wedding website

[jben_net]

Hi All,

I've been building a website over the last couple of weeks to help get my wedding photography business rolling. Its not complete yet but I think its getting there slowly.

The thing that was the biggest challenge wasn't building it, but getting it to rank highly on google. Currently its on page 9 of a goole search but it is coming up through the ranks (last week it wasn't even registering)

Anyway, for those who would like to check it out you can find it at:

http://www.gracewed.com.au

Cheers,

James

[jben_net]

Oh and I've built it on a mac, havn't tested it on PCs yet, or other browsers besides firefox and safari. If there are any faults on it when being viewed on a PC, would someone let me know? Cheers

[Geoff]

James - wish I had your web development skills - the site is simple and elegent. Congrats Works fine on PC with FF.

[sirhc55]

James - simply delightful

[radar]

James,

really the site, like Geoff said simple and elegant.

I do have a few little points

On your home page, I find there is too much scrolling. Cut it back so that it only fit on the one screen and have a seperate "about us" where you can expand on it. You want to grab their attention quickly so they stay.

I like the way your gallery works, very smooth. Initially when you have only two galleries, don't leave the empty spaces for the other ones, sort of says you haven't done much if you have empty galleries.

In the packages section, I would like to see a set of quick link to each package at the top of the page.

In your private login, I would recommend you just prompt for username/password instead of clicking on a date. As you have more weddings, your list will become harder to manage. I guess this is still beta as your dates don't have a proper link on them, still refer to file areas on your mac.

Anyway, just some nit picking on my part really, I still think it is a very nice web site

Cheers,

André

[jben_net]

Heath has helped me with supplying lots of the images...

He will also be helping me with shooting weddings for a while. I'd like to take all the credit, but I guess I can't My main input for this is the design and coding.

[jdear]

ok a couple of things...

your SlideShowPro (flash gallery) its controls stick out over the bottom of your iframe see screenshot...



also your text links at the bottom of each of your content pages... some of them dont link correctly...

eg the packages link tries to find the page at: http://www.gracewed.com.au/contact/pack ... kages.html

rather it should be:
http://www.gracewed.com.au/packages/packages.html

so test each of these links and assign them the correct properties.

your contact form seems to work correctly, but when no values are put in the fields it displays this text...

Error
No email was sent due to an error.

403 No variable substitutions in template

/home/gracewed/public_html/emailtemplate.txt

cgiemail 1.6

oh and clicking on private gallery date links doesnt do anything (not yet complete?)

other than that, great layout and easy to navigate... some gorgeous images! well done!

- using PC, XP SP2, FF

for PC, XP SP2, IE 7 - same as above ans also m$ puts a 'click to activate' box around the flash gallery. (documented problem when using flash in ie.)

regards,

Jonathan

[jben_net]

cool thanks for the input guys.....

and radar, I will take your opinion on board - what your saying makes a lot of sense and I think that it will help me make the site better...

[jben_net]

Ahh ok great - I've fixed the images in slideshow pro - there was a problem with permissions and it was not refreshing changes that I was making in the backend.

Thanks for the info re. the links. I've changed the site tree quite heavily yesterday to allow for each page to have its own folder - soon I want to have a seperate slideshow for each section..

I guess the "update all links" section in dreamweaver doesn't work that well - or maybe its something I'm doing wrong.

I'll go back and patch this up.

The private galleries are not yet complete as I havn't done a wedding recently to put in there - there are a lot of "Dummy" links to make it look a bit more substantial

The whole website is xhtml complient apart from the page with slideshowpro - for some reason the javascript file that i use to embed the flash with doesn't work so well with it so I've reverted to the standard flash was of embedding with the <object> and <embed> tags.

[jdear]

I guess the "update all links" section in dreamweaver doesn't work that well

I think when your opening links from inside an iframe, they screw-up... Id manally edit them to point exactly where you need them - http://www.gracewed.com.au/contact.html

DW isnt smart enough!

J

[jben_net]

Oh I forgot to tell you - I'm not using iframes - I did at the beginning, but didn't like the white flash that you'd get when jumping to a new page - didn't look quite right against the darker background.

[jdear]

oops... just CSS
... nice!

J

[myarhidia]

The thing that was the biggest challenge wasn't building it, but getting it to rank highly on google. Currently its on page 9 of a goole search but it is coming up through the ranks (last week it wasn't even registering)

Hi James,
you're getting more than enough feedback on your web design & layout so I'll give you a few pointers on search engine ranking.

google, yahoo, etc index your website & update their indexes at ad-hoc times. As a rule of thumb, google is approx 8 weeks. When you make changes, give it time for the search engines to re-index & re-rank your site.

Although flash & images are fantastic for a people point of view, it's useless for indexing. Make sure your "alt text" is something that SE can index, e.g. use the word "wedding" instead of "top left" as the alternate text on your image.

Get legitimate and valid websites with a link to yours. Make sure you don't subscribe to any of those URL whorehouses as they will have a negative impact on your ranking. If you know other photographers or other people in the wedding industry (flowers, dresses, cakes, etc) get a link from their site to your.s

Google "search engine optimisation". You will find a plethora of information that will assist.

regards

[jben_net]

Yes the alt tag is something that I could def. improve on. I've spent about $250 on buying links - all from relevent sites - nothing compared to some of the link packages - I've seen some one links package at $3k but I'm sure it gets much more expensive than even this

[Geoff]

James - built on a mac eh?
Nice one - which mac do u own? They certainly aren't cheap but all the cool geeks in design use macs right?

