Site is live!

Check it out…. PeggyFoy.com (ie, First draft of site is live.  YAY.)

Please help me beta-test on different browsers/platforms (I know you will!); there are some areas that are still not complete, but the bulk of it is done. This is a “soft launch” to allow time to bug-fix; I’ll send out an official launch announcement in a week or so.

[Known error: The RSS feed is supposed to be a built-in feature, but I think it may require the use of Apple’s MobileMe webhosting; at any rate it’s currently not working, and I’m not sure why. I’m not devoting a lot of time to troubleshooting this because I may use a different blog engine altogether.]

Let me know what you think!

**********************************************************

And what do I think?
a) Holy shit. I can haz website??
b) Um dood, that’s my actual real name out there. Yikes. [I thought awfully long and hard about that one. In the end, it is industry-standard to use the artist’s name; and it is equivalent to a designer label. There will also be a “company website” at some point. This is what ‘going pro’ means and I gotta just get over it.]
c) I can’t see straight anymore and I’m sick of futzing with it. It’s live. If it’s still broke I’ll get it later. *kerflop*

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28 Responses to “Site is live!”

  1. evilmike December 21, 2009 at 12:30 pm Permalink

    Looks lovely! And I had no problems on a Firefox/Vista set up.

  2. mistymarshall December 21, 2009 at 12:42 pm Permalink

    Very pretty…I really like how the pics change if you hold the mouse over them. Also nicely laid out!

  3. pedantka December 21, 2009 at 1:35 pm Permalink

    Looks fabulous on Google Chrome.

  4. scarlettina December 21, 2009 at 4:34 pm Permalink

    It’s lovely, Peggy. Nicely done. I need to send you some of the pix of your steampunk-guin. Did you get my e-mail about the book, btw?

    • Peggy December 21, 2009 at 6:44 pm Permalink

      I did, and it looks lovely! Crap, did I forget to send you a reply? Sorry about that. I need to go order mine. :)

      If you have more penguin pics I’d love to have them.

  5. justwill December 21, 2009 at 4:56 pm Permalink

    Absolutely perfect. The site looks professional AND beautiful. Works fine with Internet Explorer 7… wait, why am I still on 7?

    • Peggy December 22, 2009 at 6:48 pm Permalink

      Thanks!! Glad you like! :)

  6. aprivatefox December 21, 2009 at 7:00 pm Permalink

    Looks excellent!

    A very minor word nitpick: the “It’s not my fault I swear…” beneath the home-page photo is grammatically ambiguous, and the second reading (which was the first reading my brain came up with) is “It’s not my fault [that] I swear,” and I was expecting a link to an explanation of how you have a tic disorder or something. A comma would prevent that unintentional reading. =) Probably nobody will ever notice it but me, but I thought I’d mention anyhow.

    • Peggy December 21, 2009 at 7:15 pm Permalink

      Ha! Thanks, that’s useful… :)

      I debated that caption and nearly changed it to something else entirely. I’m not sure the second meaning is inappropriate since I do tend to cuss like a sailor… but you’re right, the ambiguity should get corrected.

      I think this highlights another issue though, that the link format is not uniform across the site. I should probably make it more obvious which text is actually a link, vs just text. Please do let me know if you find any others.

    • joyful_storm December 23, 2009 at 10:15 pm Permalink

      No, no, I wasn’t sure I was going to say anything but I noticed the grammatical issue as well. . . .

  7. imperator_mei December 21, 2009 at 8:10 pm Permalink

    Nice work. I think it works really, really well.

    Nitpicks (based on Safari on OS X):

    • The navigation menu text is a bit scraggy:

    • The rollovers on the portfolio section overviews took a bit to figure out. It’s not broken, just a little perplexing at first.
    • “cuff w/ hand for scale” needs capitalization, plus it’s another one of those grammatically ambiguous things.
    • Punctuation in captions should be consistent.
    • On the portfolio detail pages the BACK TO INDEX link looks disabled.
    • The e-mail should be a link on the ABOUT page.
    • Resume could be a subsection of ABOUT, if you wanted.
    • As long as you’re trading on your name, ditch “PEGGYFOY.COM” and go with full nominal glory.
    • Peggy December 21, 2009 at 9:42 pm Permalink

      Can’t see the image example for your scraggy text, but I’ll take your word for it. Not sure if that’s something I can fix though, the nav bar (and my inability to do *anything* with it) was my primary beef with this tool.

      >The rollovers on the portfolio section overviews…
      Do you mean the spastic flip-thru animation thing on the album covers? I found that a little weird at first too; but others seem to like it. Maybe a bit of text explanation is needed: “Roll over each album for a preview, or click to enter.”

      Grammar/punc – d’oh. grr. I made notes as a went along and at least got something in place for each one… but yep, needs to be standardized. And correct.

      >On the portfolio detail pages the BACK TO INDEX link looks disabled.
      Noticed that too; it’s actually reading as a “visited page.” (But yes, looks disabled, needs to be changed.) I have “link formatting in general” earmarked for tweaking.

