Updated Website - What Do You Think?

[particle]

I've been working on an updated website for many months now, but only got around to replacing my old site just last week. This new site will allow for a shopping cart purchase system, instead of the old order form I used previously. I'm hoping the instant-pay isn't a turn-off to repeat customers, and I hope new customers won't mind it either...

Anyway, what do you think? Anyone see any room for improvement?

http://www.adamsleatherworks.com/

[Northmount]

Home page came up okay. I attempted to navigate to Products - Belts, no response, then a database error, then could not reconnect. Using Firefox 13.0.1. (Using a 25 Mbps connection.)

Edit: It just came back up, looks great.

CTG

Edited July 9, 2012 by northmount

[particle]

Interesting - thanks for looking. I have been messing with the site over my lunch break, so maybe that had something to do with it. I just checked the belt page and it came up fine, albeit a little slow - the ecommerce plugin is rather slow and heavily embedded into the template file so not much I can do about it.

I need to update the gallery page too - it's pulling too many images onto the same page and taking way too long to load.

[Cyberthrasher]

The whole thing looks great though. Admittedly, I didn't take a lot of time to analyze individual aspects, but it looked very professional. But, it irritated me too since I'm working on my own site right now and I'm actually having to learn some coding that I never wanted to learn in order to get it done.

[particle]

I hear ya! I used to enjoy playing with the code, so long as I was surrounded by people that knew a lot more than me so I could get coding help. That's when I gave Concrete 5 a try, which is what I used on my previous site. This new site uses Wordpress. It's pretty simple to learn, and there are a lot of great looking templates out there. If you're not super stoked to do your own coding, you owe it to yourself to try a CMS website.

[RMB Custom Leather]

Looks good! What shopping cart did you use? Both of mine are also wordpress sites. The site ran slow but I have the same problem so I understand. My hosting had some instructions on how to speed mine up, just haven't got around to it yet.

Edited July 10, 2012 by RMB Custom Leather

[particle]

Thanks! It's woocommerce. I've tried all the stuff I could find, which helped a bit. Www.gtmetrix.com gave it a B speed rating last I checked, but it fluctuates a bit.

[Cyberthrasher]

I hear ya! I used to enjoy playing with the code, so long as I was surrounded by people that knew a lot more than me so I could get coding help. That's when I gave Concrete 5 a try, which is what I used on my previous site. This new site uses Wordpress. It's pretty simple to learn, and there are a lot of great looking templates out there. If you're not super stoked to do your own coding, you owe it to yourself to try a CMS website.

That's actually what I'm doing right now. I'm using Umbraco CMS on my own server. I decided to get acquainted with it because our new web-admin on campus is going to use it for our new web server deployment. Since I'm the network/server administrator, I need to be more familiar with it than just knowing how to run the database and the hardware/OS. I've spent the last week trying to figure out how to get a somewhat nice looking lightbox gallery working and finally got it figured out last night (with a compromise on the gallery package, but I can learn more and change it later). It's a lot harder when you don't know anything about web design and the different languages that go with it

Umbraco is pretty powerful since you can have complete control over EVERYTHING and not just what the application designers have allowed you to change.

[bluesman1951]

Thank you this was a treat . I went every where tried all the stuff and it worked flawless .Watched the videos and found them very informative and very well done . Only one comment : No need to tell any one you do this in your garage . Your work speaks for itself .You have my compliments and a standing ovation from me . Bluesman1951

I've been working on an updated website for many months now, but only got around to replacing my old site just last week. This new site will allow for a shopping cart purchase system, instead of the old order form I used previously. I'm hoping the instant-pay isn't a turn-off to repeat customers, and I hope new customers won't mind it either...

Anyway, what do you think? Anyone see any room for improvement?

http://www.adamsleatherworks.com/

[Cobra Steve]

Hi Eric. Looks really good to me. Easy to navigate and easy to understand. Good job! Steve