New Website Design

[Allen]

I try and keeps things fresh by updating my website at least somewhat regularly as it's where 90% of my commissions and sales come from.

As I'm trying to go for a much more art deco type of look for the instruments, and most of the traffic to the web site is on image heavy pages, I though I'd try for a new modern gallery look that featured a fluid design that will accommodate the smaller screens of the smart phones and iPad but also look great on large screens like the 27" iMac I work on.

If you want to have a look, it can be seen here.

Has taken far longer than I thought to get this in place and test as much as possible. Time to get back out to the shed and make some more stock.

[martintaylor]

Great looking website! Can't wait to see more instruments.

[Nick]

Nice new site Allen, easy layout that's really simple to navigate around & as you say, picture heavy so it great on the eye too.
Don't get a lot of work from my site (even though I get plenty of traffic) so I may have to steal some ideas!

[Kim Strode]

Hi Allen,

I'm currently looking at updating our B&B website. We previously used iWeb, but need a new program as iWeb is now no longer supported. Can you tell me what you used and how easy it was to use?

Thanks, Kim

[Allen]

I use RapidWeaver Kim.

It's pretty similar to the way iWeb works, but there is a huge developer network that have turned it into a Swiss Arm Knife of web design. There are some basic templates included in the package, but I thought that they were all a bit cheesy, and I don't think that they are making any more as there are just so many great ones available for quite a reasonable price. Lots that are free as well.

If you decide to go with RapidWeaver then you will absolutely want to get Stacks 2 by YourHead Software. It will allow you to do all kinds of layout designs that are pretty difficult otherwise. As well it's the framework that allows all kinds of other add ons to work.

The learning curve is steeper than iWeb but not by much, and there are definitely right ways and wrong ways of going about building a website. One tip is to optimise all your images before you drop them into RapidWeaver. Don't just take them from iPhoto or Aperture. This will cause all kinds of performance issues and if your website gets to be any size at all, you will get crashes in the software.