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Sara*s Pixel Studio

Hello to all the willing website critics out there! I would like to submit my site(s) for your consideration and critique.
My website is Sara*s Pixel Studio (http://saraspixelstudio.com) and it is the umbrella company/headquarters for my three avenues of expertise:
-My Pixel Shoppes where I offer custom website design services
-My Pixel Creations where all of my graphics and pre made items are sold
-My Pixel Prints where customers can find full service professional printing
I designed all of these sites myself and it has taken me nearly two years to get this far in business. Pre-January 2009 I operated under one website but things were very cramped and hard to find so I split them up into more visitor-friendly sites (at least I hope so).
75% of my business generates from these sites (the other 25% comes locally from word-of-mouth) so these sites are VERY important to my business and I wish to put my best foot forward.
I would love advice on SEO, organization strategy, copy and ideas for more products/services.
So essentially I`m asking for a 3-in-1 critique. If you aren`t up to critiquing all three please feel free to just do one. Thanks in advance!!
~Sara Brooks
Owner/Designer for Sara*s Pixel Studio
My website is Sara*s Pixel Studio (http://saraspixelstudio.com) and it is the umbrella company/headquarters for my three avenues of expertise:
-My Pixel Shoppes where I offer custom website design services
-My Pixel Creations where all of my graphics and pre made items are sold
-My Pixel Prints where customers can find full service professional printing
I designed all of these sites myself and it has taken me nearly two years to get this far in business. Pre-January 2009 I operated under one website but things were very cramped and hard to find so I split them up into more visitor-friendly sites (at least I hope so).
75% of my business generates from these sites (the other 25% comes locally from word-of-mouth) so these sites are VERY important to my business and I wish to put my best foot forward.
I would love advice on SEO, organization strategy, copy and ideas for more products/services.
So essentially I`m asking for a 3-in-1 critique. If you aren`t up to critiquing all three please feel free to just do one. Thanks in advance!!
~Sara Brooks
Owner/Designer for Sara*s Pixel Studio
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Comments
What did you use to create the sites? Also, I am curious to why do you recommend GoDaddy for the domain registration but not their hosting? I have over 100 domains registered and hosted there and I am extremely pleased with their service.
Thank you so much for your critique!
For the home page and My Pixel Shoppes I used plain old HTML/CSS. For My Pixel Creations and My Pixel Prints I use Zen Cart and put in my own graphics and CSS to match.
Typically the websites I design are hosted on sites that have the shopping cart built in (ShoppePro/Papa Shop) in which the customer only needs to buy a domain name, but I never considered their hosting for information sites. I will add them to the hosting list
As for the menu drop downs are there too many different drop downs or just too many options under each? What could I do differently?
Thanks again for taking time to review my sites!!!
~Sara Brooks
I recently upgraded computers and realized the color schemes were a bit bright and have slowly been working to correct them. Apparently my old computer had a dim resolution or something. Anyway I will try to correct this soon.
As for the text I`m having a hard time with the sizes. 14pt on one browser looks good but terribly small on another. Any suggestions or particular problem areas?
Thanks again!
~Sara Brooks
Some people also set a fixed body font size in their css, then the classes for different fonts are set at a percentage of the fixed font.
~Sara Brookssaraspixels3/10/2009 8:56 PM
Re: GoDaddy hosting - their hosting does cause some problems with various scripts (like ZenCart).
~Roland
Thank you for your critique!
It shifts because of the black border I have set for the mouseover. I couldn`t figure out a way to keep it from shifting. Any ideas?
~Sara Brooks
Thank you for your critique!
It shifts because of the black border I have set for the mouse over. I couldn`t figure out a way to keep it from shifting. Any ideas?
~Sara Brooks
Border shift - you can try adding a white border with the same dimensions to the <a> style or changing the margin on the <a hover> style. OR use a different mouse over approach... like the one I used on this CPA website or swap out the image.
~Roland
I`ve changed the images to use a simple mouseover script so the page doesn`t shift now. Thank you for your suggestions!
Robert,
Thank you for pointing those errors out! Both were caused when I moved my sites around. I`ve fixed them both. Please let me know if you find any other errors or have any other suggestions.saraspixels3/11/2009 1:52 PM
To anyone else interested in critiquing my site(s) please feel free to do so
Your fun,
creative style comes across and prospects can see some diversity from
that in your portfolio. As someone that is in mid-creation of the
public pages of my site, when I looked for web/graphic design, I liked
actually visiting the websites because the thumbs were too small -- so maybe add a link to the different domains. Some graphics for your business cards, envelopes, etc would be a nice add too.
I understand the time involvement. My tool for the real estate industry, UpdateLane, is two years in development. I finally launched the beta in January but it`ll be a while until all functionality is done and I start billing for the service.
All the best,
Dan