Hi Brian, Thanks so much for your suggestions, they are all very good. The large text was done purposely to address a pet peeve of mine about many websites I've visited, you have to read forever to really get an idea what the site is selling. So, I decided to tell people right out front what it's all about in large letters, I hope this saves people time and effort and that they appreciate it. I have already replaced my jpg with the png you had suggested and I will keep this in mind as I redesign this site. Loading the site through a dial-up is always a concern especially when using as many images as I do and now I have another method of keeping the size down. My initial attempts at product shots were very unsuccessful, partly due to the glare off the laminated surface, the pictures of the placemats looked horrible, nowhere near as good as the product itself. Others visitors have mentioned this to and I will try again. Displaying the images that are on the placemats gives much truer rendition of the product. Maybe I should just mention this and stress my money back guarantee? I spent two years coming up with the manufacturing process and materials that go into this product. It is not as easy as it may look. The combination of great ascetics, durability, ease of use, tensile sturdiness and cost effectiveness is not arrived at quickly. The quality testing regiments my friends went through were very impressive. These included laying some of the placemats on the floor in a heavily trodden path at a construction site for two months. After washing, the placemats only had surface scratches to show for their ordeal. Yes, more text, more text and more text leaves me in the conundrum of hiding the text or exposing it and having everyone use the site as a sleep aid. I bought an annual package from yahoo for about $200 that makes it so they will reread my pages and re-index them every few days so I can see the impact of how changes effect the search engines. MSN uses this engine. Thanks again, Rick -----Original Message----- From: owner-photoforum@listserver.isc.rit.edu [mailto:owner-photoforum@listserver.isc.rit.edu] On Behalf Of Brian Chandler Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2003 8:01 AM To: List for Photo/Imaging Educators - Professionals - Students Subject: Re: Photo sites Rick Kessler <rick@rickkessler.com> writes: > I just brought up a new site www.placescapes.com > <http://www.placescapes.com/> ... <snip> > I would appreciate any feedback on the content and presentation. I think all the large text looks rather amateurish. If you haven't got much text, well, hmm, the _best_ way to optimise for search engines is to add more text. Then more text. Oops, what's this? The explanation of what's on the back of the placemat could be much better done with a picture of the back of an actual placemat. The graphic you're using - http://www.placescapes.com/images/back_layout_copy.jpg ... is *ouch!* 18.5K. Here's a png file you could replace it with that is 1.3K: http://imaginatorium.org/private/grid.png I think it's a good idea to take the time to understand the different strategies for image formats, and why jpeg is so good for photos, and so bad for most other things. Sounds like a good idea anyway: you don't give much detail on _how_ you are going to manufacture them, and there are no product shots yet[?]. Good luck! Oh, did I mention, add more text. Brian Chandler ---------------- geo://Sano.Japan.Planet_3 Jigsaw puzzles from Japan at: http://imaginatorium.org/shop/
