8 replies to this topic

[Diego]

Dear Friends,
For the seventh anniversary of the Stone Pages, we decided to renew its look completely, giving you a  more complete site, more elegant, with more information and easier to use and navigate.

In the next 1-2 weeks you will probably spot here and there the new changes and we will let you know in advance - on this forum - when we will be ready to upload the new improved website. In the meantime,  here you can have a look at the new home page (still under construction - the links are not working) with the improved graphics.

Please let us know your comments, critiques and suggestions: you can post them here if you are a member of this Forum, or send them to our standard e-mail address at diego@stonepages.com.

Diego & Paola
Stone Pages

[Jimit]

Congratulations on your anniversary, keep up your good work! On visiting your new home page I thought that it looked a bit, well, grey. I know that the pictures turn to colour when you hover but the initial visuals seem to me to be a little bland considering the stunning pictures you have on this site. On my browser the site comes up with the horizontal scroll bar across the bottom which I find a tad annoying but that is just me!

[Diego]

Thanks Jimit for your suggestion. Yes, you are right: the new home page does look grey indeed, but with Paola (and other friends) we've had many discussions on how the new home page should look like. It's something related to our own personal view of those ancient places: they all look old, grey and not particularly interesting to the causal observer/visitor. But when you look at them with attention, you can easily understand that they are more than a simple bunch of gray rocks. It's a sort of revelation, if you want to, and we thought it was important to give our visitors that feeling of progressive immersion into the world of megaliths.  We know that the home page looks quite bland, but we prefer that our visitors could be intrigued by discovering this website bit by bit, instead of being presented with a series of flashy pictures (everybody is doing that on the web today; it's better doing something different to stand out).
Anyway, we are open to other point of views and please don't hesitate to post your opinion (as bad as it can be) on this thread.

BTW, now we have changed the code of the home page: can you please tell us if you are still seeing the horizontal bar?

Diego & Paola

[Arran and Emma]

It's great Diego,  I love those stones you're using as menu images. No horizontal scroll bar so far in our case. I can see what Jim means about the greyness of the page - perhaps the background could be changed from white? If not then maybe you can brighten the mouse-hover images up a bit?

And well done on not using gimicky effects, but at least if you decide to do so then you have the content to back it up.

[Diego]

Hello Arran and Emma,
Please go on with your comments, because they are very useful to pinpoint the weakest areas of our new home page. We'd like to keep the background just plain white, so we could always brighten the mouse-over images a bit, as you suggested. Can you please tell us if you are using a Windows PC? You know, we are using Macs  and usually our monitors' gamma is a bit lower (brighter) than the one in use by PCs. Actually, we are using a gamma which is a midpoint between Macs and PCs.

Just to add a little spice to the discussion, here  you can see a jpeg image of the inner pages, of course still under construction...

Thanks again for your comments and support!

Diego & Paola

[Arran and Emma]

Guilty as charged... Windows XP running Explorer 6.0 with 1024 by 768 pixels and 32 bit colour quality. Couldn't tell you about our gamma though but now agree that the white background is needed as it gives it a fresh, crisp appearnce.

Love those inner pages, pull it off and it'll look great!

[Nigel]

I hope you don’t mind a long posting, but a number of things occur to me.

I’m on Windows Me and I also still have a slider bar at the bottom, which is a bit of a distraction.

I, too, very much like the “crisp” feel, and the fact you can go to the place that interests you almost instantly. I can see the benefit of the white background, but wonder if a slightly tinted white would be better, to avoid any sub-conscious feeling that it’s not fully professional. Like the others, I am doubtful about the grey photos. I understand your 2 aims – to express a feeling that “there is so much more if you explore” and also the wish to be “different”, but for me it doesn’t work on either level. If your target audience are newcomers, rather than us regulars, perhaps it would be good to hit them hard with something spectacular, else many of them may go away to one of the dozens of other megalith sites that their search has thrown up. When I’m surfing, my attention span is very poor – I only spend a couple of seconds at a site and then I’m  off (unless my interest is immediately captured). Your strategy depends on the surfer moving the cursor, which he may not (and it takes a few seconds for the colour element to load up).

I’m wondering whether just one larger spectacular coloured  picture would be better. The Irish, French and Italian pictures may not be clear enough to excite the average visitor. The Welsh one, however, is great.

I think your choice of “megalith grey” for your title, Stone Pages, is just right and expresses the subject of the site very well.

