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Toni Ciuraneta said:
Thanks Vaughn, as I said that will have to re-worked, I want to redo them with the web logo. BTW do you know any free photo editor that allow to do so? I mean inserting a png bitmap on top of another and giving it transparency? I did these with the help of a friend who has photoshop but I do not want to have to depend always on him.
Click to expand...

Gimp is a free image editing software that can do that. I use it all the time.

There are a lot of tuturials on how to do exactly what you want.


http://www.gimp.org/
 
Warning, make sure you're downloading gimp from the main download site. There have been some recent reports of hijacked versions floating around with malware on them (specifically from CNET, and also if an ad loads before the download list be suspicious).

Nice web site! Fantastic products! Have a few notes but no time to write the out right now so will get back.
 
I had not heard of gimp, so was excited to give it a try (my Photoshop imitation - JASC Paint Shop Pro) is 20 years old or more, so I was interested in trying it. After crashing 3 times trying 3 photos, I went back to my old program. It sounds like a good program, but not as stable on a very old Win XP machine as my very old commercial program. Obviously your results may be better but ...
 
Irfanview is also a free image processing program that has, under the edit menu, a capability to 'insert overlay/watermark image' and adjust the translucency and position of the image. I've been using this program for years and it worked well on my XP machine. I can't say whether today's version is XP compatible, but it's worth a try.
http://www.irfanview.com/
 
Charlie Plesums said:
I had not heard of gimp, so was excited to give it a try (my Photoshop imitation - JASC Paint Shop Pro) is 20 years old or more, so I was interested in trying it. After crashing 3 times trying 3 photos, I went back to my old program. It sounds like a good program, but not as stable on a very old Win XP machine as my very old commercial program. Obviously your results may be better but ...
Click to expand...

:eek: I finally got my neighbor that uses me for free computer support off of XP. She still has problems giving up her mavica camera that uses floppy disks though...

Running windows 7, I can honestly say Gimp has never crashed on me and works quite well.
 
Ted Calver said:
Irfanview is also a free image processing program that has, under the edit menu, a capability to 'insert overlay/watermark image' and adjust the translucency and position of the image. I've been using this program for years and it worked well on my XP machine. I can't say whether today's version is XP compatible, but it's worth a try.
http://www.irfanview.com/
Click to expand...

Funny that you mention that Ted. I have been using Irfanview for years and I'never noticed that option. Maybe because I only use it as a viewer. Thanks a lot, I had it under my nose all the time.:doh::bang:
 
Brent Dowell said:
:eek: I finally got my neighbor that uses me for free computer support off of XP. She still has problems giving up her mavica camera that uses floppy disks though...

Running windows 7, I can honestly say Gimp has never crashed on me and works quite well.
Click to expand...

Years ago Microsoft said "no problem, you can move off Windows XP. Just replace the display adapter. Two of our five home computers are laptops where the display adapter is integrated in the mother board - "replace the display adapter" involves finding a trash can for the current computer. With rare exceptions (like free programs) Windows XP works perfectly on four of our computers, despite Microsoft's dire warnings that the end of the world is near. The fifth computer is Windows 7, which does not interface well to the rest of our world. If it worked with XP I would replace Win 7 on that machine with XP in a heartbeat.

I know someday I am going to have to enter the modern world, but that move will involve two new laptops, discarding one work-horse conventional computer, and upgrading another (that is already licensed for Vista, but XP was factory installed), plus the Win 7 machine. I am looking at the Surface Pro 3 or 4 with Win 8.x if I have to replace the XP laptops soon. Might as well jump in with both feet!
 
First up I think your sense of style and taste comes through really well on the website. You do really beautiful work, and this is a great showcase for it.

Some suggestions I would add to those made thus far:

On the design page I think it would be useful to have some nod towards the actual design side of the project pre-implementation. Having the finished pieces there is valuable, but I think if I was looking for an industrial designer I'd also want some feel good about the designs being implementable. I don't think you need to go to far with this, and I'm not entirely sure how to convey this sort of data either. I was looking around http://www.industrialdesignserved.com/ which seemed like it might have some ideas on how to convery this sort of thing. I think where you're going with an additional sub page for each product/project is a good step in this direction. This is also realizing that the production engineers will completely change the design once they get ahold of it :rolleyes:

I would probably reduce the repetition between the front page and the sub pages. You've already shown us most of the work on the sub pages on the front page which lessens the value of differentiating between them.

Don't bother with the picture pop-outs if they're ~mostly the same~ as the picture I've already seen, imho very slightly larger doesn't count as different. If something is clickable its nice if it "does" something more than just pop up the same picture that's there. This is a pet peave of mine :D The bondage one was especially annoying in this regard since the pop out picture is smaller than the one I've already seen.

Look at some of the SEO (search engine optimization) guidelines:
http://static.googleusercontent.com.../search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf
http://www.google.com/webmasters/
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1308617?hl=en
http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo (they sell related stuff so take the embeddd sales pitches with a grain of salt but have some good info nevertheless).
http://www.bing.com/toolbox/seo-analyzer
http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

Specifically things I'd change on your current site that would be easy and help quickly:
- unique titles for each page
- alt text for images used as links
- add meta tags for descriptions
 
Ryan Mooney said:
First up I think your sense of style and taste comes through really well on the website. You do really beautiful work, and this is a great showcase for it.

