This is a must with flash. Always have an obvious skip button where they can by pass the flash intro. Many people don't like it, and many still can't view it. Flash takes a long time to load for those still on dial up. People will leave if they have to download something to be able to view it. Don't use flash with anything necessary for the person to be able to get around your site.

Content is king. All I know is that when I was updating my site regularly, I was getting anywhere between 50 to 100 visitors a day. Since I haven't updated since last August, I'm getting about 20 visitors a day. I need to update again though.

When I started the site I manually submitted it to all major search engines, various directories, and put it in my profile on any forums I talk on.

 

I'll agree with you on giving folks a way around the Flash. Many sites use html links at the bottom or on the side in addition to Flash buttons at the top. The issue of a lot of people being on dial-up is still a problem, but not like it was a few years ago.

CSS will make things much easier, but he's already purchased Dreamweaver and CSS is incorporated in that so making changes and applying it to every page is a snap.

You're absolutely right in that content is king. When you stop updating your ranking will start to head downward.

Someone had mentioned that Illustrator creates vector images, which it does, but that is exactly what you want. Creating a logo as a vector images allows you to modify or resize the object without it becoming distorted and fuzzy. You can create one vector logo and simply modify that for various applications. Then you can convert it to raster for things like webpage logos and such. If you create it initially as a raster image you will have to create multiple images to avoid distortion. Of course, if you plan to do any print advertising (magazines, flyers, envelopes, letterhead, etc.) you will have to have a vector image to get it printed.

If all you are doing is the website, I would have someone create a camera-ready vector logo and size it to what you need then you would have a nice, clean, crisp image for your website. No need for you to learn Illustrator and spend the money for it if all you need is one logo for your website. You can generally get this done for about 25-30 bucks.

Good luck.

 

It's been rough going. I have been using Fireworks to do most of the graphics (rollovers/Image swaps) and then I export them to Dreamweaver. Works and looks great in Dreamweaver but when I upload them to the host I get nothing, a blank page or a 404 error response.

Oh well, I'm going to keep trying. I have to be doing something wrong.

 

you'll run into that may more times :lol: :lol: :lol: keep at it. you'll get it working and all the coding bugs out. sometimes you just have to tweak the code a little

 

Well 13 days and I pretty much done. I have made 3 different site (all the same but changed to look). First was pretty basic, second was Flash but looked cheesy and took forever to load so scraped the Flash based site and came up with this: ******edit
The business isn't open yet so the inventory pages are empty and I still need to finish 2 more links. They are going to be user submissions so I need to figure out if there is a script that will store messages on the server where I can retrieve them. The server is slow since I signed up for a basic account on Godaddy but after my first month is up going to go to a bigger server with more bandwidth. I pretty much made everything thing with Adobe Fireworks and used Dreamweaver to write the script. Fireworks absolutely rules!

 

How/where you store info on the server will depend on who your host is. Chances are it will be in flat files, MS SQL, or mysql. There are other ways, but those are the big ones. All of them have security issues, so make sure you investigate them.

If you are going to do inventory and/or online selling, you might not want to reinvent the wheel. There are plenty of projects and products that already do this. At some point in time, you may want to scour http://sourceforge.net for some ideas and frameworks from which to build.

 

like your website good work