Hello! Thank you!

I'm just getting started in web design. I've been at it for a little over two months now.

I founded a small landscaping company, (based in Calgary Alberta Canada), and decided it would be a very cool learning experience to create my own website. Here she is, for better or for worse.
http://bluemoonlandscapes.ca

I basically started with a template and slowly cannibalized and tinkered until it became what it is now.

Looking forward to lots of friendly advice!

A few comments:

Spelling error:
Regular maintenance keeps your yard looking it's best. -> "its"

It's a fixed width design, which is inferior in my opinion -- either there is blank border, or one has to scroll sideways, which is undesirable for text.

Generally it looks OK. But what are the Google ads for -- they are essentially junk, and easy to click on by accident (I found). If the site has a proper purpose (other than raising microscopic amounts of money), then such ads are better removed.

It seems very odd to me to ask people to phone up before they fax. I would prefer requiring them to email asking for an appointment to phone. Phone is intrusive, fax is not.

Here's a suggestion: you need lots of text, because (a) text is content, which is what I want to read, and (b) text brings search results. But graphics always have more impact, so relevant graphics are a good thing. Add a map showing the area you serve -- make sure you include _text_ with the names of all towns. Then when someone in that town googles for "lawn problems mytown" they will find you. I recommend using google (and perhaps other) paid ads for any specific searches that would be your prospective customers (but in practice you might get 1000s of people all over and outside Canada looking for lawnmowers, or 3 hits a year on an ad for some town + lawn. Well, "Calgary+..." might be just right.

Do you have some server stuff to block "hotlinking" to your logo? I tried to look at the image http://bluemoonlandscapes.ca/images/bg_header.jpg (it seems), but got "File not found". If you are checking the refer(*)er header, this will spoil the effect if anyone has refer(*)ers turned off, and seems really pointless, since your image is advertising.

(*) means an r inside (), but this execrable forum software can't cope with it. "Referrer" is misspelled in the HTML spec.


HTH

Brian:
Thanks for the quick reply.

That url for bg_header isn't in use, the url for the header is just http://bluemoonlandscapes.ca/images/header.jpg. I think that's a relic from the template I chopped up. There was some funky muti-graphic header going on.

I do a lot of running around. During the spring when all the aerating and power raking is going on, I try to answer every call because it's quite often that I'll be in the same neighborhood as the caller. That way I can drop by and give a quote in person and often get the job done right there. Now I don't know why I'm mentioning that because now that I think about it I only get faxes for landscape design/construction, not maintenance. Anywhoo, thanks for picking things apart for me.

I'll definitely look into using a non fixed width design some time soon. Right now I think I need to get a little more reading under my belt before I dive into that. I'm still working on understanding the different ways of laying a site out.

Thanks for catching that spelling mistake, I'll get right on it.

I have a question. How do you deal with maintaining the site? Right now what I do is use the built in solution that my web-host has. Which basically means that I'm tinkering with the files in a browser window, hitting save. And observing the effect on my website "live". So anyone's who's browsing my site gets to enjoy all the little things I break when I'm trying to fix things. All my links are absolute (or, they should be, I did a rough once-over). How do you deal with this?

I understand that ads are generally unwanted, but I want to experiment with them a little bit just to get a feel for how they work. I know a company website is probably not the best place, but that's alright, I'll sacrifice a customer here and there for some learning.
EDIT: I've tried to keep the ads as unobtrusive in appearance as possible. I did, however, intentionally put the ad right below the navigation links.

Thanks again for the quick and direct reply!
Looking forward to further thoughts if anyone's got some.

I wouldn't worry about it. Keep it simple. But not being fixed width actually means doing less not more -- the obvious problem is the header graphic, which can't be stretched to an arbitrary window width. But one solution is to left align the image and make it fade to a background green at the right, and perhaps make it a lot wider (like 1500 pixels, but I think you could compress it more without losing too much quality). Then if the window is wider than the graphic it doesn't look odd.



Um. Gulp. Actually I do quite lot of edits live, so very occasionally I screw up, and the shop goes missing for up to, um, two minutes? But:

(a) You must keep a backup copy of the whole website totally removed from whoever your provider is. Of course they are not likely to lose it, but just suppose they did, you can be quite sure the conditions you agreed to say that you get no compensation for the loss.

(b) Ideally you keep a working copy on your local computer. (Are you using server side scripting? If so this means installing a web server etc at home.)

© The QD method I use is to save a test version as webpagex.htm (inserting an x), check it works, then copy to webpage.htm.

