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Last edited by Unregistered User; 10-22-2020 at 10:03 AM.

[KiloHotelphoto]

Maybe she used Squarespace. And if she used promo code any YouTuber name she could save 10% off her first purchase.

[Qwntm]

Maybe she used Squarespace. And if she used promo code any YouTuber name she could save 10% off her first purchase.

LOL, I recently designed a website for myself,

Edward Thomas

and spent about 15 minutes reading reviews and came away with the impression that Squarespace was better if you were into blogging and Wix was better for general website creation. I went with Wix, but I didn't get 10% off.

Lucinda's website is fairly straight forward to create using one of the templates in either Squarespace or Wix. BUT it is like herding mice, not cats. And lots of them. Everything you do ripples throughout the whole thing and if you change something one place you have to think about all the other places something changed or needs to change and it can get exponential quickly... I've been working on my site for months now and it's still and probably always will be a work in progress. I have more pages in draft mode that are unpublished than I do up on the web.

The key to a website is in the absolute finest details and Lucinda's site has all her I's dotted and T's crossed which makes all the difference.

You can always hire a pro to do it if you have the money, and they deserve every penny they earn!!!

[jatrax]

Here is my new one. Not 100% finished at the moment but any comments or criticism would be welcomed. I know there are some links broken yet and some verbiage that is incorrect but the overall layout is complete. Please feel free to critique either here or by PM. I am used to doing 10 to 12 shows a year and with COVID that is now zero so I really need the website to pick up the slack.


www.zigzagmtart.com

[Lord Lucan]

You can always hire a pro to do it if you have the money, and they deserve every penny they earn!!!

Be careful not to get ripped off - there are a lot of cowboys out there.

A static, non-interactive, website such as to display text and photos is quite straight-forward to write from scratch, using nothing more than a text editor. I have about four of them on various subjects, and when I get a bit more time I shall be finishing one I've started, featuring copies of old camera brochures, mostly Pentax.

[Kiwizinho]

I came across this one today, and it piqued my interest because I once worked with a woman named Lucinda Price - though that was in Rockville, MD, like forty years ago. This website is that of Cambridge (U.K.) photographer Lucinda Price, almost certainly a different person.

Lucinda Price - Cambridge Family, Portrait and Wedding Photographer-

I don't know who designed and built it for her, but she's clearly made an investment in her business that lots of folks don't bother with.

The website you mentioned is built with Wix (I looked at the code behind it.)- personally my least preferred website builder as it adds so much junk code that produces bloated, slow websites, but it is fairly easy to use and most people can set up websites themselves with it.

Anyone who has an Adobe CC Photography subscription actually gets the ability to set up up to 6 portfolio websites included in the subscription.
I'm a web developer, so find Adobe Portfolio sites rather restricted, as there are only a handful of themes to choose from and don't include e-commerce, however they're great for someone who's not too technical who wants to have a reasonable looking photography website without paying a lot for it. (If you're subscribing to the photography plan for Photoshop and Lightroom anyway, you effectively get a simple website thrown in for free.) I think it's probably one of the most overlooked features of the Adobe CC Photography subscription.

[ramseybuckeye]

Here is my new one. Not 100% finished at the moment but any comments or criticism would be welcomed. I know there are some links broken yet and some verbiage that is incorrect but the overall layout is complete. Please feel free to critique either here or by PM. I am used to doing 10 to 12 shows a year and with COVID that is now zero so I really need the website to pick up the slack.


www.zigzagmtart.com

If it's ever 100% finished you'll be either dead or you just don't care anymore. (FYI, I have a website that I haven't updated in at least a year, but it's not a sales site, and "I'm not quite dead yet")

[Astro-Baby]

I was a website designer and builder in the early days of the web. It used to amaze me that clients would want to fill up their site with stuff that had no value to the consumer.
Our corporate values, our ethos, mission statements.....I told people constantly the punter only wants to know three things. What is it ? How do I get one ? How much does it cost ? The rest is bumf.

It was a horror to sell web services, everyone has a brother or mate down the pub who is a web ‘expert’ and boy did I see some horror, purple text on green backgrounds in fonts like ‘Algeria’ because ‘my wife designed it and likes those colors’

Beyond design though is traffic because the greatest design in the world wont help if theres no traffic so most of my time was doing search engine optimisation and traffic building for people. Of course its the same with people telling me ‘oh I dont need it, if you type ‘the very small hokey cokey company’ we come up top on Google’ yes of course you do mate, the problem is no one sits down and thinks ‘gosh I must go look at the hokey cokey company and see if they sell anything Inwould like to buy’.

I once spent a week optimising someones site and boosted their traffic but they ended up asking me to stop as they said their wife had concerns that I was changing the ethos of their business and ruining her hand crafted text that mostly waffled on about a dear departed pet. Yep....their business is probably by now dear departed as well. People dont care much about you they care about them.
Traffic building is the tough bit and its an evolving beast as well...a kind of arms race with the search engines and a good optmiser and traffic builder will cost a lot more than site design and its an ongoing cost.

