Website builder

well…for one thing usually sites dont span from one side of the page to the other, usually just some space un between (such as this page!)

Also…just a tip for the thumbnails, you should resize them in image software and post the resized ones as thumbnails so it doesn’t take forever for the thumbnails to load.

1. know your audience
make something appealing to them, something that looks decent but goes with the content that you have

For example, if you want smaller children for it you probably want happy, bright colors. That is a very bad example btw, I’m not feeling very thoughtful at 2 AM in the morning.

2. make your information appealing
right now, your information is kind of bland

3. use better typography
although everyone will have different fonts, there are some universal default faults which you can utilize. Different font sizes work with different fonts. For example, Verdana looks awful at any size greater than 11px for some reason.

4. color intensity contrast
have some contrast but not too much. Use a good color scheme (pick good colors).

5. use background-images and other neat things
Using a repeating background pattern of some sort will make a site look better. Solid backgrounds are very dull, even a 4×4 pixel square where it’s checkboard will be more interesting than a solid color.

6. functionality vs artistic
There is a line between an artistic site and a functional site, however, you can make an artistic site functional. You can make an artistic site not function at all. Ideally, you would want a site that’s easy to navigate [a menu in the right place and in wide-view] but also an art style. Information should flow easily.

The “source” I list is a very good site for inspiration.

The first thing I can suggest is to create thumbnails of all your gallery images so that the gallery pages don’t take so long to load and don’t take up so much memory. I would also suggest reducing the quality of the full size images (like an 8 or a 9 in PhotoShop) and maybe even adding a watermark to protect your images from copyright infringement.

I would also say the site needs more color. Various shades of gray don’t do much to peak my interests. I would recommend embedding all your CSS styles in the .css file, that way it’s easy to reuse on each of the pages and you only have to change it in one place to change the entire site.

A quick and easy trick to protect your images from being downloaded would be to create a transparent gif 1px x 1px (call it something like spacer.gif). Set the artwork as the background image for a 1 x 1 table and then in the table cell place the spacer.gif and size it to match the size of your image. While this trick won’t protect you from more knowledgeable people, it will prevent the average person from saving the image to their computer.

I would also suggest adding a robots.txt to your main directory to prevent Google, Yahoo, and other search engines from indexing the contents of your various image directories. See this link:

And by the way, you need to have your images in sub directories to help better organize your site. It works basically the same as the file structure on your computer. If you have all the files in the main directory, it’s basically like having all the image files on your desktop rather than in a folder.

If you plan to add a lot of images to the site, you might want to consider leaning/using PHP and MySQL so you can store the images (or image URL) in a database and your pages can be built dynamically. This would save you a ton of work over having to create a unique page for every image. If you have even a basic knowledge of programming, you could be up and running with a database driven site in a weekend – even if you have to learn the basics of PHP and MySQL.