Website for Review
http://hebrewheritage.com

Additional Comments
I am aware that I should use CSS, but I don't have a clue, how to.  All comments accepted. If possible step by step instructions and suggestions. Thanks

Welcome aboard memanni,

The site is currently using css.

Suggest you start over.

1. You have too much information on the home page and no site navigation.
Break down the information into smaller pages and then create a navigation menu for visitors to click on to get to the inside pages. You have enough information on the single page to create 30 or 40 smaller pages.

2. After looking over the page I am still unclear what the site is about.
This is one of the first things a visitor should see. Place a paragraph near the top telling them what the site is about.

3. Needless horizontal scrolling.

4. 2,995 coding mistakes.

Awaiting your response.

I suggest you download a free web template that you like and start completely over from scratch.  I hate to say something that sounds so mean, but thats just awfull.  I couldn't look away fast enough.

Thank Thank Thank You, So Far! I am going to work with what you have suggested so far. Listen, I will be around for a while, you're stuck with me now, Hope I don't become a real pain. I placed so much info on front page mostly for my reference; since I don't have the use of a gymnasium floor to spread out all the material.
Again, Thank You.

mamanni wrote:

I will be around for a while, you're stuck with me now

You would be well off to spend some time at CSS School

This will answer and guide you through the different ways to do your background and styling. By knowing the different ways will help you in understanding how you will need to style your content background so it works with your layout as well.

Search for css templates find one you like and start working with it.

Don't want you to get the idea that we are not wanting to help you, but you will need to get an understanding of CSS so that we can help you to the fullest.

If there is something that needs more explanation do not hesitate to ask. You will find that each of us has our strong and weak points, when put together we are a strong force.

Oh my, I feel sorry for both parties involved here - The student, and the SR staff.

The site... well yeah. Definitely an overhaul is in demand. I don't think there was a bottom to the page as I scrolled forever. Break that content up into many other pages.

Staff - This is the first time I heard anyone physically suggest using a template. Why? Aren't most all the templates out there made with WYSIWYG editors, packed to the hilt with table code? I would think you're doing him more harm than good.

Suggestion - Go to amazon.com and get two books. One for HTML and another for CSS. There's a lot out there, and you don't need to spend a lot of money. The most expensive books will probably be loaded with lots of stuff you don't really need, or at least might use once in your life. For those parts, you can easily get the info from various other html and css sites. Then overhaul the place. Over time, keep checking back in here for SEO tips to fine tune everything.

Templates.... wow...

Believe it or not I have shortened the page by more then 1/2. It went from a page print count of 87 to a count of 32.

Kind of like the Blog idea, I think I may try to develop the site from that angle, actually placing the data in smaller junks in a web journal page. 

You mentioned Javascript, which led me to look up the meaning. I have a few web design books but most never really made sense until I started talking to you guys; now it does. The best book is Web Design in a Nut Shell by
Jennifer Niederst.

TY for the comments, keep them coming.

Don't forget that you have a lot of keyword competition out there, including some of the major media outlets.  You'll need to leverage every drop you can (fair and square, of course! ), such as placing alt-tags with your pictures, mouse-over text, etc. as well as fixing your description and adding a meta tag for your keywords.  You'll need to change the title for each page and alter your keywords accordingly.

You mentioned you cut the site down from 87 to 32...you need to now cut down each page length to no more than 2 or 3 pages.  Feed your visitors the information you are publishing in smalller bites, as previously mentioned, especially since your published topic of discussion can be challenging to absorb.  Not everyone is like Tom Saywer's aunt (who read the bible twice, I believe) and many of your visitors may not be familiar with Hebrew heritage and history.  You may end up with a 1,301 page site, but you can always attach an internal search engine and site map to help encourage people to stay within your web site.

If you have really printed out all 32 pages, I would suggest considering the good old-fashioned cut and paste technique used before the invention of ctrl-x and ctrl-v.  Get a roll of scotch tape, pick out an empty wall in your home and start sorting through what you have, posting various information on the wall under various core classifications (such as "evidence", "supporting evidence" and "referring source"?).  You have a lot of visual graphics, can they be displayed from within a gallery structure?  Do they belong on the side bar or can they be unique to a specific page? 

Maybe think about how puzzles work and how you will pour the picture/vision in your mind into a web site.  You may not get everyone to agree with all you display, but if your goal is that all visitors walk away at least understanding what your core message is, then you get to possess the obligatory faith they will make decisions for themselves on how they want to treat the information and adjust from there.

Nice job on this draft and am looking forward to seeing what you come up with next!

MajorMelody (quoted)
Nice job on this draft and am looking forward to seeing what you come up with next! [/quote]

Please go to http://hebrewheritage.squarespace.com/t … ds-people/

I tried this and kind of like it though it is a cut and paste line to make separations.

It shortens the front page by at least 95% and allows viewers an opportunity  to become locked into a picture they are familiar with, while seeking more info.

