New site Feedback

[ksperanza]

We are almost ready to go live. Would love to have some feedback on the site.
http://weatherequipment.3dcartstores.com/

The old site is a hand coded site using Americart. Looking forward to the many improvements 3dcart offers. And so you can compare here is the site I am replacing. http://www.weatherequipment.com/

[landarts]

The site looks clean and very pleasing to the eye. You might want to run the site through the validator there are 133 errors on the homepage. Once you get that cleaned up you will be ready for the search engines.

[Toymaster]

I definately agree with landarts your site is very appealing to the eye and everything seems to be easy to navigate. I like your color scheme along with the product images.

I'm unsure as to what Landarts is referring to:

You might want to run the site through the validator there are 133 errors on the homepage. Once you get that cleaned up you will be ready for the search engines.

What is this "Validator" that you are referring to?

[kcummins]

Validation is a method for checking your coding against accepted web standards. http://validator.w3.org/ for your HTML and http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ for the CSS.

You can find some good information on the importance of validation at:
http://validator.w3.org/docs/why.html
http://www.leemunroe.com/how-importa...web-standards/

There are purists who want everything to validate, and others who are more pragmatic and evaluate what, if any, errors may be in the coding. When you are working with a 3rd party application like 3dCart, you may be overwhelmed by the number of errors, but looking through them will show that it is mainly just a few items that throw multiple errors:

NET-enabling start-tag requires SHORTTAG YES: This is caused by the rss feed links having a closing forward slash which is intended for XHTML. If you are using an HTML DOCTYPE, it's easily fixed by editing the frame.html. <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Featured Items (RSS 2.0)" href="http://www.weatherequipment.com/rss.asp?type=home" />

required attribute "ALT" not specified: Because of the tabled layouts, there are lots of "spacer" images or images that are inserted into various table cells. This is one of the pros and cons of using tables for the layout design. <img alt="shopping cart" src="assets/templates/v32015/images/shop-cart.png"> To correct, you would have to find each image and add an alt tag.

document type does not allow element "TR" here: This is the result of nested tables. Typically this happens when you have a table cell <td> that contains a <div> and that <div> contains a nested table element. While not the cleanest of coding, it usually does not cause any cross-browser issues.

There are usually several errors shown for entity "maxx" and entity "maxy": This is the coding 3dCart uses to resize your images.

value of attribute "ALIGN" cannot be "ABSMIDDLE": This is just older coding and newer attributes are available.

So each person would have to decide how important validation is and how much effort they want to take to remove errors. In a perfect world, all cart code would be written so as not to generate errors.....but we're not there yet.

[g1gallery]

Very nice and easy to use as well. Like your product TOO! As for the validator - well I just ran ours through and there were 77 errors. None of our making and we're ranking high. As was already said - "In a perfect world ...".

All the Very Best to You,
John at The G1 Gallery

[ksperanza]

Thank you for your feedback. I thought I would post an update about the site.

The site went live the middle of February. So far I am very happy with 3dCart. Our ranking on Google has improved and orders are picking up.