OT Built a new website... OT

[blueskies]

... for my business. Things are very slow at the office, so I spent some time rebuilding the lame site (that we paid a "professional" to do) with a complete makeover.

http://www.andersonarc.com

Have a look and let me know what you think.

Seems to be working correctly except for the contact page which is above my ability to sort out at this point.

I don't have a windoz machine to check it out with, so let me know if there are any weird formatting problems, etc.

Thanks,

Pete

[greg g]

OK I am old, and my eyes sometimes do funny things. From a personal point of view, I don't like the grey type imposed on the orange line. In the buttons below you have the type below the line in the boxes, that works better visually for me.

Houses look great. Hope business picks up.

[Niel Hoback]

No complaints here, its very impressive.

[RobertKB]

Looks really nice. Maybe a bit more professional information about yourself and partner in the bio. Colouring is nice. You have certainly designed some beautiful homes. I did not see anything under the commercial section of your portfolio. I sure hope things pick up soon and you get busier.

[blueskies]

Thanks for the feedback...

I was worried about the slide shows overlapping the text on smaller monitors. I use a cinema display at my office, and I forget that things get crowded on regular screens.

Looks really nice. Maybe a bit more professional information about yourself and partner in the bio. Colouring is nice. You have certainly designed some beautiful homes. I did not see anything under the commercial section of your portfolio. I sure hope things pick up soon and you get busier.

The Bio page is a work in progress. I had long dissertations about us for a while on the original site, but took most of it off when some guy walked into the office out of the blue and knew more about me than I thought was a good idea... For now I just have a couple of photos up for recognition but will get info about the firm up in the next couple of days.

OK I am old, and my eyes sometimes do funny things. From a personal point of view, I don't like the grey type imposed on the orange line. In the buttons below you have the type below the line in the boxes, that works better visually for me.

Houses look great. Hope business picks up.

Greg- I assume you are talking about the linked text above the orange line on the left top most part of the page? I'll play with the colors some, a bit more contrast would be good.

One good thing about being slow is that it gives me time to do this kind of stuff that needed to be done years ago, but never had a chance to fit it in. We got proposals from several pro web-builders, and was astonished at the cost... The sites they create are very slick and polished, but that's not in the cards for me at this point. We paid for our old site, which looked great, but made everyone who used it feel dislexic because it was so hard to navigate. And it was created with some mumbo jumbo software that ran on unobtainium, so I couldn't edit things or add new projects without paying a couple hundred for the guy to do it for me at his leisure. No I have total control.... mhuahahahaha...

I have about 25 hours into this new site, including research and buying the software, learning how to use the damn thing, photoshop editing of all the images and creating all the buttons, etc. It was a nice diversion from what I normally do every day, sort of enjoyed it.

Now to grow another propeller out of my head to figure out the contact page... Once that is done, maybe I'll spiff my Plymouth page a bit.

Pete

[TodFitch]

Using Safari 4.0 on a MacBook with a color calibrated display.

Negatives first:

1) Your colored nav boxes on the left seem like they fade to nothing.

2) You have a commercial work link but I did not see anything there.

3) Your contact link ended up downloading a file called contact.php which is actually a file full of PHP code (imagine that). I think you would prefer some other action to occur.

Positives:

1) Easy to navigate.

2) Professional appearance.

3) Great looking house designs and they are not all the same, shows you actually work for your clients. To me that is a very good thing.

Question:

Your "Furukawa Residence" looks awfully close to an avalanche prone slope. Is that just an optical illusion from a telephoto lens or is my 25 years of backcountry skiing and avalanche rescue training just getting my paranoia up?

[Jims50chrysler]

Good Job Pete...if things stay slow mabey you could design web pages on the side to keep the wolf away from the door:)

Jim

[TodFitch]

I notice the other links on your main page are of the form

<a href="../portfolio/portfolio.html" rel="self">porfolio</a>

while your contact link is of the form:

<a href="../contact/contact.php" rel="self">contact</a>

(not sure how the HTML entities will work on this forum..)