I may be able to purge my narration list also by this method.

TY
Comments Please

Woo Hoo!  Nice effort!

You'll need to keep your line dividers consistent (you use a 1pt line and then it looks like an 8 or 9pt through the rest of the page) and you still have too much of a vertical scroll due to the length of materials in your side bar.  You have 40 "main" topics with all of those sub-topics...I'm thinking some type of fly-out menu would help you in these circumstances...however, I'm not sure how the search engines read such types of design...

to the avatar. Is that you in the background working away?

Yes the page does load faster now.

Still quite long, hope the length issue is something you are working on for the future site. Keep us posted with updates.

Ok, I have been toying with the idea of a directory with an internal site search box. Does anyone know of a place where I can get good code for a directory or is it a script I will have to design. I prefer a template since I have so much material to catalog and move.

Also has anyone used Adobe Go live CS 2, if so please give pros and cons. Thanks

Keep the comments coming

BTW I have designed a nice new logo banner in SJ Namo WebEditor 6 Suite, which has been upgraded.  Also I will still drop SquareSpace, it is excellent for designing blogs but more restrictive then I need. I will have a Grand Opening when the site is ready...lots of work, so little time.

Let me tell you I have gotten some great ideas from the help provided by this forum.

We really don't appreciate what we have until it's gone; you know the couple of days the server or whatever was down.

I for one am thanking God for the opportunity to be a part of this forum community.

Again it helps greatly if you review what is listed in all the forums not just ours, Site Review. This is because it allows you to hear similar perspectives and see what others have accomplished with their sites. I tell you Bill Gates was really on to something, probably to the caliber of Isaac Newton. You know NASA still hasn't figured-out some of Newton's Mathematics, but they know it is correct, and to this day they use his mathematics to send human beings to the Planets.

I have thus far moved 93 page files to a safe storage area before I cancel my present hosting and sub-hosting publishing accounts, you can read about that in earlier posts to this forum, both were restrictive and costly. Once I finish capturing all my files I will move them to a new server, create a new CSS proper page and site, and then request the site review by this forum. Again, I am hoping to make it more users friendly while capturing some of the quality features of video to flash. I am reviewing V2F it is an amazingly simple yet incredibly powerful program that takes your video and converts it to a Flash file. V2F takes your video file, compresses it and converts it to Flash. Then creates the HTML for your web site, blog, ebay auction, or wherever you want video. If anyone has pros or cons on this subject please, keep the comments coming.  http://www.easywebvideo.com/

Wanted to let you know about http://www.htmlkit.com/services/cssposter/
HTMLKit.com's CSS Poster is an online tool that can be used to generate graphical quick references for your CSS files. Check-out this page to see what I mean, it's the best thing since sliced bread for the CSS challenged.
http://www.htmlkit.com/services/cssposter/

I finished moving all 228 page files to a safe storage. I found what I needed was not a directory format (which would have been a huge amount of manual work), but an indexing service which I found at www.freefind.com. It is an indexing spider which does the heavy lifting of finding files, either on your site or on the net or both. This is a really great whole other understanding of how your pages relate to your other pages and to your links. This is another WOW, you have to go there and try it to appreciate the results. I am working on incorporating my previous voluminous navigation page with the indexing robot system as well as coding new pages as CSS. I seem to now have a Page done but with errors problem to fix............ when I preview in IE. 

I think some will be delighted with the new site, though I am not comfortable publishing just yet.

Another Issue
If someone could help me think this through...I have a web host (canaca.com) and a publishing host (squarespace.com), which can not process all the pic files or formatting I use. The publishing host caches my previous website pages by module number. So I am trying to understand IF I will be able to retain the publishing host and still FTP publish with the main host, so that I do not have to recreate the publishing host module identified pages.

Meaning will I have to reverse direct the publishing host back to the original FTP server; and keep both active. Will this allow me to keep the cached module pages active?

I want to publish FTP, with two (2) servers involved in the process. The site will be published on the (1) canaca server, while the page links will come from the (2) squarespace server.

If anyone can help PLEASE
Keep the comments coming

Clean Up Your Code

http://www.carymiller.net/clean-up-your … ore-money/

I found this link just recently and thought it was a splendid article for us tweakers, tinkerers and wannabee bloggers, with regard to something near and dear to our hearts, clean validated HTML code.

Sidebar: I for one am amazed that the string of words would even show up in the address bar.

She's still got 38 errors (on the Cary Miller site).  Obviously she hasn't reached our level of obsessive-compulsiveness yet!   

I'm So Proud, from 2995 coding mistakes to 38 errors

I agree you have come along way with your coding

Question though -

Steven_A_S wrote:

She's still got 38 errors.   

memanni wrote:

to 38 errors

Are we seeing the same page?