Some suggestions I would add to those made thus far:

On the design page I think it would be useful to have some nod towards the actual design side of the project pre-implementation. Having the finished pieces there is valuable, but I think if I was looking for an industrial designer I'd also want some feel good about the designs being implementable. I don't think you need to go to far with this, and I'm not entirely sure how to convey this sort of data either. I was looking around http://www.industrialdesignserved.com/ which seemed like it might have some ideas on how to convery this sort of thing. I think where you're going with an additional sub page for each product/project is a good step in this direction. This is also realizing that the production engineers will completely change the design once they get ahold of it :rolleyes:

I would probably reduce the repetition between the front page and the sub pages. You've already shown us most of the work on the sub pages on the front page which lessens the value of differentiating between them.

Don't bother with the picture pop-outs if they're ~mostly the same~ as the picture I've already seen, imho very slightly larger doesn't count as different. If something is clickable its nice if it "does" something more than just pop up the same picture that's there. This is a pet peave of mine :D The bondage one was especially annoying in this regard since the pop out picture is smaller than the one I've already seen.

Look at some of the SEO (search engine optimization) guidelines:
http://static.googleusercontent.com.../search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf
http://www.google.com/webmasters/
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1308617?hl=en
http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo (they sell related stuff so take the embeddd sales pitches with a grain of salt but have some good info nevertheless).
http://www.bing.com/toolbox/seo-analyzer
http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

Specifically things I'd change on your current site that would be easy and help quickly:
- unique titles for each page
- alt text for images used as links
- add meta tags for descriptions
Click to expand...

Thanks a lot for your comments Ryan. I don't quite understand what you mean by "unique titles on each page" do you mean getting rid of the additional information about the material and size?

What you you want to say using all texts as links? Links to what? And forgive my ignorance what are metatags? I know about metadata, but not metatags:

I have to look at your other suggestions regarding the pics, I used a ready made template and I do not know if what you suggest can be done.

Thanks a lot again.
 
Toni Ciuraneta said:
Thanks a lot for your comments Ryan. I don't quite understand what you mean by "unique titles on each page" do you mean getting rid of the additional information about the material and size?
Click to expand...

I'll do my best here since I'm not sure what you're using to do web development and probably wouldn't be familiar with it even if I did :D

Looking at the "view source" on the web page there is text that looks like:
"<title>Toni Ciuraneta</title>"
This is the same on every page. Ideally there would be a unique title on each of the pages. For instance on the "Design" page you might want
<title>Toni Ciuraneta Product Design</title>
That's probably not exactly the right words to use ... but the idea is to have it be a unique identifier for each page. The search engines will use that as part of the "keywords" to identify the page. So if someone is searching for "Toni Ciuraneta" all the pages would currently be equal. If you added the "Design" to it then that would add that so it would also be more likely to be considered for searches for design. The caveat with that is that there are a ton of variables and this is only one but the more hints you can provide the better.

I see you actually have this set for some pages:
http://toniciuraneta.com/en/dresser/
has a title of:
<title>Dresser | Toni Ciuraneta</title>
You might make also want to make that title consistent with the alt tags as suggested below.

Toni Ciuraneta said:
What you you want to say using all texts as links? Links to what?
Click to expand...

Again I'm going to the "view source" on the web page here so bear with me on this :D

Looking on the design page - at the link to the dresser the code looks like:
Code: 
    <div class="entry__featured-image">
        <a href="http://toniciuraneta.com/en/dresser/" class="image__item-link">
			            <div class="image__item-wrapper" style="padding-top: 150%;" >
                <img width="800" height="1200" src="http://toniciuraneta.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/comoda01-tcm-800x1200.jpg" class="attachment-blog-big wp-post-image" alt="Material: Mongoy / Erable" />            </div>          
        </a>
    </div>

This roughly says:
For the link to "http://toniciuraneta.com/en/dresser/" use the image "http://toniciuraneta.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/comoda01-tcm-800x1200.jpg" and use the "alt tag" of "Material: Mongoy / Erable".
The problem with that is that the alt tag is only on the material and doesn't say anything about the dresser itself.

This text is used by the search engines to get hints as to the keywords for the linked page, and is also used as what is displayed if the image can't be displayed (for instance blind web readers would get the "alt" text for the link although I realize that they aren't your primary market here :D).

Ideally this would be something more descriptive
Code: 
alt="Dresser in Mongoy and Erable"


Toni Ciuraneta said:
And forgive my ignorance what are metatags? I know about metadata, but not metatags:
Click to expand...
They're more or less synonyms.

The idea is to add a description to each page something like:

Code: 
<meta name="description=" content="A dresser designed and build by Toni Ciuraneta from Mongoy and Erable.">

I'm punting somewhat on the verbiage, you might want to add other descriptive text. This what's displayed in the search engine when it suggests that link.

See page 4 through 7 of the search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf I linked to for another example.

Toni Ciuraneta said:
I have to look at your other suggestions regarding the pics, I used a ready made template and I do not know if what you suggest can be done.
Click to expand...

Yeah that's possible.. Some of the templates are annoyingly limited in some regards, and you can spend a lot of time doing :huh: If you let me know which one you used I can take a quick poke at it.
 
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