A website for rare old cars

Finished a rare-car website today, http://concourscoaches.com, for a client down in La Jolla. If you are curious about the world of concours d'elegance vehicles, take a look.

With no offense to Xara, I decided to use old Front Page 2000 to burp out VERY basic HTML code. Wanted to keep it simple, no positioned layers, no Javascript or PHP or whatever. Customers all over the world with God knows what browsers or devices. But -- and this is important -- I used Xara Designer Pro extensively for fast photo cropping and editing, here and there for photo compositing, and for simple graphics. Xara is so fast and easy to use... and, for this project, there wasn't anything I couldn't have done in less expensive Xara Photo & Graphic Designer. It is one thing to do art for fun, for a hobby. But when you are doing a project for money, and you have a tight deadline, you'd better use art software like Xara products ... very fast, bulletproof, very easy to use... and none of that Creative Cloud noxious gas.


Am happy with the result. Wish I could speed up Google's indexing the site -- anybody know a way to fasttrack that? I think this is the last website I will ever make. Too many little things to remember. I want to evolve into something like Picasso, happily getting paid for signing sketches others made, laughing all the way to the bank...

Really really nice work Jon.

I wouldn't mind that Silver Spur, but since I drive 1100 km per week to work and back, I think I may have to give it a miss .... Yeah right ... Like that's the only reason!

Thanks Keith! Hang in there, in a few years there will be a GIANT AMAZON DRONE, maybe a surplus B-52 bomber, to fly that car up to Ontario and drop it, sorry, place it gently on your driveway!

Seriously, watch your wallet. Older Rolls-Royce cars can cost a LOT of money for repairs. Parts much more of a cost problem than labor. Ones that are really nice, like the Silver Spur on the website, are expensive. This one's at $65,000, which for me, anyway, is way out of sight. You also have to have a large garage... they are long cars, like an old Cadillac or Buick.

About a year ago, I almost bought a twin-turbo 1990 Bentley something or other, for about $18,000. But the deal went off the rails at home, when my wife asked, "But what kind of gas mileage does it get?"

This project posed a dilemma. As you've heard, the latest Google search algorithm, I think it's called Panda, is seriously favoring mobile-friendly sites for their rankings. And mobile, to Google, means smartphones... not laptops or iPads. But we made a decision early on to ignore Google and just make one simple site that could display on any browser anywhere in the world... optimized not for small phones, but for tablets like iPads and larger screens. Simple HTML, no Javascript, no positioned layers, etc.

I wanted extreme code simplicity, which led to old Front Page instead of our Xara prograns. But no misunderstanding -- for a different product aimed at younger buyers, on a small site, I'd use Xara. As far as I can tell, the code that Xara puts out should make Google very happy... mobile viewports, all that stuff. And of course you get the wonderful 'design whatever' capability that is SO HARD to do in Front Page.

We'll see how it goes...