Thanks Jo, and if you pay my travelling expenses you can have any Minx feet you like, lol!!!

I used freewebs for my website, but I was so happy with it that I soon upgraded it to a premier account to get rid of the advertising.

I had no idea what I was doing, but it's grown and evolved into something that's a real mess with keywords and "click here" and there all over the place.

One of my clients is a professional website designer and he's always telling how bad it is and what I've done wrong (even though I've no idea what he's talking about). However I get so many "normal" clients who find me from that website and comment about how much they liked it!

I often wonder if my website stands out because it isn't professionally designed?

Jes

I'm just checking with Ryanair, see if they have any more free flights

If it works it works!!!

I looked at your website...and to be honest there is a lot going on in it....
but at the end of the day if it is getting you clients and they comment that they like it then keep it that way.

However....would a more professional looking site create more clients?

There is probably many pro's and con's for both free and paid for sites.

If he's a pro website designer then he will probably be checking the underlying HTML syntax of the page (which you can see by doing a "view source").

Many of the template driven web sites are notorious for churning out "messy" HTML with syntax errors in, e.g. unmatched start and end tags, or that specify a particular DTD (document type declaration) but then include HTML elements or attributes in there that are not allowed in that DTD.

Fortunately most web browsers are pretty lenient to those sorts of errors though, so you should not have too much of a problem (even though it's a bit naughty from an accessibility and interopeability point of view).

Ironically, even if you have a website that has perfect HTML and CSS from a validation standpoint, it still might not look right on all browsers though, as some (most notably IE6) don't implement the standards properly, and you have to put workarounds in to make the site display properly.

It can be a bit of a "black art" if you ask me!
Posted via Mobile Device

WOAH!!!!

You can think you have a degree of intelligence until you read all that....and then it all flies out of the window

You amaze me Ruth...that's another language!!!
I want to be clever like that
No wonder my website was a blooper

LOL, the rabbit hole goes a lot deeper than that

Wait till you start trying to dynamically generate your web pages, e.g. from content stored in a database.

That's where the fun *really* starts lol.

Although I guess that is what a lot of the template-driven sites will be doing behind the scenes.

Put a nice, user-friendly front end on it, so that people can easily author their web pages, and Bob's your uncle!
Posted via Mobile Device

Well don´t think you will understand much but if you like you can look in the Gallerie for nails, nails and more nails!!!!

http://nagel-ateliermarleneschulte.de.tl

Regards from Germany!
Marlene

Thanks for all your replies! It was interesting reading through them all.

Ruth - "WOAH" - Ditto!!! lol I started to read that and my brain was getting a tad confused!

Cant remember who wrote it, but i clicked on your website, it was the Microsoft Office Live one, it looks really nice

Thanks again for everyones replies xx

I have a free site with Webs, and whilst I don't particularly like it I do get a lot of business from it. My problem is that I am a control freak with no concept of computer talk or how to set up a site. So the idea of handing it all over to someone else to do fills me with dread because I like to be able to change things as and when I want. (Midnight usually) So I keep looking around for an alternative to Webs but haven't found anything yet.

What sort of stuff do you tend to want to change?

Is it limited to things like wording, prices, gallery images, etc, or do you like playing with things like colour scheme and fonts too?
Posted via Mobile Device

i have actually just spent the morning setting one up i used webs.com.. Glamour Nails - Homepage if you'd like a wee look, I think it looks alright in my opinon, i just dont have the funds at the moment to pay for one! x

Mainly those kinds of thing, yes. They would certainly be the main things I would want to be able to control. Colour and font only changes when my mood does!!!!

That works well with the idea of using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for the "look and feel" of your site (e.g. colours, fonts, layouts, etc), whereas the actual content is just in plain old HTML.

That way, if you change the CSS to, say, change the font from Arial to Tahoma, and the text colour from black to purple, for example, then you only need to do it in one place, and it will take effect straight away across the entire web site.

Whereas I think the way freewebs does it is that the font and colour is associated with a given block of text, rather than being generic to all text in a stylesheet, so you'd have to change every single page if you wanted to change fonts and colours - so loads more hassle than just doing it all in one place.
Posted via Mobile Device

heres my website... theres an option to create your own right at the bottom

i went insane trying to find one that didnt need me to understand html garble GAH!

http://elegancenails.ezweb123.com/#

hope this helps

xx