OFS — Sun, 27 Jul 2003 17:07:44 +0000

Also try webmonkey for some html tips and get a free gif animator if you want to create animated gifs. Mindworks has a free one that's great. (Some animated gifs are nice.) It's all the other ones that are annoying.

The Webmistress — Wed, 23 Jul 2003 16:56:01 +0000

As another learning exercise why not go through the website critique section of these forums and have a look at some of the others sites and see what people said about them. It's a great way for getting ideas and also to understand what people (well us lot any way) like & dislike.

Thank you

MajorTommy — Wed, 23 Jul 2003 15:54:58 +0000

Webmistress,

May the brightest star shine for you and grant you every wish that you deserve. I cannot thank you enough for your help.

I will keep at it and am open to all the ideas in the world. Will begin by following yours tomorrow and getting rid of the banners and re-designing the index page.

Thank you once again.

Tommy

The Webmistress — Wed, 23 Jul 2003 15:11:06 +0000

Welcome to TWF,

First of all let me say that it isn't necessarily a bad thing that you can't create an animated gif - they are very annoying on the net!!

First thing I would say is that the first page looks nice but get rid of the advert banners - your idea of getting yourself noticed is a good reason to have a website but I'm sure you aren't going to make money from those banners so ditch them now.

Second thing about the first page is that as one big image it isn't the best way of doing things - there is no text on the page and therefore nothing for the search engines to crawl, plus one big image isn't the best for people with slower connections.

It is a nice design for a splash page though - although I think it is best to have the index page as the first main page of your site. Splash pages IMO are a waste of time and make things more difficult for the search engines.

For the rest of the site you really need to bring in the colours and feel from the first page, again get rid of the banners and have a consistant layout/design & navigation system.

I think the thing to do is have a look around the net, find sites that you like the look of and view the source code to get an idea of how they have been put together. The decide what you want the entire site layout/design to be and do it in your graphics program, then you need to slice up the main graphics & place it into your html editor to build up the pages.

Another tip is to give the pages relevant names, eg. lyrics.html rather than h96.htm

We all had to start somewhere and I think that looking at the first page you have some graphics talent, so you need to just expand on that and come up with a design for the site.

Good luck and remember we are always here to help