Thread: Home made website needs advice!

Hi there,

I built this website with HTML and CSS in notepad. It's for my mother's bed and breakfast business. In this day and age, I'm conscious that websites need to look really good - I'm fairly happy with this one, but it doesn't look as professional or as good as I would like. Could anyone give me some pointers on how to improve it, or even better, what tools/software (preferably on the cheaper end of the scale) I could use to make it look sleeker.

Tankerfield house bed and breakfast St. Albans

Thanks a lot!

Hi,

if its your first site, its not bad for a one off.

I would actually turn your attention to SEO, do some googling about getting your site up on the search engine pages.

Your site is pretty impressive for one built using only Notepad! That is really doing it the hard way, but I know that it is very satisfying to feel that you are in control of every bit of it.

From a technical point of view, it may be good to centre the page by surrounding the whole thing in another <div> and using auto left and right margins. Also, I noticed that your main page image took a while to load - it may be my connection, but check the file size and only make the image the size and resolution it needs to be to load quickly.

These days you will find everything is so much quicker if you use Wordpress. It is easy to use it to produce standard websites rather than blogs if you choose one of the more customisable themes such as Atahualpa.

I also agree with byronc, the SEO stuff needs attention.

Agree with the others. The coding is solid and very impressive for a first attempt. I wouldn't go investing in Dreamweaver and end up having it write code for you because it'll end up being a mess. So that is £600 saved right off the bat by having the commitment to learn code and not 'drag and drop'.

One tiny point on the code is that your list tags in the menu should really be wrapped in an unordered list tag.

Code:

<div id="navigation"> 
<ul>
            <li>Home</li>
	    <li><a href="tarrif.html">Tariff</a></li>
            <li><a href="breakfast.html">Guests' pantry</a></li>
            <li><a href="white.html">White room</a></li>
            <li><a href="red.html">Red room</a></li>
            <li><a href="green.html">Green suite</a></li>
            <li><a href="location.html">Location</a></li>
</ul>
    </div>

But that is easily sorted.

Also agree that the SEO could do with just some subtle changes. For example your h1 tag on the front page. It wouldn't hurt to change it to "Welcome to Tankerfield House Bed and Breakfast in St Albans". That just helps location searches and hits a key search term.

Other than that you are looking at perhaps doing some more interesting graphics or playing with the colour scheme a bit. GIMP is a free graphics editor that may help; GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program

Hope some of that helps.