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Posted to rec.crafts.woodturning
Joe Joe is offline
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Posts: 62
Default My woodturning website needs an overhaul, please help!

A couple of minor issues on the site.

Menus
The color contrast is not optimum, the rollover hover highlight is decent
but the non-selected menu items are of low contrast for color blind
individuals.

The menu items, because you used graphics instead of text, are blurry.
The red of the outline is bleeding into the text characters. Since you're
not using drop shadows, try converting to two color before the final jpg
or gif output for the menus. Converting the colorspace should help to
keep the edges of the text characters sharp. The best compression process
will depend on your graphics package(s). I find "Video Preview" and "Pen
Turning", and "Writing Pens" the blurriest, but all the menu and site
graphics including the title are of poor quality.

Use more contrast or graphic definition for "current page" menu item
state. The white for "current page" state can get easily lost in the low
contrast menu. That's probably why "Writing Pens" still has inconsistent
colors for it's menu states.

"Writing Pens" has the "current page" color for it's non-selected state.
"Boiling Wood" has black as the "current page" color instead of "white".

Use a web system with "skins" or "themes" to provide high-bandwidth, low-
bandwidth, non-javascript, or alternate language versions of your site.

All pictures should have thumbnails and be click-able and zoom-able. The
size of most pictures on the site currently would be considered the
thumbnails.

Add as many pictures as your bandwidth can afford.

Start categorizing now using metawords and google custom search.
http://www.google.com/coop/cse/
If you don't want ads and don't want to pay $100 a year that's ok, just
don't publish or add links to the search pages. The format changes for
your pages will still be the same using another package (PHP,Perl,Yahoo,
etc.) You can test the pages yourself using google w/ads and when you
finally find and set up the search app you'll have all the pages already
tagged. There are a number of free search apps available and many scripts
to produce static index pages from keywords.
Category and index search is simple once/if you go to a CGI based website
using a sql backend.

PDF printable downloads for all tips. This provides embedded branding and
reduces traffic. Dual PDF's should be produced, one with no or highly
compressed graphics and one with best graphics.

Add a voting or rating system for tips.
Use weblogs to report and rate tip usage.
Use a local ad engine to promote "most popular" and "low use" articles.
Metrics from ad system can help determine articles to retire or re-rank,
naming convention impact, etc. i.e. If nobody goes to a page, maybe no
one can find it. But, if you advertise the "low use" page to 10,000
people and no one clicks on it, maybe it's not a valuable page or it may
have a bad title.

I prefer sites with over 1000 pages to have all forms of indexing and
search available. Content categories, a cross reference index A-Z, and
full text search.