Anyway maybe just changing the PHP to HTML might work. On the other hand I know nothing of the RapidWeaver program you are using to create this site so it might not work as easy as that.

[Ricky Luke]

Looks good Pete - I think you need a pic on your portfolio page. There's something on the others (apart from the contacts..) and it looks like somethings missing. I viewed it with Firefox 3.0 and Opera 9.

Things are slow all over. I'm now working for the Victorian Railways restoring Heritage listed sites, and most of the architects I work with are suffering from a shortage of work.

Regards

Ricky Luke

[Don Coatney]

Pete;

Just curious how much business a web page generates for your business? I would think networking with real estate folks, bankers, and contractors would be the way to go. How far from your home base do you go to design?

As the Godfather said "I wish you well as your interests do not conflict with mine";)

[p24-1953]

from one architect to another ....looks good. i was told that 40% of Atlantas architects were out looking for a new job. I had a friend who firm let 80 people go in one day. so at least we are still hanging on.

[blueskies]

Using Safari 4.0 on a MacBook with a color calibrated display.

Negatives first:

1) Your colored nav boxes on the left seem like they fade to nothing.

2) You have a commercial work link but I did not see anything there.

3) Your contact link ended up downloading a file called contact.php which is actually a file full of PHP code (imagine that). I think you would prefer some other action to occur.

Positives:

1) Easy to navigate.

2) Professional appearance.

3) Great looking house designs and they are not all the same, shows you actually work for your clients. To me that is a very good thing.

Question:

Your "Furukawa Residence" looks awfully close to an avalanche prone slope. Is that just an optical illusion from a telephoto lens or is my 25 years of backcountry skiing and avalanche rescue training just getting my paranoia up?

Tod-

The contact page is a form that users can fill out and hit a "send" button. It works in the preview on Rapidweaver, but not from the actual site. I don't know anything about php, so I'm going to have to get on the Rapidweaver forum and try to get an answer.

I'm in the process of re-working the nav buttons so the fade isn't so drastic. Took me a while to figure out how to make it better in photoshop.

The commercial work page is still under construction, there will be something there in the next couple of days.

Yes, the Furukawa house is near an avalanche prone hillside, but it is not inside the red or blue zones at the base of the hill. The hillside has slid only once in the last ten years, but it wasn't severe. That's not to say that it won't be severe one day, but the hillside is actually relatively small and the house is quite a distance from it's base. The Meadowcroft house, on the otherhand, is built in a blue zone and designed to withstand a major impact. It has been hit by a decent slide once, and it was amazing to see how it performed and how the slide flowed around the house. This house is in the only neighborhood in the region that allows building in an avalanche zone, and all of the homes are design accordingly. Still a dangerous place to be if the conditions are ripe for a slide, because slamming the door of your car can trigger a disaster. The property owners are fully aware of the risk, and it's even written into the deeds of the property so that any future buyers have to sign off on the risk.

Pete

[blueskies]

Looks good Pete - I think you need a pic on your portfolio page. There's something on the others (apart from the contacts..) and it looks like somethings missing. I viewed it with Firefox 3.0 and Opera 9.

Ricky Luke

I agree Ricky, that page looks weak, and the buttons are clumsy...

Pete;

Just curious how much business a web page generates for your business? I would think networking with real estate folks, bankers, and contractors would be the way to go. How far from your home base do you go to design?

As the Godfather said "I wish you well as your interests do not conflict with mine";)

Don-

I don't really expect the website to "generate" a lot of work for the firm. It is a great way for us to have an online portfolio however, and potential clients can easily see our work. It gives us some sort of "branding", and is linked to the local and national American institute of Architects websites. Anyone doing a search of local Architects can find us online and get a sense of what we do and if we may be a fit for their project. I'd say 95% of our work in the last ten years has come from realtors, contractors, and referrals from past clients, and I don't expect that to change. I see the website as a tool for these folks to have a better idea of what we can do and have done for others. And we are working to branch out of our local economy to get projects in nearby areas that can support the kind of work that we do, so I'm hoping the website will make it easier for folks in these areas to contact us if they like what they see.

from one architect to another ....looks good. i was told that 40% of Atlantas architects were out looking for a new job. I had a friend who firm let 80 people go in one day. so at least we are still hanging on.

