 A friend of mine is moving to Italy to set up a combined walking holiday location/art school. She has set up a website- www.artholidaysinitaly.com to promote this, but she has a problem with the home page. If you click on the home page it appears to partially reload itself. This doesn't happen with any other pages. Anyone website savvy out there who can help put this right?
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 Appears to work ok in Opera. Having said that, it's a spectacularly awful site and would put me off booking a painting holiday, if that's the limit of the owner's creativity 
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 They have a frames page which calls up a file called body.htm this page has a meta entry in the top that says... <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="3;URL=http://www.artholidaysinitaly.com">...because this is in that page it will every 3 seconds go to that url set after it. Take that line out of the html and it will stop doing it. I reckon at some point they have copied the entire top section from another page but forgotton that the refresh line had been put on the page they copied the other bits from.
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Appears to work ok in Opera. Having said that, it's a spectacularly awful site and would put me off booking a painting holiday, if that's the limit of the owner's creativity
Please do expand. In what way? Bearing in mind they are not that experienced in matters internet.
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If you browse to the page http://www.artholidaysinitaly.com/body.htm you will see it loads to that other page after three seconds then keeps reloading. If you use Firefox and press CTRL and U before the page redirects you will see the source of the page and you will see that line above at the top.
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They have a frames page which calls up a file called body.htm this page has a meta entry in the top that says...
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="3;URL=http://www.artholidaysinitaly.com">...because this is in that page it will every 3 seconds go to that url set after it. Take that line out of the html and it will stop doing it. I reckon at some point they have copied the entire top section from another page but forgotton that the refresh line had been put on the page they copied the other bits from.
How do I explain that in English? 
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 They have a frames page which calls up a file called body.htm this page has a meta entry in the top that says...
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="3;URL=http://www.artholidaysinitaly.com">...because this is in that page it will every 3 seconds go to that url set after it. Take that line out of the html and it will stop doing it. I reckon at some point they have copied the entire top section from another page but forgotton that the refresh line had been put on the page they copied the other bits from.
How do I explain that in English?
That's easy...
You say to them "There are some things you can save money on by doing yourself... and there are some things that are worth paying an expert to do... your website falls into the latter category"
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That's a bit more diplomatic John 
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Aha. Yup, it does indeed refresh if you click the home link. Just tell them to remove the line of code from the body.htm page that Jamie highlighted, Grendel. Appears to work ok in Opera. Having said that, it's a spectacularly awful site and would put me off booking a painting holiday, if that's the limit of the owner's creativity
Please do expand. In what way? Bearing in mind they are not that experienced in matters internet.
It just looks very amateurish. Not meaning to be harsh, honest, but whether someone has knowledge of the tinterweb or not, they can usually tell if a site looks good. Frames were very popular years ago, as was huge text and cloudy backgrounds and multiple borders around images, but tastes have changed. There are loads of templates available online that offer folks with no skills a slick professional look
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| Edited: 05/10/09 16:45 |
Frames were very popular years ago, as was huge text and cloudy backgrounds and multiple borders around images, but tastes have changed. There are loads of templates available online that offer folks with no skills a slick professional look
Can you recommend any?
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Can't recommend any as I've never used them. Just do a google search for website templates. Avoid any that are Flash ones, as it pisses most users off unless it's done very well indeed. Or as John suggested get them to hire a professional; it doesn't cost much these days. Also worth having a good surf and find things that you like the look of.
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Frames are certainly old style when it comes to web design. Frames will prevent a LOT of potential customers from finding a websites content so if you have someone looking for say Beginers Painting Courses, then Google may present them with a link to the page they have on Painting Courses, but it woun't show it with the other frames it will just show that page, hence your visitor then can't see the rest of your site. It is not a good way to design a site. The reason people use frames is that they don't want to change the menu at the top on every single page if you have it just on top of every page. This is a problem with large sites but with small sites it is well worth the extra effort of editing the top of each page, it shouldn't change that often anyhow to be honest.Its only a ten page site so they onlyhave to make ammendments ten times and as I said it rarely changes anyway. You can always use cut and past if you put thetop stuff in a table, just change it on one then copy the table into another, simple on just a ten site page. Also there are other techniques like using Find and Replace on multiple pages, which I use myself to change content that appears on every page on a site, thought you need decent software somtimes for this and a little more technical know how.
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Also forgot to say tell your friend not to spend too much time trying to fill screen sizes. Most people are happy with a site that is only 980 pixels wide to fit on a 1024 screen. Look at this site ---->> it is actually easier in most cases to read a 1024 wide site, plus from a design point of view it saves so much time and means you can keep the site nice and neat and how you want it too look. Bottom line is make it 1024 width and then don't worry about bigger screens, it just isn't worth the effort no matter what anyone says. If you don't believe me go look at some of the most popular sites on earth and they are all going back to a set width!
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 Still all look cr*p on my early model Asus pc though. Srcolling up, down, right left - and don't get me started on pop-ups Wonder how long the touchpad will last at this rate? 
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| Edited: 05/10/09 22:37 |
 Frames were very popular years ago, as was huge text and cloudy backgrounds and multiple borders around images, but tastes have changed. There are loads of templates available online that offer folks with no skills a slick professional look
Can you recommend any?
GRENDEL - just go to Google - they do a web site service FREE ! only about 5 pages but it would certainly be an improvement on that
OR how about using NING (social networking site) i'm surprised by how good looking their sites are ... email me if you want any help...
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Thanks for the help, problem solved.
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 The home page has no title tags to attract se's. The grammar is poor throughout, especially on the home page and will annoy a significant number of potential clients who will simply look for one of her (many) competitors - google for 'art holidays in Tuscany' for instance. Overall, the site appears to be low budget. As a professional photographer, my opinion of the photographic images displayed on the site is that they are utter shite. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but it is intended to be helpful and not offensive. The images , as well as her artwork, are her shopwindow. An aspiring artist or keen photographer would very likely mutter under their breath and move on after looking at that stuff (the photography, not the artwork). The function of her website is to attract clients and I feel the poor quality of those photographic images will work against her. If she cannot do better herself, she should think about employing someone who can, or look for appropriate material in image libraries such as Alamy, etc. Sort out the grammar, the search engine optimisation and the images and she'll be cooking! Good luck to her, she's obviously a talented artist and it's a beautiful part of the world to live and work.
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