[Lindy]

Hi everyone,

I've finally started my own website. Still lots of work to do, but I would really like your input if you don't mind. Its at http://www.dragonfly-pyroart.com.

Thanks!
Lindy

[Eddy Smiles]

Lindy...

Looks good. But from my perspective, only having dial-up, I'd prefer to see thumbnails and then if there was something that I wanted to see it would be nice to be able to open them up in the larger version. It takes a lot of time for my browser to open an entire page. But I alos realize that this is not an issue for anyone with DSL or Broadband.

[Joy]

Looks like a good start on your web site. One question: If it is dragonfly productions.....why do you have a gecko and not a dragonfly on the headline?

[Lynn O. Doughty]

Lindy.....Joy beat me to it. Why the gecko and not a dragon fly? 99 percent of people looking at your home page will be wondering the same thing. Other than that it looks great!

[Lindy]

Great comments - thanks!

I wasn't able to make the changes on that lay-out (they're pre-designed) so I chose another one and now it has my dragonfly on it.

Eddy - Wonderful suggestion! I'm going to look into how I can change that so I can have thumbnails that will lead to the actual full picture.

Your comments everyone are invaluable to helping me get this site fine-tuned.

Regards,

Linda

[Treever]

Looks like a good start. Keep it simple and clean. Think of it as advertising, where you have just seconds to capture your audience and keep them focused. And-in my opinion-no music! Music on web sites drives me bonkers.

[maddar]

Well done! I enjoyed looking around it very much and will watch for any changes or addings.

[Pyrographer]

Looking pretty good but I do have some recommendations.

Having been down this road myself. It took me months to get my site up and back then it was only a few pages. Thank god I had someone help me who gave me some good advise on the best way to get the site up and make it one that people enjoy visiting.

As already stated, thumbnails are best. Just keep in mind while designing the site that you want to catch and keep the people and in order to do that you must opt for speed of loading, making the site easy to navigate around, easy on the eyes, etc.

Be sure when doing each page you carefully edit and edit again......you should go through each page to read and re-read to ensure that the grammar, punctuation, etc are correct.

The key is: People don't stick around on sites when the the pages, links and photos take too long to open or if it's not easy to navigate around the site. And unfortunately there are still many people on dial up so you have to keep that in mind with everything you do on a website.

Nedra

[Woodartist]

You will certainly learn a lot designing your own site and it is fun

Two thoughts on image size. If you use thumbnails ( excellent free thumbnail creator: http://www.fookes.com/ezthumbs/), you will probably use Java Script to create the larger images. Some people have it turned off for security reasons. If you use larger images and a larger download, then you are targeting those who have a higher speed internet connection than dial up. That translates into a more upscale customer base (in general). A compromise is to have 2 versions of your website, where on the home page the visitor can select dialup or high speed. Web page loading times are an older concern, as the speed of internet access increases rapidly. Very few of my customers come from dial ups, although there are a few...FYI

Generally, stay away from frames, flash, sounds, and animation. Also a counter shows you are a newbie, and not an established site...in general. If for some reason you really need a counter, change the color to the same color as the page. That way it will not be visible to the visitor. Your site statistics from your server should give you more information than you care to know Page views, page hits, visitor browsers, entry pages, exit pages, visitor location, etc., etc. , etc.

I looked at your source code and see you haven't included the meta tag info yet. Don't forget those ( title, description, keywords, etc.), as they are very important.

Be aware of people who promise search engine promotions....it is basically a fraud. Also don't forget to submit to directories.

You have a lot of work to do creating the website. When it is created then you have to address the ranking of your site through website promotion, which is another art. Your site will be found by the larger robots (automatically), but you have to work the ranking aspect. When you get to that point, PM me and I can give you some information about how to do that, as well as free software that can be used and some excellent site resources.

There are a lot of free WYSIWYG editors out there that can be used without knowing HTML. No need to buy any web development software. Don't use Microsoft Word and other types of programs because they generate bloated code. I have a list of them if needed.

Following are a few links that might be helpful. If you would like more I have a lot more

http://www.submitawebsite.com/knowledge_base.html

http://www.urltrends.com/

http://www.123promotion.co.uk/promot...ion-tools.html

Good luck !!!!!!!!

[Lindy]

Woodartist,

Thank you for all of that information. I've made some overhaul on the site using a few of your suggestions. I will continue to work on it, but hopefully it doesn't look quite so much like a "newbie's" site. I haven't had the opportunity of playing with the Thumbnail stuff yet so it's still going to be a slow load in the Galleries for dial-up. By the way, I love those talking sticks, in fact I was so inspired by them, that I started one this weekend. I've made carved walking sticks in the past but I really liked the idea of using pyrography and creating this stick using it. Up here we use Willow and Diamond Willow so I'm doing the piece in the Willow.

Thanks again everyone, I'll continue to work on the suggestions you're giving me.

Lindy