Website Changes

[arthur712]

I made some changes to my website. Please take a look and let me know what you think. PLease tell me the your HONEST thoughts. www.mytakeacard.com Thanx! Artie

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Artie Crowley
www.marketingholders.com

www.mytakeacard.com

[mark123]

Lawn care business tips

It takes a really, really long time to load. Perhaps some optimization is in order. Also, don't do this: OUTDOOR BUSINESS CARD HOLDER OUTDOOR BUSINESS CARD HOLDER OUTDOOR BUSINESS CARD HOLDER Keyword stuffing doesn't help and can negatively affect your search engine ranking. Just put the terms in a header tag once and that should suffice. There is an old rule in web design that states "Very few users will read everything they see on the page before scrolling. Some of those will scroll once and continue. You'd be hard pressed to get your own mother to read to the end of a long page." Basically the page is too long and should be separated into relevant parts. Remember in newpapers the most important stories are kept above the fold on the front page.

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Last edited by mark123; 10-23-2009 at 11:33 AM.

[arthur712]

Originally Posted by mark123

It takes a really, really long time to load. Perhaps some optimization is in order.

What is Optimization, and how do I do it.

I fixed the other stuff you said, I think! LOL

Mark, Thank you so much!!

[mark123]

Originally Posted by arthur712

What is Optimization, and how do I do it. ...

It's basically just making everything load faster.

For starters I'd work on the code first. Get rid of all the <font> tags as they are deprecated. Get rid of all the target="_self" and OnClick="" attributes. That will probably cut the size of the homepage down to about 20%.

Next choose only a few videos for the home page.

Then make the images the appropriate size for the page. For example this image: http://www.mytakeacard.com/images/hpim0423.jpg is huge and then you have it squashed down using the height and width attributes. Just make it the correct size that it needs to be. Right now it's over 860kb. Resize and compress. I posted this back in 2005 but it's worth reading today: http://imaginekitty.com/30/ow-my-bandwidth-is-clogged/

[arthur712]

If I do not have adobe photo shop, what should I use? Photobucket.com?

[mark123]

Originally Posted by arthur712

If I do not have adobe photo shop, what should I use? Photobucket.com?

I'd suggest Adobe Photoshop Elements. It's less than $80US.

[arthur712]

Originally Posted by mark123

I'd suggest Adobe Photoshop Elements. It's less than $80US.

I may have to break out the piggy bank. LOl

Thanks!

[mark123]

Originally Posted by arthur712

I may have to break out the piggy bank. LOl

Man, I love photoshop. Photoshop was the reason I bought my first Mac back in 1995. It's really worth it.

If you want a free version, you can look up GIMP. I use it from time to time since my Mac is on the fritz. I use it on my Vista machine. The only problem is that it seems to really lower the image quality when shrinking and compressing the images. Photoshop seems to retain the image quality much better.

[mark123]

After posting that I realized it's been over a year since my eMac went all screwy on me. I guess I didn't snap in the video connection between the boards when I replaced the hard drive with a faster and larger unit.

I just got done stripping it to parts and putting it back together and this time the video connection made an audible snap when it connected so I hope that means it is actually hooked in now.

So far it's working 100%. I'm going to do a burn in for a couple of hours to see if it works as it should.

[Steve]

Huge files like those on your images can really bog everything down. I don't tend to notice that stuff with this connection I have now but with other connections I am sure I would.

Here is a smaller image for you.