Be gentle! On second thoughts, give it all you've got!

[A-two]

Good job! I had a quick look yesterday, and it's definitely faster for me today. One small navigation suggestion. I think people ought not to be able to leave your site without pressing that X in the top right, so I would make rentors.org calendar as a pop-up window, then when they X out of it, your site will still be underneath. As it is, once they go to availability, there's no way back. (and I'd like to know how to do it in Dreamweaver as i have the same problem amongst squillions of others).

Cheers,

[marcus]

Paul,

There is still sideways scrolling in Firerox in your homepage, but not in other pages and not in IE. Because the bottom nav bar is in a fixed width table in the other pages but not in the first page, I suppose.

I don't know about Dreamweaver but to make a window open as a new window try changing <a href=.... for <a target="_blank" href... ie insert the extra target="_blank" code
which I think should work.

Cheers
Marcus

[Ju]

Loads quicker now Paul, but the sideways scrolling is worse than it was before.

Ju

[Paul Carmel]

Thanks for all your comments so far. We're working on the captions and taglines of the photos, both good ideas. With the floor plans, it might be quite tricky as we did these in a very simple version of paint, you can't move objects within it or edit it at all really. Also we're concerned about cluttering it up. Really the reason we added a floor plan (we never had one on our previous site) is so that people can see where bedrooms are in relation to each other, and that the bedrooms are of a similar size - as well as seeing the proportions of the rest of the rooms. Also if the house is under-occupied we ask people which beds they want made up, so this will help them choose.

Anyway, we've resized a few more photos and made all the external links into pop-up windows. I've also played around with the bottom nav bar on the home page - can someone let me know how it looks in firefox? Hopefully this will have solved the scrolling issue!

Marcus, I really don't know much at all about code, in fact nil! So I'm not at all confident about moving it around. Now the speed seems to be better, is the banner & navbar downloading last really that annoying?

Thanks all, and keep the suggestions coming!

[Alan Knighting]

Joanna,

It would take far too long to explain it in detail but in Dreamweaver you can use the Property inspector and the Point-to-File icon to create links from an image, an object, or text to another document or file and have it open in a new window. The "Help" system includes it, if you can find it.

Alan

[marcus]

You still have horizontal scrolling in Firefox on the home page (on our 1024 screen). I am pretty confident it will be worse on a smaller screen since your pages are set as absolute sizes ie for example 1200 pixels wide not 100% wide etc To be honest not all that many people have less than 1024 nowadays - about 10% I think from our statistics. Ju, do you have a smaller screen resolution perhaps? If I was you Paul if you can't change it I'd just get rid of the menu at the bottom, since it's quite a small page anyway. Others will disagree

As you say the problem with the main menu downloading is less important now. And I still know nothing of Net Objects Fusion but it sounds like you've solved that 'new window' problem anyway.

The paradox is that Frontpage, Dreamweaver, Net Objects and others generate such overcomplicated code that it deters you (naturally) from touching it or even looking at it, when really the code doesn't need to be complicated at all. C'est la vie.

Cheers
Marcus

[Paul Carmel]

The nav bar at the bottom is history.....How's the scrolling?

[marcus]

No scrolling at all now, that's better.
And people with lower resolution screens must be used to it anyway, ha ha.
Cheers
Marcus

[centime]

Paul: Looking better all the time, but I think that the black on white text although really sharp is a little tiring on the eyes. It would really look great to have the font text in a mid to dark but distinctive grey, this would look OH so good with your grey background side bar.
Mary

[Paul Carmel]

Mary, that's an inspired idea! The only shade of grey we seem to be able to use for text is too light, but we've found a grey-ey blue which looks good to us. We've just changed the text on the homepage only and uploaded it - what do you think? Also is colour something which varies between browsers and if so, how does it look for other people?

Thanks again, we'd never have thought about that!

[marcus]

paul

go to http://colorblender.com/

make / find a colour you like and note the three numbers for rgb

go into your code if you can't do it somewhere else and do a find and replace - your current colour is:

rgb(0,0,102)

you can replace this with whatever you colour you have chosen. nothing wrong with the one you've got though.

cheers

[A-two]

On availability, am I the only one getting two empty pop up windows, one of which resolves, the other disappears?

Thanks for Dreamweaver and code tips.

[Alan Knighting]

Alan,

Nope! I don't notice anything missing on any of the pages.

Alan

[julesb]

Hi there

Gut reaction is that the site looks really good - very professional. We have a really slow snail connection but I didn't find the photo up-load too bad - must be because it is nearly midnight

Because the body text came up first I started reading that, then the side photos kicked in so I scrolled across so I could see them. Then when it had all loaded I scrolled up + down to look at first page + then that was it - I couldn't get into the site. I wondered if the site was only one page long but thought it couldn't be because I had read a couple of reviews before hand which were full of praise - so I thought there must be more to this.

Basically what had happened was that because I had scrolled right to see the side pictures, when I scrolled up your links column on the left hand side was totally lost. Had I been doing a holiday search and had not read the reviews which made me know there had to be more to the site, I would have given up and shut the site down.

Now you might be thinking - dozy woman, but there again I could easily have been a dozy potential customer who got frustrated and went away. I also know that my husband gets really irrate if he has to scroll left to right to see a whole page and have witnessed him click off a site just because of this issue.

But I have to say - despite the above - I wish my site lokked even a quarter this good!!!

Jules

[marcus]

Just to let you know the site still worked fine here in IE and Firefox so this isn't a problem for everyone. Jules I asume you are saying that when you scrolled left again at the top, the menu had disappeared but the space for the menu was still there? Or you couldn't scroll left at all? If so if possible you will need to tell Paul what screen resolution and browser you were using, PC or Mac, do you have Javascript enabled etc etc if possible so he can identify if there is a problem.
Problems like this are extremely irritating - I had a similar problem recently where all seemed fine here but then Alan told me the site often didn't load on his PC - it is very hard to solve a problem if you can't replicate it!
Cheers
Marcus