www.jxwd.co.uk please review

[hagen]

Hi there!

please give comments on my site: www.jxwd.co.uk

I am self taught and havent had any real mentoring, so am particularly interested in the quality of the code...

Cheers -Hagen

[seanmiller]

Looks pretty good.

One question - on your "Services" page you have an image down the left of the page. It isn't on any of the others, yet there is a gap where it should be which looks rather odd. Is it meant to be like that?

Design wise the page has lots of header but too little footer for my liking. I like the way the services page frames itself with the aforementioned image down the left and the variety of shapes and colours in the header. However, when I scroll down the page just ends rather than being brought to a close. Have you considered a footer?

That "services" page is by far the best page of the whole site. It has more impact than any of the others that seem to be rather lacking in content. Personally I would be inclined to have that as the homepage and turn your current homepage into an "about us" or similar.

You asked about the code... right...
a. You appear to be using inline frames as a method of avoiding duplicate code (ie. the navbar). Whilst this works it is not the way that most people would do it. SSI (Server-side includes) would be "normal".
b. There are some strange things going on in your table. First two rows are fine... both have effectively six columns (ie. bearing in mind the colspans etc.)... next row has one column, then six again then three rows of five columns. Is this what you meant to do or an accident? Either way all your rows should contain the same number of columns otherwise you're going to get mighty confused further down the line.

Sean

[hagen]

Hi Sean thanks!!

Adding a footer and swapping services and homepage and services sounds like a great idea I will do that....

Yes its supposed to be like that... The odd gap which I agree looks odd... I am hoping odd is good... Now that you have got me thinking I may add stuff that looks like notes... IE kind of a doodley note pad...

Never herd of a server side include, but it sounds exactly like what I need. IE saves people having inline frame compatible browsers... So will implement that too...

About the rows and columns, I believe that they are inferred to the brwser anyway??... Open the design in dreamweaver... This is just a way of saving bandwidth.... I am just following advice that I have seen on other web pages... In retrospect do you think it is good advice?

Thank you again, that has been extremely helpful!!

-Hagen

[seanmiller]

I think that column advice is bad advice... the W3C guidelines for tables says (and I quote)...

"Otherwise, if the TABLE element contains no COLGROUP or COL elements, user agents should base the number of columns on what is required by the rows. The number of columns is equal to the number of columns required by the row with the most columns, including cells that span multiple columns. For any row that has fewer than this number of columns, the end of that row should be padded with empty cells." -- note the last sentence.

The link for the table notes at W3C is http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html40...es.html#h-11.1

In terms of includes there are various options available but it intends to some extent on your what your webhost provides. If, for example, you were intending to use php or ASP in the long run then you may find their include functions make more sense. However, one thing you might have seen around the web is pages with the extension .shtml rather than .html - they use a very simple form of include which just requires you to put a line something like...

<!--#include file="menubar.txt" -->

...into your code. You then put the common text into menubar.txt... the .shtml extension tells the server to parse for SSI and take the contents of whatever file is specified therein and put it in place of the directive before sending the contents to the browser.

Sean

ps. I can't seem to access your website at this moment in time... have you taken it offline?

[seanmiller]

Just realised what IE meant in your post, ie. "ie." !

Just to let you know on this board folks tend to use capitalised IE to mean Internet Explorer... confused me for a few moments, that did :-)

Sean

[seanmiller]

I notice that you're hosting on Telewest Broadband... that means either...

a) You're hosting it on your local machine using a static IP; or
b) You're using webspace that they've supplied.

If the former you'll have to ensure that your webserver is configured for SSI. Is it Apache or M$oft?

If the latter their free webspace doesn't offer SSI, php or anything else but their £4/month option does. If you were considering this option, though, you would be better advised to seek alternative hosting because £4/month is actually quite expensive in terms of hosting (£48/year - about $85/year for our US friends)... there are many UK hosts that would offer you SSI enabled space for around £15/year.

Sean

[hagen]

www.jxwd.co.uk review

Cheers Sean,

I respect W3 so will go along with thier advice... Thanks for pointing me that way...

The server that I am on is old and unreliable.... Sorry for the inconvenience I have just asked to be moved onto a new one, but it looks like I am gonna be down for the weekend now..... We have a public holiday on Monday so its gonna be a long one too! Is pretty frustrating.... I will name and shame if they dont fix this, its supposed to be 99% uptime... Looks pretty bad on a web designer's site I know....

Will watch for the IE and IE thing!!

If they dont offer SSI I can easily accomplish the same thing by using an indlude in php, so will be server side anyway.... I want to rewrite the site using php anyway, because it gives me greater control over other things...

I tried changing the index.htm to index.php and the Google rank went from 4 to 0.... But I guess I should just bite the bullet and get on with it, and Google will reckognise the new page and reallocate the rank in time...

Thanks again for your time and inputs...

Hagen

[seanmiller]

If they offer php they'll offer SSI - almost certainly. Are you saying it's not Telewest? gwhois is telling me it is... odd... maybe it's going through a proxy or something (?)

Anyway, If you want to keep your Google ranking for index.htm you could instruct the server to parse .htm for SSI. This will slightly hit performance but so would parsing for php so it's swings and roundabouts. You do this by putting a file in your main directory called .htaccess and in this file you put the line:

AddHandler server-parsed .htm

You may already have a file .htaccess, in which case just append this line to it.

Changing hosting providers is very easy, btw. Just a case of copying the site and modifying the NS entries on your domain. You may be paying too much... as you're a designer you may wish to host the sites you create and do an "inclusive" deal on new projects. There are some fantastic reseller deals out there at present.

Sean

[hagen]

www.jxwd.co.uk review

I believe I need a permanent redirect "301" to do this according to something I read on the Google site a few months back.... It seems that this is a server directive... Not something I can do in the code... So will start with your code in the mean time and investigate....

Reselling sounds great! From what you see on whois, I guess I have already been resold this hosting by the sounds of it.... I am using LCN they wouldnt offer me any kind of deal on reselling unless I did hundreds of accounts... Sounds like I need to move... Do you have a couple of people you would reccomend where I can sell just a few packages a year?

Thanks this is exactly the kind of information I need right now!!! Is really appreciated.

-Hagen

[seanmiller]

You can do allsorts with .htaccess - it overrides the server defaults. Have never done redirection from the server without php or similar so am not an expert so I'll do a bit more research (unless somebody else here is an expert, hint! hint! lol)

There are two types of reselling; either you resell and get a commission or you buy a load of webspace and are free to carve it up as you feel fit. In other words you buy (say) 3GB of space and unlimited domains for £x and then you can sell it to your customers as 100MB for Fred, 500MB for George and 50MB for Maureen. Works very well if you're providing websites with hosting... I think the sort of reseller a/c that you're referring to is commission-based... wouldn't recommend it. I think the other is easier to control, though you do (potentially) have an overhead in terms of support. But if you've designed the site that overhead is there anyway.

Happy to help in any way I can :-)

Sean

ps. please check your PMs. My detailed contact information there - feel free to IM me or whatever. Would be interesting to hear what you're currently paying and what you get for it and how you wish to go forward as I can point you at several folks in the UK each of whom will fulfil a specific need but I think that's better offlist... but instinctively I suspect you'll save a fortune with reseller hosting :-)