work-in-progress

[posw2ksocks]

Hi guys, I'm working on a website for my business which is hosted from the comfort of my room and I'd like to get your feedback on it. The url is http://streetvogue.com and I'm running freebsd 4.8 with apache. My website is a homegrown B2C setup. I do not know much about html or linux/unix and I wanted to have complete control over my server and not have to pay for hosting fees, etc. I know there are some major drawbacks to managing everything myself especially since I'm so new to the open-source world but it is rewarding to see something you work so hard on become a reality. I also figured since I'm paying for home dsl I should utilize it to its fullest. Your comments are greatly appreciated, thanks!

[JamminJoeyB]

Site looks good. Simple lay out and easy to navigate. I give this site 1.5 thumbs up. It could have been 2, but you didn't have any volkswagen parts.

[posw2ksocks]

I do have vw wheels though. Thanks for the feedback. I really didn't have a choice on keeping it simple, I'm not an html guru and I can't do graphics or theme layouts if my life depended on it. LOL Trust me, I've tried to be more creative but I simply can't. *shrugs*

[JamminJoeyB]

The simpler the better. Besides the site is really fast. With many people still on 56k, that is a good thing. I think a lightweight site that gets the message out and is east to navigate will do more for you then a ton of fancy graphics.

[freemansweb]

Nice, simple and easy to use!

[theN]

Nice and Fast.

I do have one *not so important* complaint though :), I loaded the site with images turned off and I had no idea what the site was about until I read "...these wheels were made exclusively for Volkswagens" that the site was about cars accessories...

* Please consider changing your page title to "Streetvogue.com has car bodykits wheels turbos and more!" to make the site a little bit more intuitive / informative.
* Clearly mention in your Terms & Conditions page the scope of your Terms (international / USA). You don't want any visitors misunderstanding stuff.

LOL, and I don't even have a car ;)

regards
theN
ps: "designed without all the fancy graphics and flash animation" kudos to that and hope there are more your kind out there

[theN]

Its me again :)

Please consider changing "You'll experience fast and secure online shopping 24/7, provided by PayPal" to "You'll experience fast and secure online payment 24/7, provided by PayPal".

I'm got the impression that you're using Pay Pal only for payment and handling the rest of the shopping sub-system on your own.

Don't bother if I'm wrong(it happens often enough).

Best of luck with your B2C business.

best regards
theN

[malloc]

Very nice site...
It has a nice simple layout and is quite fast...
Now a litlle sugestion :D
Why don't you do a little php/mysql combo and put some search interface on the site? It's a nice thing for those people that don't like wasting time following links.

[posw2ksocks]

theN- thanks for the great suggestions! I totally agree with them and will make the changes soon. I really didn't stop to think about some of the misunderstandings that may arise with visitors from other countries. Also, thanks for the grammar lessons as my english isn't that great. That's what happens when you've been out of school for a while. :D

malloc- To be quite honest, I'm not at that level of being able to implement php/sql. I'm really new to *nix and html so I've been only doing the bare minimum with the server and html pages. I'm really pressed for time and need to get something up soon so I can start making money and paying some bills. :D Maybe once I get all the product categories filled with at least a few items then I'll sit down and learn how to integrate a search function into the whole shebang.

Thanks for the constructive criticism guys, I'm learning from them.

[mage492]

I like the clean design. The intuitive navigation was also a plus (even for us non-auto buffs). As of now, it looks pretty good with no images, as well.

As for the PHP stuff, http://www.php.net/ is a great resource to get you going. Obviously, it's not going to be a priority, right now (when you're just trying to get everything up and running). If you ever find that you're running low on reading material, though, it's a handy skill to pick up.

By the way, good job on getting all the server stuff going!

[posw2ksocks]

mage492- I've heard great things about php and I'm interested in learning more. hehe I just spent a couple of hours trying to figure out why a cgi script failed to run and as I was reading about it, the book started leaning towards fastcgi. It feels as if I wasted my time trying to learn cgi. I've briefly looked at php before but thought it was over my head. I'm really determined now, however. It seems much simpler since it's embedded in html.

[karthik]

posw2ksocks, u'r site is pretty fast for DSL. I am on a DSL too but my webserver does'nt load up so fast.

I am using dyndns.org for domain name and am on a 333mhz , 64mb ram with slack 9.0 on it. whats your config ??

pretty neat site !!

[posw2ksocks]

karthik- I think it has more to do with my hardware and the new speakeasy dsl connection. My original isp was pacbell and I upgraded the the upstream speed to 256kbps. I was also using dns2go for dns but both of these proved too unstable. There were numerous outages with both so I decided to go with speakeasy, plus, they offered a static ip so I wouldn't have to use dns2go anymore. The pkg I got was their 1.5/768KBps. It's more like 1.1/493KBps though, but I'm happy so far. My hardware is a a7n8x mobo, amd xp2500, ibm 15K scsi drive, d-link 10/100 nic, and a ultra160 scsi card. What's funny is pacbell has changed over to sbc dsl and they tried to get me to upgrade so bad for several months. I asked what exactly was changing with the service and they told me that I'd get better service *coughbscough* and more emails. hahaha There's only 1 of me so what the heck would I need with more e-mail addresses?? Well, it turns out by reading through their fine print they are now clamping down on people hosting their own servers for business purposes using a home dsl connection without paying additional fees and they would be disallowing pointing to members pics from other sites, etc. etc. Reading through speakeasy's terms of service, they seem to be the type of isp that doesn't limit what you do with your connection from webservers, emails, gaming, or whatever.

[posw2ksocks]

hey karthik, i forgot to mention something that i picked up from htmlgoodies.com about webpage authoring. If you have a lot of images it's best to define the image size in the html code so that when the page is loading, the client browser doesn't have the overhead of having to determine how much space to reserve for that image and proceeds to continue to load all the text while the image is being fetched. (ie. <img src="mypic.jpg" width="400" height="250"> instead of just <img src="mypic.jpg">) It gives your visitors something to look at immediately instead of having to wait for the image to first load followed by text. It makes your site appear faster. I hope I made sense to you.

[karthik]

hmm ..that explains it all. Thanx for the info pow2ksocks

Also i was wondering is anybody has links to tutorials regarding HTML Layer designs. It has been sometime since i designed some **good looking** webpages and one of my friends told me that you can do layers in HTML design and all.. it was kinda greek&latin for me !! do u guys have any recommendations where i might be able to pick up all these stuff ?

[posw2ksocks]

Html layering? That sounds interesting. I know about cascading style sheets (CSS) but that's the first I've heard of html layering. CSS has helped me change the look and feel of several pages by just editing 1 file, it's a serious time-saver.

[karthik]

i know, it is very useful. I was also surprised when he said we can design HTML pages in layers similar to "layers" in photoshop image editing.

Maybe i can get more details from him also and post it here .. might take some time though

[theN]

Hi

:) look around for sites with info on DHTML. AFAIK dhtml=html+css+javascript. Guess thats what karthik's pal was referring to.

Think long and hard before you go overboard with Javascript. There're no guarantees that end-user is using a js compliant browser / hasn't switched it OFF, like me ;)

regards
theN