[myarhidia]

Yes the alt tag is something that I could def. improve on. I've spent about $250 on buying links - all from relevent sites - nothing compared to some of the link packages - I've seen some one links package at $3k but I'm sure it gets much more expensive than even this

Ouch.....
I was actually referring to exchanging links, i.e. I'll link to your website if you link to mine, different businesses with same target customers.

[jben_net]

ahh ok yeah I think i got you the first time i just went off on a tangent like I sometimes do i need to find some people willing to exchange links with. Do you think having your website in your signiture on forums like this can actually help your page rank?

[myarhidia]

Do you think having your website in your signiture on forums like this can actually help your page rank?

Does absolutly nothing for you. If you have a look at this file http://dslrusers.com/robots.txt this website is instructing robots not to index it.

[jben_net]

oh ok - thanks for that.... I suppose it's a good thing really, otherwise we would get lots of people posting just to up their PR....

I suppose most forums do this?

[mark]

Firstly nice build and design, simple and easy on the eyes.

list it here http://dmoz.org/
other than submitting to all the search engines you can think of, basically this is all I do when search engine optimising a website for a client. I don't have many clients but the ones I do rank in the first page of Google results for the words and phrases targeted.

Also as myarhidia has said read the Google webmaster guideline pages http://www.google.com.au/support/webmasters/

Make sure your alt tags are descriptive and that your page titles contain words or phrases that people may search for you with. Also make sure that on each page there is a link to your home page and that you have at least one text link to each page on your site that is no deeper that one click from the home page (best way to do this is a simple site map with text only links to all of your pages).

Make sure that you have no broken links including images, search engine crawlers seem to stop crawling when they find a broken link.

As a suggestion, keep a word doc with all your urls in it and simply cut and paste them into the code as an when you require them, changing links sitewide can be a bit of a hit and miss affair sometimes.

Lastly, if you haven't already. Learn to read code! Search engines like clean code. For this reason I mostly code straight into the code view in dreamweaver rather than use the design tools. For some reason Dreamweaver has a habit of dropping alt tags or even placing them in the wrong place in your html along with a few other glitches.

Hope this is of some help to you, good luck with it all. Don't hesitate to PM me if you want any clarification or other help.

Regards

[jethro]

This is fantastic and very candid. congrats on a terrific site
J

[jben_net]

sweet... I've just listed it at dmox.org

I listed it at a similar site a couple of weeks ago.

All the links are fixed now... and thanks for the input.

[firsty]

to help with searching
go through all the yellow pages in the complete area you are targeting and make a single reference page for every wedding service in the area.
list every single florists, reception center, catering, church, car hire, dress maker, celebrant, etc. (list all photographers who don't do weddings)
make sure you list the suburb in every address
that way you will build up a page full of suburb and relevant search references
so if some one searches "reception center port Stevens" they will find a page with the word reception x 35 , center x 40 , port x 20 , Stevens x 12 and your page will be near the top if not at the top of the list
lay the page out so that it will be a handy guide for everyone who is having a wedding in the area
repeat the information by grouping all the services in an individual suburb together under that suburb name as well as all locations for each service under that service name
if you build it using a php data base you can make separate pages that calls the same data for each service or area. then make up a link array page to tie it all together for the search engines
make sure you send the search engines into all the relevant pages using you robots.txt file
don't forget add sample photos and lots of your info to the pages, it is your advert after all

this is a first attempt site I made with one data base and about seven very basic pages http://www.eyespy-webcams.com/ note the link array at the bottom to every web-cam in the site (one line of code creates the whole array)

hope this helps

[Glen]

Keith, is easyscrew your website?

[firsty]

Keith, is easyscrew your website?

the sales website is mine but I didn't invent the product

[ozimax]

James - built on a mac eh?
Nice one - which mac do u own? They certainly aren't cheap but all the cool geeks in design use macs right?

Geoff, my son just purchased a brand new Macbook in USA for $995 (USD) with extras thrown in, brilliant machine and now cheap too.

James, your website is simple and A1 in every respect. Could you please design one for me, I will pay you in coffee!

Max

[jben_net]

wow thanks for that search related info firsty - will def. get to this when i have a chance..

oh and i have an older 17 inch laptop mac if you wanted to know geoff.

those new intel ones have me salivating, but like you said, they are certainly not cheap

thanks for the flattery ozimax - it would get you far if i wasn't so busy

[wendellt]

James

sorry i missed this
excellent body of work on your site
and the site design is clean and simple too so i see you have the designers eye

if you want better ratings in google you need more sites to link to you

[Laurie]

Excellent Site.

If you dont mind me asking, how did you get by business wise without a website in the past. obviously judging from the website you have had at least 3 weddings. how have people found out about you? word of mouth? yellow (white?) pages? shop front?

just interested.

also what gear? (nikon )

[jben_net]

Hey.


Thanks for the feedback wendell

Laurie,

I use nikon And my d200 will be arriving any day now

Umm every wedding so far has been friends or family. Also the images are a combination of Heath Bennetts (my brother) and my own. Stuey and Heidi's wedding was all my images.

I really want to turn this into something commercial. We'll see how it goes.

Cheers

[Laurie]

well best of luck with it.