screen Res change.

If I had to put my head on the line, I would also guess that our visitors who actually buy, are only concentrating on our website - and not doing 7 other things at the same time! So I hope they would view it in a maximised screen.

But I am very new to all this website online selling lark - so like you, I will reserve judgement until after spring 2006 and our peak season...

Till then I have 5 months to try and conquer that little old 'SEO' chestnut...and I thought building the site was the hard bit !

Pat Mac.

**retekdirect** · 16-Sep-2005, 08:55 AM

Well, you've done yourself proud on the website side of things

SEO-wise, have a seach through these forums; there's plenty of posts knocking about that should set you on your way or at least point you in the right direction. Everyone has an opinion on what works and what doesn't. All you can do is read as much as you can and make your own decisions.

Should be plenty of links for bedtime reading in there too.

**pinbrook** · 16-Sep-2005, 09:38 AM

I will look at the link text colour issue - it's a bit of a downfall of creating colour coded areas of the website is that I can only seem to select one set of link/hover/active etc colours globally for the whole site in the Design/Colour palette.

you can create different classes in the css file to get have more than one set of link colours.

I often have 2 sets one for a light background and one for a dark. Here is my 2nd set of css definitions.

A.darkbg:link, A.darkbg:visited {
text-decoration: none;
font-family: Verdana, Arial, "MS Sans Serif";
color: White;
font-size: xx-small;
}

A.darkbg:active, A.darkbg:hover {
text-decoration: none;
font-family: Verdana, Arial, "MS Sans Serif";
color: Yellow;
font-size: xx-small;
}

code will look like this

<a href="page.html" class="darkbg">link</a>

**Pat Mac** · 16-Sep-2005, 10:35 AM

Fantastic Jo !

This answers my question perfectly. I will look at adding a suitable set of link colours for each of my templates page body colours - which should make my links much more noticable. I'm sure actinic is capable of a lot more than I have done with it.

With trying to get into the basics of Actinic, Flash, Photoshop and Dreamweaver in the last 3 months - I have probably not learnt the the 'day one' stuff with HTML or CSS syle sheets !

Thanks for the tip,

Pat Mac.

**jont** · 16-Sep-2005, 10:44 AM

Originally posted by pinbrook

font-family: Verdana, Arial, "MS Sans Serif";

To be pedantic you should also include "sans-serif" to the end just in case non of the first 3 above are installed:

font-family: Verdana, Arial, "MS Sans Serif", sans-serif;

**Pat Mac** · 16-Sep-2005, 02:03 PM

Thanks for that Jonty,

I will go through my font family and check that too, as I add some new link classes to my CSS style sheet.

Pat Mac.

**Pat Mac** · 17-Sep-2005, 03:15 PM

What do developers on this forum think about using flash?

I have noticed a lot of actinic websites dont seem to be using it. I have used it in a very limited form as a slideshow, but is it working?

Are the slideshows too slow or subtle - do people notice they are actually films playing, or do they just think they are static images?

Is anyone having any page load problems with the Flash elements? or any Flash version incompatibility problems?

Thanks,

Pat Mac.
www.applegategardens.co.uk

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