Rate My Web Design Skillz

I made this website for a silversmith, and entered it in my school computer fair. I took first place, and I'm moving on to regionals in two weeks (with a $500 cash prize as an incentive ).

http://silvervine.webng.com/

The images are high-quality and may take a while to download. I'm going to optimize them before I actually put this site up on the web.

Please post any critique, suggestions, etc here. I'd love as much advice as I can get.

 

First problem i have with it, is the uncommon spelling of jewellery, you'd be better of spelling it "Jewellery" rather then "Jewelery", then comes the very emptyness of the whole thing, there's no real flow either, it really doesn't make me want to view it. moving onto the thumbnail images, ACTUALLY MAKE thumbnail images, don't shrink the picture using width and height attributes in the HTML, it just takes forever to load them, when you could have much smaller thumbnail images, then people can load the big versions of the images they actually want to look at. I also looked at your source code, seriously, get away from the tables, and move into CSS tableless design, it's much better. Oh, and you need to add ALT tags to your images, for the disabled people who require them for their readaloud browsers.

 

Thanks for the advice

I live in the US, and "Jewelry" is how we spell it here. I spent several minutes agonizing over how to spell it on the site, so I just used the term that I (and the judges) are familiar with.

Like I said, I am going to make thumbnail images. I made this entire site in the three days prior to the competition, so it wasn't my priority. Ditto with the Alts, I'm going to add those when I do the thumbnails.

I know I'm stuck on tables, I do want to learn more about dynamic CSS layouts but I'm sticking with tables for now.

What suggestions do you have for me to improve the overall "flow" and appeal of the site?

 

TDD is absolutely right about the images. I'm on high speed and I can still actually see them loading instead of just appearing because they are so large. In addition to helping disabled people, adding ALT tags to your images will also help with SEO (search engine optimization).

I also agree with the emptiness although I'm not entirely sure how you could improve it. My only idea right now would be to try experimenting with borders up the left and right sides as it's quite empty. Also, trying a black background might also look better, I can't really decide without seeing both.

 

I definatly agree with everything said above. Alt tags are a must, add meta tags too for search engine pickups. TDD is right about the flow, there really isn't any. There's a fancy headline, but theres nothing anywhere else to compliment it. You may want to consider adding a background, but nothing too annoying or distracting, just something to help the flow of the site. Right now it feels dead. But good work none the less.

 

If you bothered looking at the source code, you'll see that I have more than enough meta tags. Don't know why I bothered, as search engines don't really use them anyway.

Nullware, I did state in the original post that I'm going to scale-down the images. The site was originally run off of a flash drive for the competition, so the lag wasn't noticable. I know about SEO, I just didn't have the time to alt-text all of the images before the competition.

I originally did the site with a black background, but my client insisted that I change it to gray. She wants her site modeled after bernardine.com, a well know jewelry site. Personally I hate it, but I do what i'm paid for.

Personally I can't really think of a background texture that won't distract from the gallery pics. Any suggestions?

 

Any more advice pplez?