I think it's just a question of time for things to turn around. Just hoping we can keep the small stuff trickling in to wait it out... I don't have any employees right now to worry about, had to lay them off about a year ago. If we can eek along for now, we will be well positioned for the turn around.

Pete

[John Mulders]

Pete, lwebsite ooks good.

always difficult to get the perfect webpages, it also requires constant work as you need to have new things every now and then.

Whether it generates business is difficult to tell, but with my business I have had people making inquiries as they stumbled on my website.

it also generates unsollicitated contacts for all kind of stuff, was called this week for advertising that would make my company visible over the whole world. Yeah, right, really want that ! Quite difficult to get rid of the guy.

I like to look at those designs of residental houses. You surely have designed a few nice ones. Meadowcroft for example.

Pretty impressive if you have done that in the time mentioned (25 hours).

I have asked a friend of mine (a webdesigner) to have a quick look at the contacts page. Could be something simple. Will let you know if he comes up with something.

John

[blueskies]

... I like to look at those designs of residental houses. You surely have designed a few nice ones. Meadowcroft for example.

Pretty impressive if you have done that in the time mentioned (25 hours).

I have asked a friend of mine (a webdesigner) to have a quick look at the contacts page. Could be something simple.

Will let you know if he comes up with something.

John

Thanks for the complements John-

From what I can gather in the RapidWeaver manual, my host must support PHP for the contact page to work. The my host doesn't support PHP, it won't work, which seems to be the case... Still looking into it. Might have to simplify it for now.

Pete

[blueskies]

Made a whole bunch of changes today...

Re-made all the buttons so that they are more legible, added an image to the portfolio page, added bio info, and added some flash to the intro page.

Hit reload on your browser so you don't see the old one from your cache, and have a look...

Thanks,

Pete

[blueskies]

...if my host doesn't support PHP, it won't work, which seems to be the case... Still looking into it. Might have to simplify it for now.

Pete

I think I've go the contact page sorted... my hosting package was windows based, and the windows platform on Network Solutions doesn't support PHP. Because of this, I've had them switch my service to a Unix based platform that does support PHP.

My plymouth site is on the unix platform, and I uploaded the contact page there and it worked... the e-mail function sent an e-mail to my inbox. Once everything is switched over to the unix platform the new site should be good to go.

The site will probably be down for a few hours while it switches over. Hopefully it will be working when it comes back on-line... fingers crossed.

Pete

[TodFitch]

I think I've go the contact page sorted... my hosting package was windows based, and the windows platform on Network Solutions doesn't support PHP. Because of this, I've had them switch my service to a Unix based platform that does support PHP.

My plymouth site is on the unix platform, and I uploaded the contact page there and it worked... the e-mail function sent an e-mail to my inbox. Once everything is switched over to the unix platform the new site should be good to go.

The site will probably be down for a few hours while it switches over. Hopefully it will be working when it comes back on-line... fingers crossed.

Pete

I wonder why the Windows platform is not set up for PHP. It is a pretty standard package even for a IIS machine.

[blueskies]

I wonder why the Windows platform is not set up for PHP. It is a pretty standard package even for a IIS machine.

No idea, but it is waaay beyond my brain power to understand much of this... I've grown a huge propeller out of my head to get this far...

Pete

[Dennis Hemingway]

The contact page works now.

Dennis:cool:

[blueskies]

The contact page works now.

Dennis:cool:

Excellent! give it a try, I'd like to see if the e-mail is coming through.

Pete

[Dennis Hemingway]

I sent you an E-Mail.

Dennis:cool:

[rolliejoe]

looks good using Google chrome on a windows machine.

[JerryinTx]

Sent you an E-mail too.

[blueskies]

I sent you an E-Mail.

Dennis:cool:

Sent you an E-mail too.

Hmmm... Don't seem to be getting the e-mail. Back to the drawing board...

Pete