greghaynes Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 Helped out a general contractor with his website. He wanted a site that he could display his previous projects and somewhere he could upload testimonials from customers. I built in a log-in section for him to sign in and upload new photos and add new testimonials. Let me know if you have suggestions on changes as the site is not fully done. http://www.delawarevalleybuilders.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jackpf Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 Not a bad design. "Simple but effective" I guess. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nrg_alpha Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 I like it. Looks professional IMO. The only things I can crit on is the lack of both markup and css validation, and the location of the log in looks strange at the bottom in the footer. You have plenty of space beside the top menu... Perhaps making the log in more noticeable by placing it there (flush right hand side)? Overall, I like it. Nicely done. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maq Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 I agree with nrg_alpha, I think it looks nice and professional. The only other thing I would change is the color scheme. It goes from white, to dark blue or dark gray. Just seems like it doesn't look right. I'm not the color schema expert but maybe a shade background for the top banner? Anyway, nice job Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Axeia Posted April 18, 2009 Share Posted April 18, 2009 Do like the design, but the used font sizes seem off.. menu is really small while the content is quite big. Since there's lots of room and no "chunks of text" I think a fatter font would look better for the contents. The "30 years of experience" link styled to look like an image is missing alternative text. Just a normal link with the image in it and the alt text as the same information would work better. Context wise I think http://www.delawarevalleybuilders.com/services.php could do with some more information. Like a short bit of information of what "roofing" is (use a dl/dd/dt list for that instead of ul/li). I'd also replace the "<div class="contentpaneopen">318 Great Oak Drive<br>Middletown, DE 19709 (302) 378-9823</div>" at the topright with an <address> tag, no need to use a div if there already is a tag for it. http://www.delawarevalleybuilders.com/gallery.php?page=2 no alt text, and also you didn't set the height/width of the images so on a slow connection they load in a bit funky. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
greghaynes Posted April 19, 2009 Author Share Posted April 19, 2009 Thanks for the great feedback. I'm already working on fixing up my html markup and css so it validates properly. As well as some of the other suggestions that others offered. I do have a question though if none of my pages have a .html extension and they are all .php will that cause google and others to have an issue when indexing. I'm not sure if my homepage needs to be an html file or can it remain as index.php? I'm asking this since I've submitted my url a couple of days ago to google and it still is not showing up when i search on "site:delawarevalleybuilders.com". Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jackpf Posted April 19, 2009 Share Posted April 19, 2009 I honestly doubt it makes any difference. Millions of sites use php, yahoo for example. They've got a pretty good page rank Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ankur0101 Posted April 19, 2009 Share Posted April 19, 2009 There is only flash without any link, just a slide show of houses ... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nrg_alpha Posted April 19, 2009 Share Posted April 19, 2009 Like jack said, it won't make a difference. When you say you submitted your site to Google, I am assuming you mean you: - created an account with Google, logged into their webmaster tools, got and inserted that line of code into your page that proves you are the owner of the URL in question - also created a sitemap.xml file (from say xml-sitemaps for example, put that in the root of your site), and submitted that through your webmaster account (the instructions are all there on the Google webmaster site). If so, it may take a bit to get things rolling.. Google is not instantaneous... stuff like this and page ranking and what not needs a little bit of time. On the note of indexing / page rankings, your site should have SEO (search engine optimization) integration if you want to improve your listings within Google. I looked through your code (of the home page) and did a quick check for <h1>, <h2>, <h3> tags as an example and found none. Good content using important high-ranking and relevent key words is important in the text of your pages, as well as including heading tags. Also giving specific key key words that you want to stand out using <strong> and <em> help. Also Note that the meta tag "keywords" is rendered pretty much null and void these days. While there are plenty of SEO tutorials online, I ended up picking up this book, which helped me understand SEO a lot more. In any case, I would suggest implementing some SEO into your pages if the goal is to stand out and increase the odds of getting noticed more. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
greghaynes Posted April 19, 2009 Author Share Posted April 19, 2009 nrg_alpha you have a wealth of great knowledge. I haven't done the sitemap. Honestly didn't even know about that until you told me. Thank you so much. I did already verify my site for the webmaster tools, but i might want to hold off doing the sitemap until I'm 100% finished with site. Or does it not matter if I continue to make updates will it pick up the updates? Thank you also for the SEO tips. I'll be sure to check out the book. I didn't put any <h1> tags on the homepage to keep it simple and clean. Didn't know where to place one. Do you think i should place one on top of the flash slideshow? The rest of the pages have <h1>, <h2>, and <h3> just not the homepage. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nrg_alpha Posted April 19, 2009 Share Posted April 19, 2009 I did already verify my site for the webmaster tools, but i might want to hold off doing the sitemap until I'm 100% finished with site. Or does it not matter if I continue to make updates will it pick up the updates? I think over at xml-sitesitemaps, when you enter your URL for sitemap generation, there is a flag (Change frequency) you can set to daily. weekly, monthly, etc.. so choose the frequency you want. I didn't put any <h1> tags on the homepage to keep it simple and clean. Didn't know where to place one. Do you think i should place one on top of the flash slideshow? The rest of the pages have <h1>, <h2>, and <h3> just not the homepage. Don't worry about heading tags cluttering things.. just keep in mind that there should only be one <h1> tag (think of this as sort of the headline of a news article.. this stands out as carrying the most weight of the h tags), and perhaps only using a single <h2> tag as well [i think I used more than one for mine, but I read that keeping it down to one is probably preferable] (which could be simular to the web page title or something), then you can have multiple <h3>s, <h4>s etc.. for lesser important sub-headings and whatnot. You would really have to read up on SEO (and again, while I went with that book, I'm sure [much like everything else], there is tutorials online that you can sink your teeth into.. just Google SEO implementation or something... it shouldn't be hard to find stuff that will enable you to hit the ground running... you can even mozy on over to the SEO Forum here on the freaks.. which should also help you out.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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