Website for Review
http://www.ItsyBitsyBabyGifts.com

Additional Comments
Hi Everybody,

I would love to have your opinion on my little site. I spent 6 months to put it together , I took hundreds of online courses, advices from gurus, read every book written on this subject, spent hundreds of hours on SEO.  When I started I knew nothing about website creation, never mind SEO.

I have launched it in October, now I am getting orders, without paying Google PPC.
Managed this week to get it up to PR 2.

Still lots to do, (too bad I have a real job, which does not leave me enough time to work on this new hobby of mine)  to get it up in the top, but I am determined to do so.

Please hit me with your criticisms,  bad or good, I will listen to all.

Many thanks for your time in advance.   

Suzanne

Just a quick look

Not keen on the heavy striped background...

I'd look at making an external style sheet and creating specific styles so you do not get this happening

<H1 align=center><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt">Are you searching for Unique Baby Gifts or Baby Gift Ideas?</SPAN></H1>

As you are using a site building approach, you may not have the flexibility to do this, however.

The current setup of the html means the navigation coding appears before the main text of the page, which is not ideal.

I like the fact that you include plenty of description for each item.

Thank you for your time and comments.

I have purchased the template of the site, but I am able to make changes.

The H1 was added later when I learned that it is important to have the titles with the keywords in H1. Perhaps this is why it looking a bit messy.

Would you kindly explain your comment "The current setup of the html means the navigation coding appears before the main text of the page, which is not ideal"

Many thanks.
Suzanne

Hello,

I like the name of your site,its a name that you would remember.

I did not like the brown and green striped background and every time i clicked on something new the whole screen was filled with the brown and green background.

I wondered too what safety standards your baby clothes and baby items had. I do not know what it is like in Canada but in Australia  you would not buy anything for a baby that did not reach our safety standards.

I also wondered too, as you mentioned that you had enployment, how much time was spent buying and shiping your products.

Well done on building your own website.

Janet

Thank Janet for your comments.

I will look into changing  the background, I am not sure why you get the backgrond each time you click on the items.

The products are all complies with the North American standards.

As far as products involvement,  I am only doing marketing, all items are drop shipped by the suppliers, I do not have inventory so there is no shipping  or stocking involved.  I search for the products, display them and market them. I work 14 hours a day 7 days a week in my other business and  work on my little site  at midnight.  This is my retirement project which hopefully one day gives me more freedom to travel end enjoy my grandbabies.

I appreciate you comments.

If you look at your code you will see that the code for the navigation appears before the code for the main body content.

Hat off to you for a first site, well done.

I will add that your images are on the large file size. People are impatient and want things now. People that do not have a fast internet connection will get tired of waiting for the images to load and move on to the next site. You should resize your images and optimize them for the web. Smaller images need to be properly sized and not have the coding do the resizing. Laurie has written a great article about this. Take a read of Optimizing images

I really like the look of your site but would suggest that you try to clean up your code with an external css sheet as has matte
ie replace

<DIV align=justify><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: #696969; FONT-FAMILY: Arial; BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff">

with
div id="box"

css

#box {  
FONT-SIZE: 10pt;
COLOR: #696969;
FONT-FAMILY: Arial; 
BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff;

It would take some work but your page would look and operate much smoother.
to give you an idea of problems validate your pages http://validator.w3.org/.

Your home page shows 657 Errors, 6 warning(s) dont panic a lot of these would solved when sorting css

Thank you so much for your complement and advice.

I have a very fast computer never thought that this maybe a problem,
I will definitely look into it and resize them. What size do you recommend?

Image resizing is about the size of the file, not the size of the image.

The minimum file size is the size that allows the image to be displayed clearly, without any graininess.

Many images could be in the 10-30k size.

If you read the article suggested in images, Laurie mentions a free program that will do it for you.

Can you please tell me what is external css sheet ?

CSS, this is a cascading style sheet - sounds really scary, but once you start to use them, they are great fun.

You have the main elements of the style sheet on you site already here

<style type="text/css">
<!--
body,td,th {
        font-family: Arial, Trebuchet MS, Veranda, sans-serif; 
        font-size: 13px;
        color: #655440;
}
body {
        background-image: url(http://www.itsybitsybabygifts.com/images/mainbg.gif);
        background-color: #655440;
}
a:link {
        color: #655440;
        text-decoration: none;
}
a:visited {
        text-decoration: none;
        color: #655440;
}
a:hover {
        text-decoration: underline;
        color: #E48EAD;
}
a:active {
        text-decoration: none;
        color: #655440;
}
.style1 {
        color: #FFFFFF;
        font-size: 12px;
}
.style2 {
        font-size: 16px;
        font-weight: bold;
}
.class1 a:link {
        color: #FFFFFF;
        text-decoration: none;
}
.class1 a:visited {
        text-decoration: none;
        color: #FFFFFF;
}
.class1 a:hover {
        text-decoration: underline;
        color: #FFFFFF;
}
.class1 a:active {
        text-decoration: none;
        color: #FFFFFF;


}
-->
</style>

- but you have one on each page, which means that you have to visit every page on your site to make changes - like the H1 issue.

By having it as a file of its own that every page refers to, then you have ONE file to change and the changes are then made site-wide. Cool eh!

Here is a site from Coloeagle that goes through CSS http://validwebdesigns.com/css/ - note that you can approach CSS in one of two ways:
1. To control just font sizes, colours etc
2. To control the whole layout of your site (for instance yours uses tables, whereas you can also control it using CSS coding)

One of Colo's pages has instructions of how to great an external style sheet and then reference it - its not hard. The rule of thumb when experimenting, especially when your site is live, is to create a copy of the original stuff, so if things go belly up you can easily start again from the original.

I'd suggest get comfortable with using CSS for font control first.

I liked your website - the background is the first thing to come up when doing a new page, and photos took a little while to load. Other then that, well done for first website designing. I wish mine looked so good.
Chez

Thank you for your comments.

I am looking into to resize the pictures and change the background, honestly I don't know why the background comes up first before the page.

Need some digging I think I will need some help in that.

Suzanne

In reference to allenion’s co0mments about the 657 errors, after I regain consciousness, I checked this out and I was told that I have nothing to worry about, there are 2-3 different forms of html and validator.w3 only checks one html code, if those errors in the report were actually a problem with my site and missing all of those brackets and things my site would be a huge mess. 

Apparently my site is running off of a different html pattern than they check for, that is why they give you so many errors. So, I went to a link checker that uses all forms of html and all of my links are ok.. Here is a link to the link checker I used, http://www.submitshop.com/tools/linkchecker.html
You will see that all links are ok I hope they are correct.

the link you provide is a link checker, not a code checker.
WC3 is a bit anal in the way it looks at things and my opinion is that perfect coding is not important, as long as the site displays correctly in the major browsers (IE and FF really).

For your advise, I am working on the re-sizing of the photos; I have over 600 photos, so it is a nice retirement project.

I found 2 sites giving me downloading time and page sizes, to complicate the matter further, by inserting my site in their analysis software the 2 sites give 2 very different analyses on my page size. Huge difference. One mentions 221,000 bytes the other 54,000. Interesting!

Good sites to analyse your page size, uploading time Meta tags, spider simulator and more. The best that they give you a list of the large pictures on each page.

http://www.submitplus.com/freetools.htm 
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/s

I'd not get too caught up in page size etc just yet.

Suzanne this is a good Meta tag checker

http://www.metatagscheck.com/metatagscheck.html

Don't forget Site Reference also has many tools
http://www.site-reference.com/tools.php