[Edit: Huh, more lunacy from Abysmal Software. Of course I mean (*c*) ...]

No reason to use absolute link addresses (you mean they quote 'http://...'?)




If you have a noncommercial site - say a chess club - ads make sense, because your members will be happy to use your clicks to buy relevant stuff. But for a commercial site, either the links are just advertising the competition, or they are irrelevant, and thus junk. So I don't understand your argument here -- whatever you need to learn about using ads, surely you've now learnt it, and can get rid of them...?

Well I've made a decent amount of Cash from the small ad, and my traffic is basically nil About 300 impressions, 5 clicks, and $5. With the ads you can set it up so competitor's ads are filtered out, so in my case there won't be any landscaping companies that show up. But similar sites will. That is, once I get around to filtering out the competitor's sites. So things like fertilizer companies, maybe plant nurseries, I don't know, or something similar, will show up.

A mid-term goal I have for my site is to become a quasi-authority as far as landscaping advice and articles goes, for my area. So have as much area specific advice as possible to generate traffic. I have a decent amount of content that I need to edit and html-ize.

Here's another question. How do you tell an html file to link to a file that's in super-directory?
So say you have home/folder/html.html, how do I link it to home/style.css?

Edit: Oh yeah, Thanks again for advice
Liking this forum. Been lurking some of the other html forums but I'm liking this one thus far.

See here http://htmlhelp.com/faq/html/basics.html#relative-url .



But it's often smarter to use a root relative URL. Then the same URL can be used no matter where the HTML page is. If the full URL is http://example.com/home/style.css , the root relative URL would be like this:


It's all explained in the FAQ entry I linked to.

Thanks a million pandy, I've been looking for just that.

I'm having another issue!
For some reason the last paragraph on this page won't display properly. I know I've had this problem before, so it could be an issue with how I have my css set up, or how my document is lain out with my divs. Have a look and let me know if you can spot what's wrong?

Quick summary of the problem is that the last paragraph is displaying the <p> and <b> tags.

Problem Page Click Here

Worse than that.
Click to view attachment

The characters in that paragraph are from another charset than the rest. If I change the encoding in my browser to UTF-16 that paragraph becomes legible and the rest of the page turns to question marks.

Paste that bit in again and not from a document that uses UTF-16 or higher. Save it as ASCII ir UTF-8 first.

Alright I did some copy pasta, does it look alright now, (other than the html tags being visible)?

Good to know about the text encoding, never ran into anything like this before.

Nope. Looks the same.



Is that good? Aren't you going to offer me some?

Hm. I'm doing all my web-design on a mac. I've been using a program called text-edit to do all the html. I'm having trouble figuring out what I did wrong. When I save the document it appears to all be in the same encoding. I'm going to try copy pasting the html to an e-mail, e-mailing it to myself, then copy pasting back into TextEdit to see if that locks it all into one encoding. Gulp, here goes.

EDIT: what browser/version is that? I'm going to try to download as many as I can. I have a PC but it's in a different city until I pick it up in a couple days. Back home for the summer but my stuff isn't!

And you can have as much copy pasta as you want.

You poor thing!



Frederiek and Darin are the mac guys around here. I think Frederiek has said that TextWrangler (free) is better to work with.
http://www.barebones.com/products/TextWrangler/




Great! Hope the sauce is yummy. I know nothing about Mac so I'll just lay back and enjoy my free dinner then.

I'm actually really pleased with mac for web design/productivity stuff! I have my PC over-clocked to the teeth so it crashes here and there occasionally!

Back to the problem:
I tried copy pasting the html out of the text file into an e-mail addressed to myself, then copy pasting out of the received e-mail back into TextEdit and it solved the encoding issue as far as I can tell. It looks good in Safari!

Also! Got a couple pictures up. Some aerator tines on the article page for "aeration 101", and a map of service areas for weekly lawn maintenance.

Friends have suggested adding an "about us" page that gives a bit of information on the company, and maybe a short bio about myself. What do you think?

Things still left to tackle:
-Non-fixed width design.
-Re-do color scheme to have more white.
-Use percentages for text instead of font sizes
-make all links relative so I can have an offline version that doesn't link to online stuff
-write more articles and rework the ones I have.
-add lots of cool pictures

Confirmed! Text is readable now.

Hey, I joked you about Mac. I'd have a MacBook Air like yesterday, could I only afford it.

I use a 3 or 4 year old white bottom of the line macbook, and it's still great for photoshop and oldschool videogames. My mom just bought a shiny new aluminum macbook, so jealous!

Why do parents get all the cool toys?
Edit: good news! glad it's workin.