      >The e-mail should be a link on the ABOUT page.
      I specifically avoided adding a mailto: link for the email; I have healthy fear of teh spiders. Perhaps this fear is unfounded? I *do* intend to add a form to the Contact page (hence why there is a Contact page at all).

      >Resume could be a subsection of ABOUT, if you wanted.
      Good idea, probably fits better there.

      >ditch “PEGGYFOY.COM”
      :)
      I intentionally deemed logo creation Out Of Scope for this initial launch (or else I’d be poking at options until the New Year; needed to just make the leap and put the site out there). I wanted my name to appear somewhere in the header of each page, but thought that it looked dumb to have it in the nav bar in the same font as all the other links. I poked at different fonts for a while, but that was getting into logo design and taking too much time; so that’ll get fixed in V2.

      Thanks for the feedback.

      • imperator_mei December 21, 2009 at 9:53 pm Permalink

        Yeah, I don’t know what’s up with that image. The URL is actually fine, but it seems to sometimes work and sometimes not.

        Oh! Ohohohoh. Hang on…fixed! My anti-image-spidering device was a little overzealous.

        Anyway, about spidering: what I do to prevent mail address sucking is something like this:

        <a href="mailto:atomicmetal at gmail d.t com">atomicmetal at gmail d.t com</a>

        You can further mangle that if you want, but the point is that a human has to demangle it to get it work.

        • Peggy December 21, 2009 at 10:01 pm Permalink

          Huh. Really? This is superior to just typing it in yourself?

          What if the user doesn’t notice that it’s mangled? Seems like it’d need to be called out that there’s still further action needed before you hit send… (it’s not a bad idea — just not sure it’s more user-friendly!)

    • Peggy December 21, 2009 at 9:55 pm Permalink

      Ah! Nav bar image finally populated; yeah, that looks like ass. Out of curiosity, is that actual size? It’s a smaller point-size than what I’m getting on my end. Curious if it’s an issue with Safari or an issue with preferences settings? (ie did you specify somewhere that your default font size is itty bitty….)

      Any other Safari users, please pipe in?

      • imperator_mei December 21, 2009 at 10:00 pm Permalink

        Yup, that’s the screen shot.

        My standard font is Helvetica 12pt.

  8. spazzychic December 21, 2009 at 8:52 pm Permalink

    Your site looks awesome. Time to pimp!

    • Peggy December 21, 2009 at 10:13 pm Permalink

      *grin* Thanks!!

      Lurv the companion cube icon. It’s apparently a Portal kind of day on my f-list…

  9. methos80 December 21, 2009 at 8:59 pm Permalink

    The site looks good on IE 7 on Win XP.

    A couple of my own nit picks – I agree the email should be a link on the about page and the contact page.

    Really, though, for as good of a job as you’ve done on the website, the actual artwork looks even better.

    • Peggy December 21, 2009 at 9:48 pm Permalink

      Thanks! :D

      So, I specifically avoided adding a mailto: link for the email; I have healthy fear of teh spiders. Perhaps this fear is unfounded? If this is a major annoyance to people maybe I should reconsider.

      I *do* intend to add a form to the Contact page (hence why there is a Contact page at all).

      • methos80 December 21, 2009 at 9:55 pm Permalink

        Well, my thought on email links and spiders is this. Is it possible that some spider will spam your email? Yes, but that’s what spam filters are for. Actually, my email is available on the State Bar database here and it hasn’t resulted in too much spam.

        I also look at it this way – will someone who is teetering on whether to email or not, and who may ultimately turn into an admirer/paying customer, be deterred initially from bothering to cut and paste, or if they don’t know how, to re-type the link? In my opinion, if you lose even one customer, it was worth putting up with the spam bots.

        But, that’s just my opinion. I do know that when I am on a website and see an email contact link, I expect to be able to click on it. When that doesn’t work, I generally assume it was just a broken link.

        • Peggy December 21, 2009 at 10:08 pm Permalink

          Good points. And when I think about it, I already have an email address that’s out there on another site (one that has “sexpositiveculture.org” in it no less!) and — though my spam box fills up regularly, it hasn’t been inundated.

  10. dj_warhammer December 21, 2009 at 9:10 pm Permalink

    Comments and suggestions have been good thus far. I’m about to leave NC and drive down to Savannah for Yule. While I’m there I’ll email you the obnoxiously long-winded and wordy critique that you’d expect from a SCADling. :)

    • Peggy December 21, 2009 at 9:46 pm Permalink

      YIPE! Um, please be gentle when you rape my tender asshole….

      Looking forward to it, hopefully you have some good suggestions for how I can improve. :)

  11. shadow_and_veil December 22, 2009 at 5:24 am Permalink

    *thumbs up* about freakin’ time Well done.

    • Peggy December 22, 2009 at 6:47 pm Permalink

      lol NO KIDDING!
      (…brat.) :)

  12. bittercrow December 22, 2009 at 4:58 pm Permalink

    holy hell wow!! it looks amazing!! way to go Miss Professional Metalsmith!!