SITE REVIEW: www.FinePianoServices.com

Hello...
Being very new to all of this, I am trying my hardest to get it all together and pull off some sort of professional looking product. Never in a gazillion lifetimes would I have thought I would be tackling this sort of project... But... Here I am... struggling to learn something new, yet again...

http://WWW.FinePianoServices.com

Please, I look forward to a bit of constructive criticism regarding this site.... My first attempt at web building... I know that I have a few small problems with 5 links that need to be checked... But nothing major... with the linking, I hope.

The biggest problem is with my CGI (form submission on the Services Page link)... for whatever reason, suddenly the form information is not arriving in our box... I don't know what's up... Any help would be appreciated. Also... Comments on a few of the Restoration Galleries would be appreciated...

Thanks much,
I remain,
g

Hey,

If this is your first website I think you've done an excellent job As a personal preference I would get rid of the rollover photo's in your navigation menu, they detract from your domain.

Regarding your contact form - don't bother. At best they will be used to spam your inbox and at worst forms are the easiet way to hack a website if not properly created. People simply enter code into your form field and when they press submit it's executed Properly written forms need to check for such dirty tricks. Unless you honestly think you get alot of business through the form I suggets you leave a number and an email address only.

Best of luck.

Cheers, Prime ...

Prime...
Thank you...
Yes, it is my very first web-build.
Worked on it for 3-4 months, but finally it's there. Best yet it's up and running and seems to work...

The CGI-bin is working now.
Ugh... Who would I get to check the coding on my form, to make sure that it is more or less, secure? The form will really help him, if it works.

With regard to the rollovers... Believe it or not, that's one of the features that the piano clientele loves! I went both ways with it... But now that it's there, and viewers seem to like and the client is happy with it...

From this site, I have captured 2-3 jobs that I wasn't even looking to get! Now I have to work!

Thanks again for your input.
I remain,
g

I agree -- since this is your first site, you've done an excellent job...congrats!

Now, a few items for the review...

1. In your NavMenu, it would look better to reduce the text size and images.
2. Where you have "Your piano is an investment..." I would darken that text so that it's readable.
3. I wonder why you named your Services page as "services-.html" instead of the standard "services.html" without the hyphen?
4. Also, on both your main and Services pages, why do you have your CSS code mixed in with your HTML, instead of in a separate CSS file, uploaded on your server? I would advise against using both CSS and Tables -- tables are for Tabular Data; suggest you look into doing that page in a table-less CSS format.
5. Lastly; your coding validates 100% on the main page -- but on the Services page, there are only 3 code errors:


Beyond that ... outstanding job!

TA...
Thanks again for the comments... I really do appreciate them...
Ok, now here goes.
The Navigation Menu was set to a size that was easily readable by the client. There are visual issues in the family, and so...

services-.html Ugh... well initially I had services.html, then I had some issues with the page and wanted to try another services page and named it services-1.html... Somewhere along the line, I decided to toss out the original services.html page and saved the service-1.html as services.html, but somehow didn't drop the -... so after getting so far into it, I became a bit nervous about changing it on all the pages, and not missing any of the necessary changes for links... so... There you have it. It was a blooper. Now should I go back and try and capture all of those - and eliminate them or is it safe enough to just let them be?

Lastly...
I am clueless with regard to CSS. I am lucky to have slipped in the little bit that I did... Honestly what I need is a class in CSS, only out here in our area, I've not found one available. I have a couple of books on CSS, but I am lost when I open them, they all seem to assume that you have a fairly solid knowledge of html and web IT, and honestly there are days that I am still rather overwhelmed... But I do keep mucking along.

With regard to the errors you found, I will try to go in and fix them... Always a "FUN" experience...

Thank you so much for all of your input. Help, is always genuinely appreciated... Perhaps more than most would realize.

I remain,
g

Also...
An issue I just became aware of:
When dealing with the lates Internet Explorer...

At the bottom of of the menu bar is a link to the Piano Technicians Guild.
The link button is a PNG file that on all other browsers that I've seen is as it was designed to be, Red on a transparent background, but on IE the background becomes white? Any ideas?

I am cross platform but primarily work on a mac... Now with Vista, I am more locked into mac than ever before...

Has anyone else come up with this kind of issue? Any work arounds or solution ideas?
http://www.FinePianoServices.com
Thanks again.
g

What version of IE are you using that makes the backgropund turn white? I have IE7 here, and it looks OK - red text on the black background.

Chris

I agree that you may want to rather remove those images on the index on the left hand side ... If you want to keep them you can look for higher resolution images at ... http://www.sxc.hu ,because those that you have are very pixelised ... TA already talked about the validation errors, there is just one image on the index page without an alt tag on line 315 in your coding ...

I would also suggest disabling the link for the page that the user is on at the bottom menu, meaning that if I am on the "restorations" page, the "restorations" link can be disabled and maybe in another colour ...

On the "restoration gallery" page the black and white images that turn colour on rollover are really cool, I would just suggest preloading those rollover images so that people with slower browsers can see them quicker ...

For that left hand menu you could actually keep all the buttons there, because it's quite confusing when a button just disappears, but that's not the end of the world though ...

On some of the pages the menu at the bottom consists of images and on some it uses text, I would suggest sticking to text for SEO ...

I think it would also be great to have a heading on each page to tell a user on which page he/she is ... This is especially good for people with short term memory loss who forgets on which button they clicked (like me)