Amber Stevens Homepage http://www.amberstevens.net
As you may know, I have been working with Melissa Bergen on a new website for the multi-talented Amber Stevens. We launched the new look this morning! It was a fun design to work with and I am really happy with the outcome. The homepage features a XHTML/CSS menu, which is actually comprised of CSS Sprites and an unordered HTML list. I also used another unordered list and CSS sprite for the menu on the rest of the pages. This allowed me to give the appearance of uneven rollovers, and using CSS Sprites kept the filesize relatively low. There was a very good article awhile back on A List Apart about CSS Sprites.
I used Slimbox2 for the photo galleries for its’ flexibility, small size (4kb compressed), and overall appearance.
Check out Amber Stevens’ New Website, and let me know what you think! If you have any questions, leave a comment and I would be more than happy to come up with an answer!
Very cool site. I like the color scheme. I’m a novice designer/seo guy with a question: On a site like this how does a search engine find it? It doesn’t look like there is any content for Google’s spiders to view.
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Hi Joe, thanks for the comment! The main navigation on this site does lack SEO, and that was a sacrifice made with the design. My role on this job was making the site function, so I tried my best to optimize what I could, but keep the design as similar to the comps I was given. The pages themselves have text that will be picked up by search engines. Also, I tried to keep the URL’s search engine friendly. The domain name also contains “Amber Stevens,” so I relied on that along with the body type to try and achieve higher rankings in the SERPs. Another aspect that will help is inbound links. With a well known client, there are going to be quality inbound links.
Thanks again for the comment Joe, you bring up a valid point about SEO. Although this site might not be the most optimized, I am confident that over time the results will be good.
Hi Ryan
I used to spent hours reading the articles on “A List Apart”.
I learnt most of my CSS rounded corner boxes and unordered list menu generation from them.
Now that you’ve reminded me, I’ll pay them a visit and see what’s new.
Amber Steven’s website is a little too different for me but I can see that you’ve done a great job on producing it.
.-= Keith Davis´s last blog ..A helping hand… =-.
Hi Keith,
Thanks for the comment!
A List Apart is such a great resource. I learned countless tips, tricks, and solutions to problems there. One of the best things about web design is the endless resources that are out there at no cost!
Thanks again for the kind words!
Very nice site.. and with a little work could be very SEO friendly.
Hi, and thanks for the comment!
Just out of curiosity, what would you suggest for SEO?
I’d ensure that http://www.amberstevens.net/index.html was redirect to http://www.amberstevens.net using htaccess.
Also within each anchor tag on the homepage i would enter the text that the link goes to, but style the text to not display, not a great solution but gives google some text to work on.
Also descriptions of each page will help google out, not too sure where it has got the current listing from?
Good call on working with the .htaccess, I do need to set that up. For the the anchor tags, would you suggest just adding a title attribute to them?
The meta descriptions do need to be updated, I believe the ones you see in the Search Results.
Thanks again for the feedback! I appreciate it, and it’s nice to have an outside view on a project.
A title attribute would help, although i was thinking slightly more sneaky.
href=”photo.html”>
would become
href=”photo.html”>Photo
and in your css do
#photo a {
display:none;
}
Hope that helps
I’ve heard of techniques like this before, and but I thought things like this could get you black listed with the search engines? Maybe I’m just paranoid, but I haven’t really looked into it in the past. Either way, thanks for sharing the idea! CSS is great for little tricks, haha.
A really informative post, but I’m a little scared about google penalizing me….
I find if I’m worried about being penalized for a technique, I usually won’t try it. The main concern when designing a page should always be the user experience. Also if you try shady SEO techniques and get penalized, that completely defeats the purpose of SEO at all. Just my additional $.02, haha.
This is excellent, but previous one was more perfect and most fit in to its business. I feel some gape in the design and what he want to convey. Please don’t mind its my personal view.
That looks cool – good to know you’ve used HTML/CSS as it would have been easier in Flash yet ultimately not as flexible and futureproof!
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Thank you! I know a lot of people could have easily done this in Flash, but I like to stick to HTML/CSS. It’s nice to have people recognize that, haha.
No problem, I am happy to praise HTML/CSS usage any day
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