Handyman Site ready

[The3rd Earl Of Derby]

You had no more than 40 errors on you're site.

-- Sir Benjamin Middlethwaite

[nrh]

[Douglas de Lacey]

OK. I noted that you'd used FrontPage to write the pages and wondered if I was being too technical:-) But it's worth persevering, specially if you are getting comments about problems on other browsers.

The validator gives you a box ("Validate by url") into which you can paste your page url (eg

for the home page) Click "Check". You get an awesome page telling you there are 40 errors. The first is that no DOCTYPE is specified: You should put at the head of each page this bit of code:

There are then a number of errors about M$-specific things, eg bgsound which you are going to get rid of anyway (thank goodness:-). Then there are important ones, like having in the wrong places which is the cause of the alignment problems (I suspect). Sort out those you can understand. I'm happy to help (off-line) with those you can't.

I admit it's less of a problem given that *all* of your text is blue. But I found myself clicking on certain items and getting cross that nothing happened.

A lot of it is just common-sense, and you have already avoided many of the pitfalls he discusses -- mainly over-complexity.

Again, happy to help if necessary.

If I open your page in a small window (or, presumably, in low resolution) the text runs off the right-hand-side of the window and I have to keep scrolling left and right. I'm not sure why (I do hate reading raw code) but I suspect M$ has put an explicit "width" in somewhere.

Only maybe? I doubt any of your prospective customers will have even heard of Part P.

You're welcome! I'll add a couple more comments in response to others.

Douglas de Lacey

[Douglas de Lacey]

Yes, this is the kind of issue that the validator will pick up.

But why discriminate against them? Specially since many of them may be the elderly, set up with kids' cast-offs, who may be a significant part of John's clientele. And it may not just be IE5. Lynx loses the whole list, and lynx is used by the visually handicapped.

Douglas de Lacey

[sPoNiX]

I agree!

sponix

[sPoNiX]

[bigsteve]

Personally I would not deal with anyone who does not give an address.

I think its also illegal on advertising bumf ?? but I could be incorrect on that.

You do not say how long you have been in business, and doing which trade.

You refer to 'We' but how many are in the team.

Do you have any references or photo illustrations ???

Check out my website

I know mine is not perfect, so perhaps some feedback on mine. TIA.

Otherwise a good site, nice and clean.

I prefer KISS (keep it simple stupid)

[david lang]

Like this?

[Dave Liquorice]

I'd say "more likley to render how you expect them to". Different browsers will still render the same, valid, HTML in different ways. Though there is much less chance of the 'orrible incompatibilty stuff that MS based web page generation can produce, particulary Front Page.

There are various standards for HTML, the text file that controls the look and content of a web page. If you stick within a standard the chances are the page will display well on most browsers. These days it's probably best to start with XHTML v1.0, it's a little strict about syntax but it stops you learning bad habits. There are a number of basic online "get you started" tutorials/reference sites about as well.

Links can be any colour you like. What they need to be is a contrasting colour to the ordinary text and background. A unvisited link that is the same colour as the ordinary text is very silly. I detest underlined links, so turn that feature off in my browsers. A visited link would normally be a less saturated version of the unvisited link colour and the colour on mouse over more saturated. Links must be blue is just an MS thing.

I can't see anything relevant at that URL, it's some US based Federal Credit Union.

[Douglas de Lacey]

That's a good point; however I'm not sure I'd want both my home address and phone number published on the web. He has a land-line phone no and a registered website, which is a good start.

I'd doubt it, but IANAL.

An "About us" page would certainly be helpful.

Yours has very useful "About us" and "contact us" pages (but why so coy about giving your email address: I *hate* using forms. If you are worried about spam, then don't use the "@" symbol; use "@" instead. It does exactly the same thing but no spammer seems intelligent enough to search for it.)

I do like your "We have enhanced clearance from the Criminal Records Bureau and are also Age Concern listed." But how is a prospective customer to check? If these could be links to the relevant organisations that would be very helpful!

