Show us your sites!

**slavelle** · 23 March 2009, 10:54 AM

MArk, looks like you are having some success with xwd.

A few comments:

The pictures that are recessed into the white boxes on the right are (in some cases) a little off center, and the interior shadow is a little too blurred into that area, so it looks a little sloppy/dirty. With the rest of the site built on very clean, almost neon, lines, these blurs seem out of place.

The site pops up in many stages like a lot of the xwd sites I've seen (including a site I did a while back. There seem to be a ton of objects (and therefore requests for them, with latency each time) on xwd produced pages and some things really need to be grouped to get around this, or in some cases, some manual exporting of larger images needs to be done to force them a little smaller. It seems the biggest issues with most of the sites I've seen have the slow-loading, pop up feel to them are those that have graphics that are large. The ones with smaller graphics come in the same way, buit all the pics are small enough that you sort of see like a card deck fanning out of the pics - not really an issue, and if they are mostly the same from page to page, it runs from cache, but with the larger images, you can actually see the page being put together - on my demo site, I actually saw the inividual characters of a word being placed on the screen (this was a xarax doc), as if done with Flash on purpose. There are SO many images in that site. I'm sure some of it is me, but I think some is xwd and some optimization that needs to be done with some of the outputted code. Some folks have worried that the absolute positioning is the issue, but it seems more "too many requests" possibly for "too large sized objects" to me.

FWIW: your blurred background image is 268k, the header images add up to about 100k, another 60k+ or so for the two side jewlery items on the home page. Without going into a huge amount of detail, that's about 420k for the home page. Again, add to that a lot of requests (guessing you have lot of files) and you wind up with delay.

Hope that helps.

**nickydude** · 23 March 2009, 07:38 PM

Here's my WIP version of a site that's in the process of a make over (not by me) - original Adventure Game Studio site, my version of the Adventure Game Studio

**Greg M** · 24 March 2009, 02:02 AM

Here's a Website that was 99% done by my girlfriend over the weekend with WD. Every page was made in WD except the 'News' page. She didn't want to look at what WD could do when I found it, being that she was using Dreamweaver, but after I convinced her to take a look at WD she remade her website into something that was beyond her dreams and that was done in just hours! Excellent Software XARA!

http://comigirl.com

**DigitalJeweler** · 24 March 2009, 06:14 AM

Originally Posted by Ross Macintosh

Mark - the site is coming along great. Further to the suggestions already made I'd suggest adding info about the materials you use. Seems to me visitors would want assurances about quality etc. --- some technical info isn't a bad thing.

It isn't clear from the site if there is a real associated jewelry store. If there is then please show it or at least talk about it & the staff. It could help reassure potential on-line purchasers.

Please don't take this the wrong way but I don't think your family pic is the right one for the purpose. It's fine if you were going to have more information / pics about yourself but given the small amount of info it doesn't inspire confidence that you are a pro. I really think you should add more info about yourself, training, style etc. Before I'd spend any money on an expensive on-line purchase I'd read every word two or three times. I believe the site visitor needs to build trust - so support that as much as you can.

Regards, Ross

Ross,

Those were some great points, I took the input given by "Boy" here and moved the links to their own page.

You're right in that I need to add more things about how I do things etc. I'm trying to not focus on the technology I use (CAD) design and focus more on the emotional aspects of the type of jewelry I make. This might help set me apart from the other slick sales people type...

I'll really take everything I read here to heart and try to improve it regularly.

Thanks for the input, that's exactly the type of constructive help I am looking for.

**pauland** · 24 March 2009, 08:46 AM

Hi DigitalJeweler,

I took a swing by your site and it's quite impressive - nice site and beautiful jewellery.

As always, a couple of suggestions:

Think about an alternative domain name - it doesn't do your work justice. When I saw the link I feared the site would be bad - how wrong I was. The domain name diminishes your brand.

The family image - could be replaced by a picture of you at work by a workbench. Personally, while you may be guided by god and draw inspiration from that source, not everyone will be comfortable about being told how religion influences the jewellery they may purchase.

On the custom Jewellery section, the background is 360K and the page takes time to load. It should be something like a 20K jpg image.

Really nice work - real talent there.

Paul

**stuartwilson** · 24 March 2009, 09:59 AM

First attempt, text is just garble but you can get the idea. Does anyone know whether its possible to get the transparent background effect when opening a gallery like when using LightBox?

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/stuart.a.wilson/index.htm

**pauland** · 24 March 2009, 10:03 AM

Does the job nicely - check out the photo gallery "Communal"!

Still a bit of lorem ipsum on the first page.

Paul

**Poptart** · 24 March 2009, 12:35 PM

http://www.snowfall.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/paddy

I had been keeping a kind of Dog-blog since we got our new puppy, using X5 Evolution as the authoring tool, but was never happy with the results. I downloaded WD yesterday and apart from copying the header and the text across I rebuilt it from scratch in a few hours.

I'll probably be altering bits as I learn more about WD, but I'm impressed by how easy it is to get a basic grasp of, ideal for somebody like me who has neither the time nor the mental capacity to get to grips with coding.

**selbi** · 24 March 2009, 12:59 PM

Originally Posted by slavelle

selbi, your site looks nice. One thing I noticed, however, is that your shadow i only on the main body rectangle and looks a little strange ending (and extending) at the footer. Don't know if you meant it to shodow the rect or a group of that + the header and footer.

Nice job.

Many thanks Slavelle, the shadow is now fixed + a few more improvements/changes.
XWD keeps amazing me!

CHEERS

Robin

**DigitalJeweler** · 24 March 2009, 02:50 PM

Originally Posted by pauland

Hi DigitalJeweler,

Think about an alternative domain name - it doesn't do your work justice. When I saw the link I feared the site would be bad - how wrong I was. The domain name diminishes your brand.

Paul

Hi Paul,

At first I was confused with your comment, then I realized that the link I posted here was the "working" link/domain address. My old site was still online and I have multiple domains that all point to one site. So I used customcoins.biz which was really just taking up space online and it became the canvas for getting the new site online.

The correct domain that I refer to people is.

www.preciousprintsjewelry.com

I have these registered and pointed as well: have to allow for people typing it wrong
www.preciousprintsjewelery.com
www.preciousprintsjewellery.com
www.fingerprintring.com
www.fingerprintweddingring.com
www.fingerprintweddingrings.com

I will go back and edit that photo on the custom jewelry page and engagement rings, it's a photo of my sister and brother in laws hand's on their wedding day.

I'll have to have my daughter take some pics of me at the bench doing my work, I agree in that it will look better. I chose the family pic to give me a face and to realize that people are working with a regular person who's not some multimillion dollar faceless corporation. (Although we'll see where this all leads)

Thanks for such great suggestions, ideas, perceptions, etc. Since I'm new to web design, this is a very great place to learn...I'm a HUGE Xara Fan.

I dumped all my Adobe CS3 stuff off my computer...BLOATWARE

Peace,

Mark