Websites - how to look professional cheaply

[Boo]

I'm afraid, for me, Google ads across the top of a web page is a bit of a turn off. Do you really want to be advertising someone else's Pandora beads and handmade glass beads right at the top of your own site before they've seen your own lovely work?

[AniccaJewellery]

I use Shopify which was easy to set up and is also easy to update.

just to throw a different name in the mix!

[Di Sandland]

Hello, Anicca, from the North of the County.

[lorraineflee]

Hi Annica, welcome from Bedfordshire
Lorraine

[AniccaJewellery]

Hello! sorry to just join in and not introduce myself I am an Aussie living in Devon x

[Solunar Silver Studio]

Hi Anicca! ...you really should start a thread in the Introduce Yourself section you know.... that way you will get the full forum Welcome!
Can't have people sneaking in by the back door!!

[katrina alexander]

Mr Site can be difficult to get the hang ofKatrina Alexander - Home but it is definately worth persevering. It does everything I want it to do very well and comes up in search engines too if you add the right text and metatags. I work professionally in marketing and have done lots of research on web building for companies with very large budgets. There are 1000s of companies who claim that they can build you a site but don't follow any of the necessary rules necessary to be ranked by google, or build the site properly so unless you have time to do alot of research and have around £3,500 to spend I would recommend that you try out Mr Site first - it is incredible value for money.

Good luck with it - you could always get a friend to help you if you get stuck until you get into the swing of it. Also, the help service is fantastic - rather than trawl through the help menu, just send off an email to the help desk with your query and they will answer within a day.

[Boo]

How much does Mr Site actually cost then? I never got that far. I probably pay around £70 a year for my hosting (includes the cart system) and domains.

I decided against Mr Site for 3 reasons when I was looking at something for my own site - firstly, every site looks very similar in it - even personalised they seem to have the same layout and feel. That's also true to some extent with my own, I used one of the included templates (I use CubeCart) and whilst I modded it quite a lot, it's still recognisable. But I was going to buy a custom fancy skin for it, but the friends and family who tested it for me said they preferred my test version than the one I was going to use, so I stuck with it. It's not as elegant as I had in mind, but customers say they like its clarity and ease of use.

Secondly, every site I've seen is just slightly wider than my screen res. so I always have to scroll left to right a couple of inches to see everything - I'd prefer a page to adapt to whatever screen res is viewing it, without horizontal scrolling.

Thirdly, I really dislike how it treats photos - site owners seemingly upload whatever size of photo they have available and it re-sizes it to present the photo on the screen - and does a horrible job of that process - with nasty jaggies on smooth curves etc. I've got into the habit of copying the photos to view at the original size instead, but sometimes a 6+MP image of a small piece of jewellery doesn't flatter it. I suspect that mine would do the same, but I know what size the image pop up is (and I made it bigger than the default), so I prepare my images in advance just the right size so that I can control their appearance exactly.

[mizgeorge]

Boo, a 'regular' rather than pro version of Mr Site costs anywhere from £15 to £35 for the first year (depending on where you buy it) including domain registration etc. Second and subsequent years are £35.

I don't know about the screen resolution thing - like most websites it's optimised to a screen width of 800 pixels - I think most PCs have at least that now.

As for the pictures, you're right. If you upload pictures that you've sized correctly it handles them really well, very much as you do with your own site. The problem is that few users understand this, nor do they have the technical skills or information to edit their photos well, and therefore upload whatever they've got, which then gets automatically resized to the best of the package's ability - which is rarely great. I think getting this side of things right is one of the hardest things most new online sellers have to do, with very mixed results IMO.

For what it does, I am more than happy with my Mr Site, and have actually used it for a couple of other websites I needed to create. The ease of use more than compensates for the small frustrations that come with it. I actually find the team there are surprisingly responsive to customer input (once you can get past the poor initial contact system), and they've certainly changed things very positively over the couple of years I've been working with it.

[Boo]

My screen on this desktop is 800 x 600, but Mr Site pages are always slightly too wide. On my laptop and netbook with larger screens, I'm sure this wouldn't happen, but for me to work on it day in day out here, it was an absolute deal breaker. Just looking at yours, it's about 60 pixels wider than my screen - on the right I just see the starting 'A' of the 'Add to cart' buttons and the numbers of the prices are butted right to the right of the screen when I scroll right to show them.

The images thing - I wonder how easily that could be set up to be done better? It seems reasonable if it resizes from a large image, but particularly poor if the original uploaded is not that much larger, it really makes them look poor on screen. I wonder if there are any settings that would allow it to permanently re-size to the presentation size rather than just squishing the full original onto the screen? On my Cubecart I think there are various options for handling images like this, I just opted to use the 'original' size and make mine the final size I want, so it actually does nothing to them.

But as you say, that just won't be an option for most of the very users this system is most likely to interest. It just wasn't the one for me. I tried and looked at a lot before I settled on CubeCart - which suited my own skills and ideas most closely. It was a tortuous journey getting to that decision though and it's a pretty personal process - I like how it works, the next person may well not.