I'm puzzled by your choice of pictures on gardhand.html; I'd have chosen obvious "before" and "after" pics myself. Also puzzled that you didn't name gardhand.html simply as gardening/index.html. And when I first read it I took the first line as meaning that you were appealing for custom from "Plant growers and Plant suppliers" rather than stating that's what you are!

On your pages generally: Also FrontPage, I see, and also fails to validate. Which reminds me to say, if you want to tidy up your pages manually do use Notepad and not Word, and make sure you don't use so-called "smart quotes", which won't render properly on all browsers.

There are lots of grammatical and spelling errors you could tidy up; the most significant I noticed is "If you are unsure of dealing with use" on

where you mean "with us".

Hope that's helpful to both Steve and John (and others:-)

Douglas de Lacey

[nrh]

In news:kg1Cf.9426$ [e-mail], david lang scribed:

Yes Dave! Juss loik that! And what's more, it complies with Usenet conventions of keeping to 4 lines or less, and is preceded by '-- ' so that newsreaders recognise when not to quote it in replies. Unlike some other advertising hoardings around here. ;-)

WDTM!! :-)

Nigel

[John Rumm]

Yes valid points, and I was not suggesting that IE5 did not matter (after all I went to the bother of posting about it in the first place!)

I was just suggesting that current IE and Gecko had to work well enough to mop up the bulk of users - so that would be my first priority. However if you can get a resonable presentation on a good spread of current browsers then it will save annoying any of their users.

FYI, the top browsers that visit our main site are as follows (bear in mind that the results are probably skewed by a larger than normal group of techie visitors):

27.63% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET 11.25% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) 4.28% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1 3.08% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0) 3.01% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko 2.98% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) 2.92% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gec 2.41% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; AOL 9.0; Windows NT 5.1; S 2.16% Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; msnbot/1.0 (+ Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR 1 1.51% Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020 1.41% Googlebot-Image/1.0 1.34% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; FunWe 1.28% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90; S

So IE5 falls off the bottom of that list...

[Douglas de Lacey]

Ha! A page that doesn't render properly in Epiphany, and doesn't validate. So John is in good^Wbad company.

I assume you are saying that's an appropriate page for the link from "Part 'P'"? Seems reasonable. Douglas de LAcey.

[John Rumm]

Yup having that somewhere will add a nice warm fuzzy feeling...

since we are talking about a startup probably best to major on experiance rather than time trading.

As many as required - after all he can always outsource jobs or parts of to trusted subbies.

Photo yes, references I would only include as some testimonials - last thing you need is loads of people contacting any poor referees!

[Douglas de Lacey]

Sorry, your html doesn't validate; I think you mean Juss loik that! :-)

Indeed, a model .sig.

?? WDWM?

Douglas de Lacey

[Andy Luckman (AJL Electronics)]

AOL, sometimes noted as is a term used as shorthand for a posting made up of reams of untrimmed irrelevance with a single line at the very bottom, or more often the top, of:

me too

The term came from observing the IQ level of the typical AOLer.

[nrh]

In news:dra9ta$5je$ [e-mail], Douglas de Lacey scribed:

Errr... I guess so. ;-)

TM!

Nigel :-)

[John Rumm]

Oh, while on the subject - it is well worth including and obfuscating the email address so that spam harvesting robots won't grab it so easily...

One quite effective way is to use HTML character code replacements. They will still work and look like normal email links but the plain text html will not contain an obvious address.

E.g.

email me

Will work just fine on a web page - but not get harvested since most spam robots don't bother to render the HTML prior to looking for addresses.

Oh, should have read this far before starting the post... I will get my coat!

[Dave Liquorice]

Neither does that, tags must be lower case only.

Juss loik that!

[usenet]

I'm pretty sure it was a long time before MS, it's the default in Netscape from the time before IE even existed.

While I agree that links can be any colour I much prefer it if web sites don't mess around with the default that I've set in my browser preferences unless they do it for very good reasons.