perlgoodies

You really can't design a full pledged web site using a WYSIWYG editor. They aren't there for designing web sites but rather to give you something to work on. You're supposed to use them to design the main structure of the site and then go into the code and rework everything to your needs. Editors produce ugly code that sometimes doesn't render properly in all browser and USUALLY doesn't W3C validate! But of all the editors out there, Dreamweaver is a top choice and you get a 30 day trial. I won't go into PHP but PHP shouldn't be used anywhere on a web site. Ever.

I would not suggest www.diyestores.com. They are a very poor ecommerce provider and they charge far more than the service is worth.

It certainly does look better but I have a few suggestions. * On each of your sub pages, the font changes from bold, italics, regular and some even change font faces. It's not considered acceptable to change the way text appears on every page. There has to be consistency to make it easier for the visitors to read. * Your text area is way too small (in width) and needs to be larger. Not sure what it looks like on your screen resolution, but on my 1028x the main content text spans about 50% of the available area leaving 50% of the main content area to be unused real estate. Real estate should be at least 75-80% filled with text or images. Hope this helps!

It's no problem I can try and find a few resources of the PHP problems that arise, specifically with this cart. PHP in itself is NOT a safe choice for anything secure, it's not just oscommerce. I will look tomorrow.

I'm sorry, can you direct me to the post where I suggested php? I looked at that past thread and couldn't find it.

I'm not sure about the logo, specifically the dots. Logos are supposed to be easy to read but I had to look at the logo 2.5 times before I could understand what it was saying. The rest of it looks really nice but I'd consider making something other than dots fill in those gaps a little more

OSCommerce is an extremely insecure shopping cart, specifically because of their use of the PHP language. I would never install this script, there have been TONS of reports of web masters getting hacked through the use of this shopping cart. HostGator.com is an excellent web host IMO.

Most search engines are free to submit to. Google is one of them. The trick to getting to Google to list you is NOT submitting it to them but having them FIND your web site by incoming links. This is to say, if Google finds your web site via someone's page who is linking to you, it will index you you as well. This is almost always faster than submitting to them-- simply get other established web sites to link to you for a few days and you'll be up and running. It IS free to submit to Yahoo as well. They have a FREE and PAID FOR submit. Of course, it's worth it to pay them if you have the cash. Free submit tools do not work for the real search engines and will almost certainly get you blacklisted from them. There are VERY few programs out there with licenses to submit to search engines like Google, and if your site is submitted to them falsely via an unlicensed program-- ZAP. Always do submissions manually or have a legit program do it for you. Hope this helps.

Hi, this is my professional opinion of the the site. When reading, please remember I am critiquing the web site, not you. The site looks good, overall. It's very simple and easy to navigate. I would drop the two huge images on the front (the two scent photos). They load okay on highspeed connections but it would definitely make 56kers die of age before they load completely. Always think of them before making a web site because if they can't access and load things quickly, there might be a number of other problems as well. The entire web site is a shopping cart and this will cause your web site/business to lose the "personal touch" that is usually the selling point of small businesses and especially crafters like bath and body and soap makers. This is saying you put selling your products first instead of welcoming new people to your business and learning more information about you. Large sites such as Best Buy are strictly a shopping cart because they are corporate and aren't known for their closeness with its customers. Craftmakers should strongly reconsider using a packaged shopping cart for their web site. You will probably lose a lot of potential customers. The contact us button on top is a direct link to your email address. This is not an acceptable form of contacting from a web site. Not all users have POP3 email access which is required for a mailto: link to work. If they don't, nothing will pop up for them and they will not be able to contact you. There are two ways to make contacting you easier for everyone: 1) Make a contact page and list your mailing address, e-mail address and phone number. 2) Add a real contact form to your web site and ALSO add the above information (this would be much more friendly to your web visitors in case they'd like to contact you via other means) Your logo will need to be changed into something that screams your company/services/products. Let the logo do the talking to your web visitors why they should choose you for candle buying. I hope this helps.

A home page is a personal web page for a hobby. Say, you have pictures of your cat on there or your small bowling club. A personal web page has no real purpose other than collecting things you like and putting them up for your friends and family. Home pages are not a site set up for selling products or services. A web page, company page, web site, is a site developed around a common theme to present information, products or services to other people. This would include a search engine, chatroom web site, or a small candle making business. The main difference between a home page and a real web site is how it looks and who it's made for. Above, I used home page to describe the type of page a user may have created. It shouldn't be confused with "home page" meaning either: 1) The main page of every web site can be called the home page 2) The page your browser opens up to by default is also named a home page Would you buy products from a web site that looked like a personal home page instead of a real web business?

Hi, The following is a collection of thoughts and opinions on the web site from a professional perspective. I do web design for a living and I ask you not take anything in this personally but just thoughts to help you get your site on the right track. Problems: 1) Your main page is entited "homepage". This will need to be changed as soon as possible so search engines don't index it as such. 2) Like some people mentioned, the curly font on the main page should be swapped with a more legible and supported font. Some browsers/OSes will not be able to render this font unfortunately and it is hard to read. 3) Your page has no default layout. Your main page has a 3 section layout (two side bars and a content center) while the sub pages just have floating text in the middle of the screen. Each page should have an identical apperance (with exception of splash pages which shouldn't be used anyway). I would stick with the template of the index page and push that apperance on all sub pages. 4) Similar to #3, your navigation menu changes location. This is a no-no and should never be done. The navigation is the single most improtant section of the web site and it needs to be consistent. Also, the top nav bar on your sub pages changes location and each has a different size. If nothing else, be sure to go through and make sure the nav bar stays put. 5) Get rid of the guestbook. You WILL lose a lot of business for having a guestbook on your page. Especially considering it is a free guestbook with advertisements. Guestbooks and counters make a web site look like a home page and people don't feel safe buying from a homepage. This is a major problem. The goods: 1) I like your nav menu on the main page. I don't care so much for the vertical bar on the mouseover though, but the menu itself looks like. 2) The overal template of the main page looks nice. It'd all look better if your sub pages looked like this page. 3) Your logo is nice though it's too close to the edge where your text meets the side of the browser. Overall the site looks good but there are a few major issues that need some looking into. Good luck.

You can't use anything in emails to arbitrate PayPal payments. There is no way to verify the email is real and since it didn't happen on PayPal, they won't read it or take it into consideration.

In reality, you can get any domain you want. Domains are neither owned nor trademarked. Even if say Google became available and you got it, they can't sue you for having it. (though they'd surely buy you out with millions of pretty pennies!). See if your domain is available then check to see if the words you are looking for are trademarked or owned. If not, the domain is yours. Maybe I misunderstood the question.

Frames are NOT good for search engines. Search engines actually prefer if you don't use them because it can mess up your details. "Your pages use frames. Google supports frames to the extent that we can. Frames tend to cause problems with search engines, bookmarks, emailing links and so on, because frames don't fit the conceptual model of the web (every page corresponds to a single URL). If a user's query matches the page as a whole, Google returns the frame set. If a user's query matches an individual frame on the page, Google returns the URL for that frame. The page is not displayed in a frame because there may be no frame set corresponding to that URL. " - http://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html On a personal note, I do not like framed pages or coding for them. They are a hassel. Use Server Side Inludes (SSI) if you need to. But that's just my opinion.

I have not personally used them with any of my half dozen or so domains but they are supposed to be very fast and very stable servers. However, they said they won't install extra goodies (like scripting modules) if you need them to. So when it comes to that, you are on your own. But if it's a simple site, GoDaddy would work great.