Back in the day the code had to be compact as well as many people were running slow modems so i used to use a lot of handwritten code to get it compact and sharp to get the site to run quick, if the page load went over 10 seconds it was game over, you lost the punter, it still applies now, a slow loader is a loss.
The other schoolboy mistake web designers jad, and may still do, is designing on a top end system and finding it looks great and not taking into account the average joe wont be running a fully loaded Power Mac with every extension imahinable on a dedicated 10mb line. These days the site has to be optimised for mobiles, tablets etc but a lot of sites dont do that at all. Kissing off a lot of custom there I suspect.

[Lord Lucan]

The website you mentioned is built with Wix (I looked at the code behind it.)- personally my least preferred website builder as it adds so much junk code that produces bloated, slow websites

One of the websites linked above, built with Wix, took 15 seconds to load for me, and is over 5000 lines of HTML code just to display one picture and a handful of links! That is what the website development apps like Wix do - pack in thousands of lines of bloat. Most of the web is like that these days But I have a similar website home page that does it in about 50 lines and loads in the blink of an eye.

My advice to someone starting is to get a free template from one of the many places that offer them, eg:

99 of the Best Free HTML Templates to Make Your Website Sparkle

.. and then change the text and pictures (using a text editor) to your own requirement. Gallery templates are very common. The HTML code for static sites (and I guess the interest here is in galleries) can be very simple - starting with one of those templates, you can modify them with only knowing the codes for line and paragraph breaks, picture insertions, and links. Alternatively, most word processors allow you to create a page and export in HTML (ie web) format, at least LibreOffice does. You can get more ambitious later, learning from eg:

HTML For Beginners The Easy Way: Start Learning HTML & CSS Today »

[Kiwizinho]

I was a website designer and builder in the early days of the web. It used to amaze me that clients would want to fill up their site with stuff that had no value to the consumer.
Our corporate values, our ethos, mission statements.....I told people constantly the punter only wants to know three things. What is it ? How do I get one ? How much does it cost ? The rest is bumf.

It was a horror to sell web services, everyone has a brother or mate down the pub who is a web ‘expert’ and boy did I see some horror, purple text on green backgrounds in fonts like ‘Algeria’ because ‘my wife designed it and likes those colors’

.

You don't remember blinking text and animated gifs everywhere do you? And meaningless hit counters.

Beyond design though is traffic because the greatest design in the world wont help if theres no traffic so most of my time was doing search engine optimisation and traffic building for people. Of course its the same with people telling me ‘oh I dont need it, if you type ‘the very small hokey cokey company’ we come up top on Google’ yes of course you do mate, the problem is no one sits down and thinks ‘gosh I must go look at the hokey cokey company and see if they sell anything Inwould like to buy’.

I once spent a week optimising someones site and boosted their traffic but they ended up asking me to stop as they said their wife had concerns that I was changing the ethos of their business and ruining her hand crafted text that mostly waffled on about a dear departed pet. Yep....their business is probably by now dear departed as well. People dont care much about you they care about them.
Traffic building is the tough bit and its an evolving beast as well...a kind of arms race with the search engines and a good optmiser and traffic builder will cost a lot more than site design and its an ongoing cost.

If you have a niche topic and good content without too much competition, it's not really an arms race, but it sure is if you have plenty of competition covering the same topic/product/service. All the AI that search engines employ has to try to rank similar content based on relevance, however if you're fortunate enough to find a topic that doesn't have much content out there, then all the ranking algorithms become irrelevant with even a half decent effort to follow the guidelines search engines provide.
I'd say the arms race isn't so much against search engines, but against every other punter out there trying to sell the same thing or something very similar, as the better they optimise their site, the more you have to do to compete. Of course search engines do update their algorithms as well to try to deal with people who try to increase their rank without actually providing more useful content.

Back in the day the code had to be compact as well as many people were running slow modems so i used to use a lot of handwritten code to get it compact and sharp to get the site to run quick, if the page load went over 10 seconds it was game over, you lost the punter, it still applies now, a slow loader is a loss.

Now days, 10 seconds is way too slow and you'll get penalised for it. A common issue with a lot of designers/developers is use of utility code libraries and frameworks without understanding how to customise them, resulting in massive amounts of unused code loading.
Frameworks are great for rapid prototyping, but once you've settled on a design, a good modular system should make it easy to strip out all the unused components to speed things up.
Wix is awful at this. On one site I looked at for a friend, I discovered it was attempting to load something like 50 web fonts including in foreign character sets even though the site only used a couple.

The other schoolboy mistake web designers jad, and may still do, is designing on a top end system and finding it looks great and not taking into account the average joe wont be running a fully loaded Power Mac with every extension imahinable on a dedicated 10mb line. These days the site has to be optimised for mobiles, tablets etc but a lot of sites dont do that at all. Kissing off a lot of custom there I suspect.

