Quote:
Originally Posted by chicgeek
So the page is actually used for sales purposes? .
|
The wholesale gifts website will hopefully be a gateway for people googling "wholesale gifts" to find us as a company. I have listed the products gift shops generally buy with the right hand menu being a subset of our main one targeting people looking for wholesale gifts (so it only has our crafts & handicrafts section - the stone and pottery seem to be sold mainly to garden centres with the furniture going to furniture shops and garden centres also.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chicgeek
So the page is actually used for sales purposes? Both the sites have major design flaws that I know would turn off any visitor immediately. I do urge you to look at the sites in FireFox, as there is a large section of the header missing.
.
|
I havent gotten to the bottom of what is causing the problem in firefox, but acording to our stats 97% of our visitors are using IE so less than 3% experience a problem. I can confess I prefer Firefox as a browser as it is just better than IE but when working as a web designer I believe we should all use what the vast majority of visitors are using. I would be open to suggestions as to what causes the problem.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chicgeek
With more content, will there be more pages, or will the single-page plan remain the same? The crowdedness and page length are the two greatest problems with the design.
|
More content will come with time. We have a student comming to work for us for three months shortly who is studying marketing and is good at writing. They will be working full time on internet marketing with a specific brief to increase the content of each of these websites by writing contant aimed at specifically targeted audiences. In the mean time I will be adding the catalogues relevent to the targeted audience to the top of these industry & product line specific pages.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chicgeek
I wish you luck. I know I've been very critical, but I feel that if you are to do well with these sites, much work is needed. If you are wary about experimenting with these changes yourself, it might be to your advantage to find (maybe purchase?) an existing template online.
|
These websites did start off with a template for the basic design (fixed width - css based). I am inserting the entire code for the main page below so you can see what it has evolved in to.
Code:
<?php require("./dbconn.php"); ?>
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>UK Wholesale Giftware, Furniture & Stone Supplier :: Worldwide Trading Enterprises Ltd</TITLE>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=windows-1251">
<META Name="Description" CONTENT="Worldwide Trading is a UK Wholesale Supplier who work very closely with our customers, from small independent outlets – Gift Shops, Furniture Shops and Market Traders – to some of the largest Garden Centres in the country, We pride ourselves on understanding the market and building a Wholesale Product Range that fully meets the consumers’ needs and expectations.">
<META Name="Keywords" CONTENT="Uk wholesale supplier distributor garden centre gift shop market trader stock wholesaler carvings furniture handicraft stoneware terracotta pottery trade england devon">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/shop/stylesheet.css">
<?php require("./wwt.css.php"); ?>
<?php require("./header.php"); ?>
<TR>
<TD COLSPAN=11 valign="top" height=100% bgcolor=#EDEFEE >
<TABLE WIDTH=539 bgcolor=ffffff BORDER=1 CELLPADDING=0 CELLSPACING=0 align="centre">
<tr><td width=539 height=173>
<?php
$content_name = 'index_page_1';
require ("./cms.php");
?>
</td></tr>
<tr><td colspan=2 width=539 height=94 >
<div class="text2"><BR>
<?php
$content_name = 'index_page_2';
require ("./cms.php");
$content_name = 'index_page_3';
require ("./cms.php");
$content_name = 'index_page_4';
require ("./cms.php");
$content_name = 'index_page_5';
require ("./cms.php");
$content_name = 'index_page_6';
require ("./cms.php");
$content_name = 'index_page_7';
require ("./cms.php");
$content_name = 'index_page_8';
require ("./cms.php");
$content_name = 'index_page_9';
require ("./cms.php");
$content_name = 'index_page_10';
require ("./cms.php");
$content_name = 'index_page_11';
require ("./cms.php");
$content_name = 'index_page_12';
require ("./cms.php");
$content_name = 'index_page_13';
require ("./cms.php");
$content_name = 'index_page_14';
require ("./cms.php");
$content_name = 'index_page_15';
require ("./cms.php");
$content_name = 'fairtrade';
require ("./cms.php");
?>
</div></td></tr></table></TD>
<?php require("./right.php"); ?>
<?php require("./footer3.php"); ?>
The shop part of our website uses some of the same include files but its an oscommerce site which uses the STS template system. Its all very integrated and making design changes isnt as easy as one might think.