Handmade Ecuadorian Jewelry

patasarriba

http://www.caipocha.com

This is the website I just made and have almost finished, it exhibits my work and my two best friends' work. I know the design is still very simple, but I kind of like the idea of keeping graphics to a minimum so that people in countries with slower Internet can still enjoy it. Anyway, constructive criticism of any sort would be very much appreciated. Thanks!

benjad

it's a very simple appearing site, which can be good when you are selling art.. since teh user will focus on your artwork instead of a flashy site... a few things to consider.

- Can't return to home page after leaving it. Turn the "Caipocha
Handcrafted Jewelry" in the header into a link back to your front page.

- Can't validate because of the accented o in cristobal in the footer. http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.caipocha.com%2F&charset=iso-8859-1&doctype=Inline&group=0 Not sure how to fix that issue.

Layout uses tables and div's. Switch to 100% div's.

On the subject of trust, most people would be wary of an international sale. Put your physical address, and phone number in the footer on every page.. this helps to build peoples trust. Also, if you have a physical storefront, put some photos of that up too. A brick and mortar pictures builds more trust in your potential customers.

patasarriba

Thanks benjad!

The first thing I've got to ask is, what is "validation"? I'm very new to making websites and have never heard of that before, I'm not sure why that's important. And it's kind of messed up that you can't validate a page with an accent mark in it, so many millions of people simply have accent marks in their names.

The second thing is, how can I switch to 100% div's? I only use them because I use stylesheets. I'm not sure how to replace the tables with div's.

As for the whole trust thing, all of our transactions go through PayPal so I'm hoping that will make people feel better about everything. We don't have an actual storefront but I'm hoping to get some pictures of us selling jewelry at craft fairs.

Thanks again, this was very helpful! I'm going to make the header into a link now.

imagefree

benjad

Validation checks your code to see if it complies with the expected rules for a well formatted html/xhtml document. Most browsers are very forgiving when it comes to coding errors, some less. Worse yet, some browsers have created their own hacks, which are not part of the html/xhtml standards. Using tables for page layouts is one such hack.

There are no guarantees that the hacks will continue to be supported by the browsers that understand them today.

In order to switch to 100% divs, recreate your table set-up using div's defined in your style sheets... A few references I commonly use...

http://glish.com/css/7.asp
http://www.westciv.com/style_master/academy/css_tutorial/introduction/what_are_ss.html

And if you still don't understand exactally what style sheets do, try this: http://csszengarden.com/?cssfile=http://www.tastydirt.com/zen/sample.css

As far as building trust... Paypal is the antonym of trust. I really have yet to have a good experience with them, and would not put any money into that companies hands again.

So then best recommendation for the moment, put a physical address and phone into teh footer of each page. Don't save it for the contact page.

patasarriba

Do you really think PayPal is that bad? I've used them a lot and have never had any problems!

the6thfactor

Good overall site, it looks like you have some really amazing products on there Smile

Layout works well for your purpose

patasarriba

Thanks, I was a little worried that the layout wasn't "advanced" enough...

But I doubt that'll be much of a problem, especially since our average customer isn't a FriHost webmaster but just a regular layperson.