Website Design Help.

[steelyeyed57]

I am by no means a web developer or programmer. So forgive my stupid questions, and my awful mistakes. I am a former graphic designer and I have begun work at a rural farm real estate office. While I am learning the business, I have worked on the website. It was awful, no pics, all text long scrolling and it wasn't linked or marketed anywhere. So, I began by upgrading it's current design. I added nice buttons, banners and pics, but the load time was getting long for each page. (Like I said rural area, many customers still on dial-up). It was still pretty hokie, but better. So finally I put my design skills to work and came up with a whole new design. Well, that brought larger size banners and menus, etc. So I went to a frameset design (bad, i know). And it looks and works pretty well, but now i am running into all the typical frames problems (no links, or bookmars, search engine problems, can't resize frameset to view pictures etc).
Like I said, I am not a developer or a programmer, so programming things myself is a bit of a stretch.
Is there anything I can do, simple or drastic, to correct these problems without having to learn to code all this myself?
I appreciate any help I can get.
Thanks.

[Simplex3]

Frames are evil, vile creatures. Much like the marquee tag, if the person developing it had know it was going to actually be USED they wouldn't have developed it.

With that said, you really want to check into XHTML & CSS if you want a small page size. Basically all of the formatting will be pushed into the CSS file which only has to be downloaded once, then the browser will use it's locally cached copy.

Another thing that rookies tend to mess up on is image compression. You might want to check that as well.

Lastly, if you generated your HTML using Word, Powerpoint, FrontPage, or any other MS product then you can be sure that it is f**king huge and bloated with reeruned crap. I've found the only way to get clean HTML is to hand code it. Besides, it really doesn't take very long and you can learn the tags you need in a couple of days. If you give me a link I'll look at what you have and make some suggestions.

[steelyeyed57]

my page is www.ppiowa.biz

As far as image compression, all pics are 72 dpi, and all thumbnails are actual, scaled down files.

Is there a good book so I can learn quickly? I took html in high school, and I know the bare basics, but I am over my head when it comes to anything beyond that.

Thanks for your help.

[Simplex3]

Originally Posted by steelyeyed57

my page is www.ppiowa.biz

As far as image compression, all pics are 72 dpi, and all thumbnails are actual, scaled down files.

Is there a good book so I can learn quickly? I took html in high school, and I know the bare basics, but I am over my head when it comes to anything beyond that.

Thanks for your help.

I don't buy many books for web work, stuff changes so fast that it generally isn't worth it. I usually design what I want, then look for the necessary tags to pull it off.

I can tell you that your use of frames is bad. Really bad. What you can use and still gain the same effect is called an "iframe", or inline frame. However, I would still recommend against it. Most people like the entire page to scroll, it just seems to "feel right" to them.

Oddly enough I actually have done sites for real estate agents in the past, so I know quite a bit about what the want when selling homes in residential neighborhoods.

My first recommendation to you would be that there is a lot of color. And I mean A LOT. I would cut down significantly on the number of images, that will greatly reduce the page load times.

I would start by losing the crops or whatever the green stuff is behind your buttons. Then I'd probably also lose the images behind the buttons. Next, I'd lose the copy of the logo under the menu, it's already on top of the menu. I'd also lose any of the washed-out watermark style backgrounds you're using unless you are using the same pic on every page.

Next, the menus don't make much sense. The one across the top of the page never changes when you click the one on the left, so why is it seperated?

Also, your page degrades severely when you view it in 800x600, which probably isn't desireable if you have a lot of dial-up consumers.

For real estate you really want a simple layout that accentuates the photos of the property. Here are two examples that I did, though I'm not really fond of the color scheme on the second:

http://www.pcrkc.com/
http://www.clayandplatte.com/