[sally_in_wales]

Pics are due for re-doing, I did say they were temporary ones

I can't get the title to go any further across, it looks fine when I preview it, but stops short when it goes live

Any suggestions rather than the parchment? Personally I like it, but I'm open to suggestions that will fit the subject matter

[tahir]

If you were buying and selling maybe. The customers we sell to mark up at between 2.2-5x cost, and they're not slogging their guts out making stuff, all they have to do is order more from us....

[Chez]

Isn't it one of the things that you can produce quickly and easily to bring in profit to fund your more marginal things, though? Don't under estimate the amount of money people are prepared to spend on their pets . You could soften the blow to your conscience by doing tapering discounts for quantities?

Talking of people spending money on things I wouldn't - a friend was telling me today that there is a teddy bear's holiday service that charges £80 to host your bear for a week. Bizarre.

[MarkS]

Nah!

It is well known that cat owners are foolish and in thall to their foul animals and thus will happily spend a fortune on the most silly and useless gimic for the 'darling'

Hence all those franklin mint plates and statues etc.

[MarkS]

The table column sizes are explicit rather than %s - although you would probably be better using css.

Anything is better than parchment - imho it is the comic sans of backgrounds.

[sally_in_wales]

oh dear, I'm getting out of my depth already

[sally_in_wales]

Thanks! That makes sense now. Its not that I'm not prepared to fiddle with the html, its just that I'm the equivalent of a tourist who can only have a conversation by referring back to the phrase book to look things up every 5 seconds. What is obvious to you clever people who can look at coding and see a page isnt to me, I'm much more visual in how I work so I almost always have to start with a drag it around wysiwg then refine from there once I can see what shape the page is.

[Grimnir]

That's how I set my old site up, you can set the width to whatever figure you like. I then set the width of the left menu as absolute so it didn't alter on different page sizes.

[orangepippin]

Very good analogy!

[sally_in_wales]

Very good analogy!

[Chez]

That will help you being googled, too.

Stick a meta-tag at the top with your keywords in it, just underneath your other meta-tags that you've got there already. eg, my poultry one is:

meta name="keywords" content="utility poultry, poultry, hens, chickens, eggs, meat birds, greenmeadow poultry

Then use those words in your text.

Search-bots will pick them up and your google indexing will go up a bit if the two things tie in. The same with your 'title' tag - you've got it set to 'plaguerats', which is great - but, perhaps, you could put 'cat toys' in there, too?

If you want to, you can also stick an 'abstract' in there, which is the bit that shows up on google under the actual link. ie.

META NAME="abstract" CONTENT="Traditional utility breed chicken hatching eggs"

For your actual title, in your banner, rather than have it as ordinary text, formatted using 'span' tags, you could try sticking it in an H1 tag - google also indexes on those I believe - so if your title and your keywords AND your H1 tag all contain 'plague rats' and 'cat toys' the site will be given more weight when it's google-botted.

That's my understanding, anyway - if I'm wrong I'm sure someone will pop up and tell me .

[sally_in_wales]

good idea! Will do that now

[Barefoot Andrew]

That's useful for glaring glitches, but if you want to ensure perfect code, as vegplot says you'll need to use the W3C "validator".

Sally, go to http://validator.w3.org/ and put your address in the box. If your code is correct you'll get a message and a green box; if there are problems you'll get a red box and a list of the faults.

This is an excellent tool, but its report can be a bit "techie". For example, it's currently saying your site has 23 errors, with the first one being "NET-enabling start-tag requires SHORTTAG YES" on line 6. The actual problem is that on line 6:-

<STYLE type=text/css>BODY {

you've not included quotes around the text/css bit. It must be like this:-

<STYLE type="text/css">BODY {

I'm afraid you'll have to face up to these horribly techie error messages and fix the problems if you want your site to be a success. We can help with translation to English

Note that "23 errors" doesn't necessarily mean 23 actual problems: a single mistake can produce multiple error messages. So try fixing a few at a time, the ones where you can see the problem, and then re-validate the code.

You'll need to do this for every page in your site...

Good luck!
A.

[orangepippin]

Being a bit of an HTML purist myself I agree with this ... but most browsers will cope minor syntax muddles, so I would not go as far as to say it will compromise the success of the site. Good content is more important than HTML syntax.

[Chez]

The easiest way though, is to get page 1 perfect with the validator - and then use that as a template for subsequent pages