Show us your sites!

**pauland** · 25 March 2009, 08:12 AM

Originally Posted by katecj

I'm also welcoming comments or criticisms if anyone is interested

www.nycsalonsearch.com

PS I think this forum is great because everyone is so helpful and respectful of various levels of expertise or lackof!

Hi Kate,

I think you're off to a great start. I'll make a few suggestions to get things moving.

1) Alignment. Our eyes like things to have edges and follow some kind of structure. Aligning page elements allows the eyes to see edges and make sense of an arrangement. Take some time over alignment (use guides) and make sure things line up (the buttons for example). It only takes a few pixels out of alignment to make things look wrong. I've used some guides to give you an idea.

2) It's a wide page - probably wider than it needs to be.

3) A nose sticking out from a panel isn't a good look. With such large bold panels the picture is lost.

4) On other pages the white space seems to be dominant and the thumbnail content seems a bit lost amongst the white.

5) I don't like having too many different fonts on a page - see if you could live with two, or at least if there's a paragraph in one box and a paragraph in another, make them of the same font.

Hope that helps.

Paul

**Ross Macintosh** · 25 March 2009, 01:59 PM

A one-page business card site for an imaginary client...

http://www.designstop.com/4forums/your-special-day.htm

(It will be interesting to see if it ever gets me any xara affiliate income. Probably not but it was fun to put together).

Regards, Ross

**pauland** · 25 March 2009, 02:14 PM

Nice job Ross, always nice to see a self-portrait and source of inspiration combined in one image.. ;-)

**JKatz** · 25 March 2009, 04:22 PM

Brand new to Xara & talkgraphics when I purchased Web Designer right after its release. Here's the new front page for: Pets-n-People.net

http://pets-n-people.net

The page takes a while to load as we've got lots of pics to show off. If there are suggestions as to speeding things up, I'd love to hear them. Or constructive criticism in general. Thanks in advance.

**slavelle** · 25 March 2009, 04:34 PM

Your banner image is currently over 250k. It's a png graphic right now, which it doesn't need to be. If you convert this jpg and force to 75% quality, it would reduce down to about 44k with not appreciable loss in quality.

To do this the easiest way, right click the graphic that is the header background, choose web properties from the list, go to the image tab and instead of "letting Xara choose", select jpg and put the slider at 75%. All other graphics will be left alone, but this will force this as jpg output.

You can probably make similar gains with other changes like this.

Does that help?

**JKatz** · 25 March 2009, 04:40 PM

Originally Posted by slavelle

Your banner image is currently over 250k. It's a png graphic right now, which it doesn't need to be. If you convert this jpg and force to 75% quality, it would reduce down to about 44k with not appreciable loss in quality.

To do this the easiest way, right click the graphic that is the header background, choose web properties from the list, go to the image tab and instead of "letting Xara choose", select jpg and put the slider at 75%. All other graphics will be left alone, but this will force this as jpg output.

You can probably make similar gains with other changes like this.

Does that help?

Thanks!

Interesting & nice catch ... it was imported as a .gif so it did make that choice. I'll work on that. As a .gif, the original is only 68KB.

**jaci** · 25 March 2009, 04:47 PM

Here is the one I am working on: http://maui-island-vacations.com/index3.htm

PLEASE feel free to critique and advise. Obviously, I am not finished with it. I plan to have several other pages based on the same template.

**jaci** · 25 March 2009, 04:51 PM

I love your site.. and it loads fast for me. I have cable. Oops - I meant this message for JKatz.... posted in wrong area.

**JKatz** · 25 March 2009, 04:55 PM

Thanks jaci ... yours looks great too. Well done.

I have cable too but I've already made the suggested change & that helps. (Thanks again, slavelle)

**slavelle** · 25 March 2009, 06:07 PM

Hey jcatz - glad that helped. I'd guess the next thing in line would be the .swf file you've got. What did you make this with? Do you have an option in that utility to compress the images?

Your swf file is quite large. Looks like site-perf and other such tools kinda just barf on it, but appears to be over 4mb from what I can tell. Looks like it is in the load order such that the rest of the page is waiting on it to get going.

I bet without that flash or with it optimized, your page would load fine. Most of your other graphics are under 5k each (save the header @ 50k).