I had a lot of problems uploading this to 1&1 which I mentioned in my last post but no one responded.
They said the files were not html but php and I should redesign the site in another program- after pointing the domain at the site folder instead of the main folder for the website it became visible, but my twitter and facebook buttons aren’t showing up, although they did in the browser when I was reviewing it before publishing it.
The other problem is that on my product pages a scroll bar appears which causes a jump from those pages to the others- I think this is do to overflow from ecwid code added to put the shopping cart etc. but I’m not sure how to correct this. The products also seem to take up a lot of space- I could only fit one row on the page- I think my pages are too short maybe? someone told me on an ipad part of the right side is cut off- I made the width 1020 since at the normal width the site was at one side or not taking up the full length of the page which looked bad.
Can anyone help with any of this?
I plan to use freeway to design some more sites for clients again so I need to get the file problem and these other things ironed out.
I use 1&1 and there’s no problem using php files on their servers. Freeway isn’t the problem here.
Your background image is large and will take some people time to read your pages. I don’t mean to sound harsh, but the problems you’re having are down to poorly constructed pages with the sidebar too far right of our viewable area - meaning you’ll get scroll bars on small viewing browser windows - regardless of the ipad. It would be worth spending time adjusting your layout - and if you know how, I’d start using CSS layouts in Freeway Pro rather than the table based layout you are currently, which will attribute to some of the problems you’re facing with content pushing cells outward.
I know it may be not want you need to hear, and it will take some time, but to avoid these problems you might want to go back and do some tidying up of elements.
The twitter and facebook buttons are showing up in my browser, so you may have fixed that.
I think your site pages are too wide. There is some debate as to the “best”
page width, and I think 960px is the best compromise for fixed-width sites.
I think it is just fine for a page to scroll. Everyone knows how to scroll
a window. It will be okay for you to make longer pages if you need to. You
might do well to explore inline layouts so your pages will grow to fit your
products.
I am not a fan of mixing layered CSS layouts with Table layouts. I would
like your site better if you did not use tables to position page elements.
Tables should be left to spreadsheet-like information.
Trevor is right, your background image is too big… I would aim for a
proportional size that was no wider than 1600px, and if you have Photoshop,
to use the Save for Web feature to see how much compression you can get
away with.
I had no problem seeing your facebook/twitter buttons, so I don’t know what
to say. As far as the shopping cart stuff goes, there are many others here
with more experience
The other problem is that on my product pages a scroll bar appears which causes a jump from those pages to the others- I think this is do to overflow from ecwid code added to put the shopping cart etc. but I’m not sure how to correct this.
This is browser, and now platform specific. It’s down to the way that browsers display scroll bars. Safari and Firefox on Mac OS X (Snow Leopard and below) move the content to make way for scroll bars. This means that centered pages will change position slightly when switching between a page with scroll bars and a page without. There isn’t really any way to reliably correct this behaviour because fixing it for one browser breaks it for another.
I have been very busy so I’m late to respond. I’m surprised the site is slow to load- it loads within 1/4-1/2 a second for me and everyone else who looked said the same- maybe it is due to your computer connection/speed/capacity etc? I will look into making the background image smaller anyway, there was another image I was considering for that also. I use lightroom & photoshop for my photos and I was having problems with the photos being very pixels at first- I reshot everything & then did something when putting them into freeway which seemed to help, but I’ve already forgotten exactly what that was. I will try saving for web, but I think that may have been what caused problems at first- not sure now.
I’m not sure I really understand the difference between tables and css- I did the menu bar in css & the slide show on the home page- I remember reading a tutorial that said to turn css on for that. Is there an explanation of the two somewhere?
As far as the scroll bar thing goes, it is only happening on the pages with products so I’m pretty sure that has to do with the code added in from ecwid to put the product info causing overflow & not to due with the browser- all my pages are centered but not all have products and those are the pages that have scroll bars. I was asking about that a while back and someone named tom I think, a German designer who had done a tutorial on ecwid here, was helping me with that. I don’t like the look of uncentered pages.
I am still not able to see the Facebook/twitter buttons but one of my friends said he is- this is very odd, in Safari I see they are acknowledged by ghostery and in firefox I see white boxes but no button- very odd- this remains a mystery at present.
When I started designing the site I changed the page width so that everything would look good when it was centered- I don’t remember now what the specific problem was with that but I’m going to change it back to the standard size and see what happens, as well as make the page longer maybe.
I will be back with more questions when I make some of these changes no doubt.
I’m not adverse to changing things in the site, that is why I asked questions, but I’m not sure about re doing everything in CSS since I don’t really understand the difference at this point.
I forgot to mention Trev, that I think that I used tiff for some of the images due to all the problems with jpeg being super pixels- someone told me not to use jpegs I believe. maybe saving for web will help this? I’m not sure… in any case the background image is something that will be easy to change.
A proper background image has to be in a web ready format - jpeg, gif, png etc. or will not be viewable on all platforms. A tiff inserted in a graphic box and sent behind other page items in FW will be converted to a web ready format but will not be a ‘proper’ background image.
I will try that…my friends who looked at the site had no problems with speed either
Everything is relative - I dont have superfast broadband but I do have what i would consider a reasonable download speed and it was slow for me.
But you have to remember that this will vary dramatically for different users in different areas and whatever you can do to speed up the experience for everyone is worth doing.
Web visitors are fickle - if they do not get what they want quickly enough they will go somewhere else - there is plenty of choice on the net.
I agree totally, anything I can do to make it fast for everyone is the way to go… I have little patience for slow sites also…
but I do want to know why it was ok for them and me and not for everyone here, for me you think it was the browser but that doesn’t explain why it’s ok for them… they are not being forgiving, they’re giving me accurate info, no reason to do otherwise.
Thanks for doing this… for me there is only a minimal difference in the time it takes to load these images which I can’t measure accurately prolly but it’s maybe like 1/2 a second longer for the larger one or something like that. As far as the image quality I see no difference. I will reduce it and see if I can get the same vantage point etc. with no reduction in image quality at my end.
I forgot to add that what I meant about the browser was that either you or someone else mentioned they thought the reason the image /site was loading faster for me was due to the site being cached in my browser. Anyway I’m going to reduce the image size. What size did you make the smaller one btw?
