first website, need help..

godjwood

New Member
Thanks guys!

I really appreciate the help.

I have trouble finding time to work on it between work but i will keep you guys posted!

any recommendations for form submissions?

should i find a PHP script online to use?
 

jnjc

New Member
You could look at something like this for you contact us form:

http://www.freecontactus.com/

I have never used and I don't know a lot about it but I have heard of others who have....

I think there are a couple of others offering the service for free, somebody else on the forum may be able to give you more info.

HTH,
JC
 

godjwood

New Member
hey guys,

did alot of work on the site. www.twobrospainting.com

everything seems to pretty much be going fine, except, it seems when i view the page on IE6 the right column appears below everything else. why is this?

does it look ok on your screen?

also, its weird, it seems that when i view it also on IE6 I somehow see an older version of the site, without recent changes.

why is this?
 

jnjc

New Member
The site is really coming on...

A couple of points:

1) You should probably add a "Home" Link to you left menu (I eventually found a way to get back to the home page by clicking the logo but it should be easier)

2) On the about us page the images are not aligned correctly with the text. try experimenting with using the 'align="left" ' (or right) on the img tag. You will probably need to move the text and image into one DIV to make this work

3) As for the IE6 issues it looks to be caused by the left menu bar being too wide, I haven't really looked any further than that. To be honest with you I wouldn't stress too much about IE6. IE8 is due for release pretty soon and as far as I'm concerned (and I hope the idea catches on), I'm only going to support one major release down on IE. Get the site how you want it in IE7 and FF and if you have the time/energy then worry about IE6

4) If you are seeing the old version of the site on IE6 it's probably because of your cache, try refreshing the page and if that doesn't work select "Tools" from the top menu, go to internet options and "delete files". This will clear you cache and you should be OK.

HTH,
JC
 

godjwood

New Member
The site is really coming on...

A couple of points:

1) You should probably add a "Home" Link to you left menu (I eventually found a way to get back to the home page by clicking the logo but it should be easier)

2) On the about us page the images are not aligned correctly with the text. try experimenting with using the 'align="left" ' (or right) on the img tag. You will probably need to move the text and image into one DIV to make this work

3) As for the IE6 issues it looks to be caused by the left menu bar being too wide, I haven't really looked any further than that. To be honest with you I wouldn't stress too much about IE6. IE8 is due for release pretty soon and as far as I'm concerned (and I hope the idea catches on), I'm only going to support one major release down on IE. Get the site how you want it in IE7 and FF and if you have the time/energy then worry about IE6

4) If you are seeing the old version of the site on IE6 it's probably because of your cache, try refreshing the page and if that doesn't work select "Tools" from the top menu, go to internet options and "delete files". This will clear you cache and you should be OK.

HTH,
JC


Cool. thanks for taking a look.

regarding (2), i realized this was an issue. I had used float:left, and this seemed to work at first but later on for some reason unknown to me the text started going under the images i didnt get a chance to look into it further (by the way, these are not the images im going to use they are just holding the spot!).

but for some reason again unknown to me, on IE6 the text seems to form around the images as intended. but i will try what you suggested.

Regarding (4) i have already tried this, and i tried it again right now, and its still doing it. so i have no idea.

but I will keep you posted as I finish up the site.

I really appreciate all the help you guys have given me!

I think next time i might try those yahoo templates, which from what i gathered were coded to adapt to different browsers?
 

godjwood

New Member
site finished

Hey-

so the site is pretty much finished now..

i searched in google and it appears very low on the search results and only the home page is indexed.

I put a robot meta tag into the html as i read online.

my friend recommended socialmarker.com, so i am in the process of using that. is this a good idea?

i read online that it is good to have text based links for the search engines and since right now mine are image based do you think it would be a good idea to also put some text based navigation links in the footer?

i have tried to put my keywords in the description several times as i have also read online.

any other suggestions?
 

jnjc

New Member
Getting Google to rank your page is a complex issue. There are lots of factors google will use.

If google finds a link to your page somewhere else it considers this a sort of "thumbs Up" for your page and that will increase your page rank, this is why your friend recommended using a social bookmarks site (I find I get best results from Digg).

As far as text links are concerned, you just need to add some text to your existing links, on the <a> tags on you side menu add titles:

Code:
<a [B]title="About Us"[/B] onmouseover="MM_swapImage('aboutus','','Images/link_images/aboutus1.gif',1)" onmouseout="MM_swapImgRestore()" href="aboutus.html">

Another thing to look at is create a sitemap and submit it to google. I use www.xml-sitemaps.com to create the map, then save the files it generates to the same location as your html. Once you have done this set up a google webmaster account and submit your site map, this MAY get google to index the other pages (it may just happen over time).

Another thing worth looking into is google analytics, again it's a free service from google that lets you track visitors to your site. Basically you paste a piece of code (supplied by google wen you setup your site) onto the end of each page and after a couple of days you will get statistics on the who, what, when and where of your site.

HTH,
JC
 
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