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Layout Tables
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Gary Jones
Posts: 4
Member since: 10/10/2008
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 RE: Layout Tables (in reply to Gary Jones)
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Thank you so much for your insight. Yes, I have in fact been emailing back and forth with Brian Gardner, the developer of the theme, on the issue of colors. In one of his posts he had indicated that he was going to produce other style sheets, offering more color options, but now that he is going the open source route I don't know what will happen with this current designs. I was hoping to see something that might better mirror my own design. As someone very new to Word Press, I am very hesitant to redo my entire site in something I am not familiar with, but, except for the color scheme, I did like the very professional layout of the theme. It also makes much better use of the available screen Real Estate, which is very important to me because I want to sell advertising to support the site. My problem with the Flash menu is that it is far too complex for me to try to change to a wider page. I have also had people tell me that it often takes too long to load, which is not good when it is the primary site navigation. I do have the menu along the bottom which also has the standard links, but this isn't very appealing, visually. If I had a wider screen with my current design I see this as being much easier to accommodate various ad sizes than the Word Press theme allows.
My basic concept is somewhat unique for our market. Here in Boquete, Panama we have no 411 service, no Yellow Pages, in fact, no street addresses, so a web presence is very important here to get the message out. It is also a much poorer country and businesses have very limited budgets. My goal was to develop a Business Directory, with listings free for ninety days, then grow this to a banner ad, for example, on our restaurants page. This would then lead to a dedicated section for the restaurant, where they might feature some photos, their menu and a map showing their location, plus maybe some customer reviews. These smaller restaurants could never justify the development costs of having their own web sites, so they would instead have what looks like their own site, but as sub pages on our site, for which they would pay a monthly fee instead of upfront costs. Naturally I would incur the development costs upfront, but these would be recouped over the course of the contract and then, assuming the client remained happy, would continue on in the future, generating additional revenue with no ongoing costs.
The concern at this stage is obviously which format provides a better design to accomplish my goals? I am torn between the somewhat more flexible current design, but with the limitations of the format, or going the Word Press route. One of the advantages of this theme is that it already has an incorporated forum design, plus it offers the blogging, which is becoming more important every day. Using Word Press stimulates more viewer interaction which keeps people coming back to the site. If you look at my blog on the current site you wil see that I attempted to use a theme that has the look and feel of my site, but this proved most difficult to get the Flash menu to work properly so that people could return to other areas of my site. This will be an ongoing issue as new versions of Word Press are released.
My budget is limited, as I have yet to generate any revenue, but if it's something you are willing to look at, maybe you could give me some idea on what it would cost to alter the Flash menu to provide for a wider screen? I do have an earlier version of Flash MX, but when I opened the file it looked way too complicated for me to try to change it.
Thanks.
Gary
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Date: 10/17/2008 6:45:18 AM
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