What I find with a lot of mobile site support is that many sites are 'responsive', in that they'll deliver screens that look fine on mobile, but are definitely not 'mobile optimised', in that they'll serve up full sized desktop images squeezed down to fit a mobile screen, but still taking up large amounts of bandwidth. Modern HTML and web platforms mean there's no excuse for this, but it still happens all too often.
A personal pet hate is video backgrounds on websites. If I want to watch a video, I'll watch a video, but video behind text is distracting and a huge bandwidth waste, and screams a designer with an oversized ego.

[Lord Lucan]

I was a website designer and builder in the early days of the web. It used to amaze me that clients would want to fill up their site with stuff that had no value to the consumer.Our corporate values, our ethos, mission statements.....I told people constantly the punter only wants to know three things. What is it ? How do I get one ? How much does it cost ? The rest is bumf.

Tell me about it. I have just bought a new ethernet card (the last was fried by a lightning strike last week) and using a different PC tried to download a driver from their website, as they advised. But what do I see beside a picture of the thing I bought : hype, links to a copy of the minimal instructions already in the box, and links to their "diversity policy", "environmental policy", "slavery policy" "privacy policy" and other even more boring stuff. Does anyone sit and read this?

But a search told me the chips are made by a different company, and I did find their driver download page . But they wanted me to answer a capcha (WHY?), but the capcha picture was broken End of story. That was Realtek BTW. Why can't a company, supposedly expert in IT, design a website that works??

You don't remember blinking text and animated gifs everywhere do you? And meaningless hit counters.
...

I thought that stuff was really funny, so I put an animated GIF on my page that looked like an odometer racking up mileage like mad, spinning the numbers constantly, as if I had "millions and millions sold" like McDonald's. It didn't actually count anything, of course, just whirred along as-if.

If it's ever 100% finished you'll be either dead or you just don't care anymore. (FYI, I have a website that I haven't updated in at least a year, but it's not a sales site, and "I'm not quite dead yet")

Mine's in the category of "zombie" - it's been dead for years but doesn't know it yet. And I've been too lazy or pre-occupied to mess with it. I figure when my pre-paid hosting contract expires, it'll go away of its own accord. DefenseRights

I originally put it together in HTML 2.2 using Windows Notepad somewhere along about 1990 or -91, and it really didn't chage all that much since. I think I was the first person to put a menu of links to different parts of the website along the left-hand border of the pages, by the way. It did have the advantage of speed, but then there were no "templates" or "code libraries" at that time.

[Aussie Matt]

I've got a weird an interesting back ground... But have spent a fortune of TIME and money learning how the world (ie. people) work. Business/service marketing is actually rather simple, most people confuse promotion/advertising with marketing, and the results speak for themselves ie. 95% of businesses fail in 5 years. Horrific numbers when you dig into them, broken dreams, spirits, marriages, lost homes, retirements destroyed etc.

fill up their site with stuff that had no value to the consumer.

Classic business behaviour.

took 15 seconds to load for me, and is over 5000 lines of HTML code just to display one picture

I was speaking with someone who works in this field.. He says many website pages are now a 50mb script! Just the script!!!! For crying out loud, my first internet plan had a monthly limit of 70mB LOL.

Why can't a company, supposedly expert in IT, design a website that works?

Because they are living in LaLa land and have never approached their own business or customer experience from the position of a customer!!!!

A while ago a new 'old' video of Jeff Bezos 'surfaced'. Yes, Amazon Bezos. Yes, 'richest' man in the world Bezos. Now I don't for one minute recommend emulating his business model of selling on super thin margins (most of us will go bankrupt before break even), but the beauty of this interview was his 'fixation' on the customer: What the customer 'wants', where do they 'want' it, how to we make it easy, how do we reward them, how do we keep them, how do we find more etc etc... Customer, Customer, Customer.... And we know what happened to Amazon, it become the largest retailer in the world!


Realtek above is a great example: We make chips..... Yeah? great. How does the customer get the software to make the damn thing work????

I originally put it together in HTML 2.2 using Windows Notepad somewhere along about 1990 or -91, and it really didn't chage all that much since.

And yet I've had Joomla sites get hacked in days/weeks.... Simple often really is better.

I could bang on about promotion and marketing all day: It's a little understood art, that can make your life a whole lot easier when you understand it all, whether your a consumer, a business manager, an investor etc.

[Kiwizinho]

Why can't a company, supposedly expert in IT, design a website that works??

Question is whether they built their website or hired some marketing agency to do it for them.

The thing about websites is they require multiple disciplines to be done well. Since this is Pentax forums, I can make a comparison with a camera. A camera has both form and function. People are attracted to the external aesthetics of cameras, but they also want them to function well, so there is both design and engineering required to make a good camera. The most beautiful camera in the world is useless if it can't create the kind of photos its user wants to create.

Websites are exactly the same, except that many people who build them forget this resulting in two extremes; websites built by designers that look pretty but perform badly, and websites built by engineers with no sense of aesthetics that perform well but look ugly.

Of course you can get ones that look awful and perform badly as well, and just occasionally you get beautiful, well engineered websites that do everything they're supposed to quickly and efficiently.