I see the following;
Result: 9 errors / 227 warnings

line 13 column 1 - Warning: <meta> element not empty or not closed

line 14 column 1 - Warning: <meta> element not empty or not closed

line 16 column 1 - Warning: <meta> element not empty or not closed

line 17 column 1 - Warning: <meta> element not empty or not closed

line 18 column 1 - Warning: <meta> element not empty or not closed

line 19 column 1 - Warning: <meta> element not empty or not closed

line 20 column 1 - Warning: <meta> element not empty or not closed

line 21 column 1 - Warning: <meta> element not empty or not closed

line 22 column 1 - Warning: <meta> element not empty or not closed

line 23 column 1 - Warning: <meta> element not empty or not closed

line 32 column 1 - Warning: <body> unexpected or duplicate quote mark

line 32 column 1 - Warning: <body> attribute with missing trailing quote mark

line 43 column 1 - Warning: missing </h1> before <dd>

line 32 column 1 - Warning: <dd> isn't allowed in <body> elements

line 44 column 1 - Warning: inserting implicit <dl>

line 32 column 1 - Warning: </dd> isn't allowed in <body> elements

line 46 column 1 - Warning: inserting implicit <dl>

line 46 column 1 - Warning: discarding unexpected </dd>

line 47 column 1 - Warning: discarding unexpected </h1>

line 69 column 1 - Warning: missing </h1> before <p>

line 72 column 1 - Warning: discarding unexpected </h1>

line 74 column 1 - Warning: missing </h1> before <dd>

line 59 column 1 - Warning: missing </div> before <dd>

line 75 column 1 - Warning: inserting implicit <dl>

line 78 column 1 - Warning: discarding unexpected </h1>

line 75 column 1 - Warning: missing </dl> before </div>

line 32 column 1 - Warning: <dd> isn't allowed in <body> elements

line 80 column 1 - Warning: inserting implicit <dl>

line 89 column 1 - Warning: missing <dd>

line 91 column 47 - Warning: missing </div> before <dd>

line 92 column 1 - Warning: inserting implicit <dl>

line 99 column 1 - Error: <st1:city> is not recognized!

line 99 column 1 - Warning: discarding unexpected <st1:city>

line 100 column 1 - Error: <st1:place> is not recognized!

line 100 column 1 - Warning: discarding unexpected <st1:place>

line 102 column 1 - Warning: discarding unexpected </st1:place>

line 103 column 1 - Warning: discarding unexpected </st1:city>

line 105 column 1 - Error: <st1:country-region> is not recognized!

line 105 column 1 - Warning: discarding unexpected <st1:country-region>

line 106 column 1 - Error: <st1:place> is not recognized!

line 106 column 1 - Warning: discarding unexpected <st1:place>

line 108 column 1 - Warning: discarding unexpected </st1:place>

line 109 column 1 - Warning: discarding unexpected </st1:country-region>

line 110 column 690 - Error: <st1:country-region> is not recognized!

line 110 column 690 - Warning: discarding unexpected <st1:country-region>

line 111 column 1 - Error: <st1:place> is not recognized!

Sorry about any confusion, I was talking about Cary Miller's page.

I know this will give some a well needed good laugh, but I am redesigning the site for Mobile Web devices. Further I intend to make it WC3 Mobile compliant, which is currently in Working Group status for Best Practice and Device,etc; which means there really ain't no standard yet! We all know WC3 is the Best and when Mobile standards is complete, it will be the Global standard.

Awareness of standards is the greatest issue (as I learned from advice from Site-Reference.com), especially with those tenny-tiny fonts, graphics and with regard to caching and bandwidth.

The stats according to WC3 are staggering regarding users of Hand Held Devices, to the year 2015. These users will be goal-directed, requiring specific information about their current undertaking or concern. Note to Self: Typically mobile users are less interested in lengthy documents or in browsing. 

This is a One Web issue, whereby content should be accessible on a range of devices irrespective of differences in presentation capabilities and access mechanism. Web sites may paginate their content in various ways corresponding to differences in device characteristics; therefore the navigation structure of the site, and possibly its technical realization, may vary according to the device class that is being served. WOW ...brief excerpt WC3 

Three  HUGE bits of info.

1.  http://www.w3.org/2006/Talks/mwbp-ac-tutorial.html#3) Why does the Mobile Web matter?

  2.  http://validator.w3.org/mobile/ W3C Mobile Web Best Practices checker (Beta)  Note: This tool is a beta release of a Mobile Web Best Practices checker. It is known to be incomplete, as it doesn’t cover all the best practices (34 of the 60 best practices - see more details). The validity of the reports it makes has not been assessed by the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group yet. The tool is a beta release!

  3.  http://www.w3.org/QA/Tools/#validators  WC3 QUALITY ASSURANCE Tools
This page lists some of the tools provided by the W3C in the domain of Quality Assurance: validators and other test tools. Almost all of these tools are web-based, are available both as downloadable source, and as free services on the w3.org site.

Just like this site, the help we get should be the best!

OK stop laughing