I was also wondering about hits on search engines. I believe that many of them look for the relevant search words in the first lines or two of the first page of the site. Google does. So your site name, Stone Pages, might be better moved down a bit and you might like to amend your first few  words…Stone, Pages, Welcome, First, Web, Guide, European…since they are probably not the most likely ones that your potential customers will have searched on. I think your hits would be enormously increased if your first words on the page were something like…
Small letters:
Stone circles, ancient standing stones, megaliths, dolmens, cairns, barrows, hillforts and archaeology of Megalithic Europe:
(which has the likeliest nouns and adjectives, and repeats the word “stone” and uses Europe rather than European and mentions both megalithic and megaliths).
Large letters:
Stone Pages

In fact, if you want to do even better, perhaps you should consider that the one word that the average schoolchild in Ohio knows about megaliths is “Stonehenge” so if your first line was
Stonehenge, Stone Circles, dolmens, ancient standing stones, cairns, barrows and hillforts and archaeology of Megalithic Europe…
you’d get a very high listing, and lots more hits. You can prove this by searching Google using just Stonehenge. The top couple of sites actually have Stonehenge in their name (and you can’t do anything about that) but the next top sites (out of 440,000!) have Stonehenge as their first word.

I know that your site isn’t about Stonehenge any more than anywhere else, but truth and business rarely coincide exactly! And you could salve your conscience by being able to lead all those American  youngsters to appreciate Brittany and all the rest!

I read your copyright statement. I think you have hidden your treasure away! The concept of educational use is a great one (there’s a site just about Stonehenge that does that, but your site is far more comprehensive and authoritative). Equally, the idea of free use of the pictures and free wallpaper is a major selling point – so why not boast about those things on the home page? You could also add “see our conditions of use before using).

(Incidentally, if you don’t mind me saying so, your conditions are very long and I find them a bit intimidating! Especially the bounty!)

Finally (!!), might it be an idea to move the “forum” button to a more prominent place, for both the visitors and the search engine?
And finally, finally (!!) it’s very nice to have taken all the photos yourself, but is there any reason why you shouldn’t invite your users to submit some? I know some sites do that.

Altogether, it’s a great resource. (And the new inner page is brilliant).

( Please delete this lot, as I’ve just realized how embarrassingly long it is…)

Nigel

[Diego]

Thanks Nigel for your in-depth analysis of our new webpages: that's just the kind of feedback we need from our visitors, so we could point to the right direction.
OK, let's go with the comments:

• Can you please tell us what is your screen resolution? We have changed the HP code so it shouldn't show the slider bar at the bottom even on a 800 x 600 monitor.
  
• We too like the plain white background, but we are not afraid that it couldn't look fully professional, as Google and Apple websites (and many, many others) are using the very same background... We were just bored by the "rocky" background.
  
• Yes: nobody likes very much the grey photos. We know a single spectacular photo could grab the attention of the newcomers, but that would force us to change the basic design layout, that is now carefully balanced between the six national sections and the row of rock carved buttons. On the web you can find hundreds of other websites devoted to megaliths and almost all of them are using big splashy pictures on their home pages. So, we will probably take the risk to look bland just for the sake to be different. And please take into consideration the fact that over the last 7 years on our home page there were no images of megaliths at all!
  But - as you know - the new home page is still a work in progress, so we are rethinking our "visual strategies" and maybe thanks to your input we will change our mind... We are still working hard on the inner pages and it'll take some time to have a second look at the home page layout. Paola just suggested to leave the six small photos in colour, without any fancy "mouse over" effect...
  
• Anyway, we coded the new home page in a way so there shouldn't be any delay between the mouse movement over the photos and the loading of the colour element. Can you please check again if there is a delay viewing that page with your computer?
  
• You suggestion of a different word choice for the opening page is clever (and very good). We will post the new version - with the suggested change - asap.
  
• The copyright statement... Again, you're right: it looks more like a lawyer's document than a web page. Wouldn't you be so kind to edit this text for us? You know, we are constantly struggling with English language and we're always afraid of errors... We will add some other thing to the home page, too, but we won't make the same mistake we made on the "old" home page design: too many notices.
  
• And last but not least: why we haven't invited our users to submit photos? Well, there are several reasons. First of all, our website comprises now almost 1,900 webpages and occupies about the 70% of the space alloted by our hosting service provider. That means that if we will accept hundreds of photos by our visitors, we will run out of space in a few months. And we are still losing money just to keep this website online: selling prints and gaining a percentage on Amazon's books sold through your pages are not enough to cover our expenses. The second reason is probably self-indulgence. We know we've got some very good megaliths photos, and mixing them with images sent by other photographers would "dilute" the overall quality. And third: other - more recent - websites (the Megalithic Portal and The Modern Antiquarian) have followed the path you suggested, but in our opinion sometimes they look just a giant collection of postcards. But don't despair: if our publishing projects will proceed as we hope, we will certainly make the Stone Pages a bigger and better website!

Paola & Diego

[Nigel]

I'm still getting a slider bar in the window I open in (but not when I maximise it) and the colour is still taking a while to load, but I'm not really the person to ask as my computer and my computer knowledge are both pretty useless.

Anyway, I've done the editing, as best I can, and am sending it by email.

Nigel