# Perfect Tree Care Website: Even a Caveman...



## M.D. Vaden

*Even a Caveman can do it.*

Murphy4Trees started one website thread a few days ago about tags. This thread is for the *PERFECT* website for a tree service. I think that the perfect website for a commercial tree service is not perfect, as much as it is the perfect site for a particular arborist's needs.

*This thread would be a good place to post links to various websites, and post comments about the good, or what could be better. Clean positive commentary.*

This is the link that I posted in Murph's thread about website ranking and purpose for one...

 Top Website Ranking & Website Purpose

For what websites can accomplish, I think it's a bit dark-ages-like to not have a site. Websites serve many purposes. As arborists design productive websites, the greater that internet system will be for the industry and public education.

I'm going to list some websites that illustrate good, interesting, or productive aspects to consider for website design. *Please contribute...*

BARTLETT TREE SERVICE http://www.bartlett.com
I like the colors on the home page. The menu is interesting.

VALLEY CREST http://www.valleycrest.com/main1.html
This home page look is very unique. I first landed on their page about moving big trees.

AVOCADO COMMUNICATIONS http://www.avocadocommunications.com
Check out the Portfolio from the menu. I like the style and color palette.

*There is a benefit to smaller 800 to 1000 pixel centered pages, versus stretch to fit. Stretched sites are hard to read text if users have wide monitors.*

HIGHRIDGE CORPORATION LANDSCAPING http://www.highridge.com
A lot of landscapers have commented about liking this site's layout and design.

FLORIDA WATER GARDENS http://www.floridawatergardens.com
I like the simplicity of it - deviates from the common rectangular home page look.


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## John464

http://www.davey.com

I think its a great site. Color & layout. Detailed info with pics on each page. The feel it gives off is a bit too corporate for the residential tree service.


http://www.rickstreeservice.com/

Love the video that auto opens when you visit the site. Sample action videos of how the business operates.Picture gallery of the crews at work. Has mailing list that customers can sign up to be notified. This is good to have to remind customers for spray, fertilization treatments, specials, etc

What I dont like is that they state they have the best price. I am never the cheapest price and would never want to be known as the cheapest. I want to be known as the best quality that people realize its worth paying a little extra for. Do not encourage lowest price shoppers. There are enough customers that encourage it that we dont need proffesionals adding fuel to the fire.


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## l2edneck

This one is mine.Very simple.Small host server,basic HTML(for those that dont know HTML the basics to yer page do/look like what you want.Odds are people wont remember
www.mycompanynameissocoolstumpgrindingnameofmycompany.com but they will remember. http://www.smalljobs.biz.
Also my page is almost entirely designed by me at my home PC.It works ok for me but if my buisness was really humping i would look to have someone else maintain/update it for me.

Im sure yall can pick it to death and it doesn't have meta tags yet but im still learnin and update when time will allow.Most of my HTML is copy and paste from what i call cheater sites.

If any body wants some easy links just PM me.

P.S. my site is horrid but im happy with it for now.


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## diltree

All these web sites are very good, and effective. My only observation is that many service oriented web sites share a great deal of similarities. My main goal with my web site is to keep things simple and make an attempt to be different then the common site you would encounter. We attempted a different approach with our site, and I have received an overwhelmingly positive feedback by our customers. The site is a work in progress an there is still a great deal more work to be done. We are currently working on the idea of a before and after flip-book, which I feel will be a great addition to the site. I welcome any feedback or advice anyone may have......like I said "its a work in progress"


www.dillontree.com


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## M.D. Vaden

diltree said:


> I welcome any feedback or advice anyone may have......like I said "its a work in progress"
> 
> 
> www.dillontree.com



I like the black background, which is not the trend of many. Two weeks ago, a mushroom collector's site switched to black, and it gave me the idea to try it. I messed around but it doesn't work for me. The colors of your home page fit the black.

Personally, I don't like click to enter pages. ISA has that. At least your click to enter is more noticeable than ISA's. The slideshow is cool.

The text to the right was too small to read. But text on a page should be able to increase and decrease by holding the CTRL key and rolling the mouse wheel, or clicking the text increase in the browser window.


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## diltree

MD...I felt the same way about font size.....my web guy hates scroll bars...but I am going to look into adjusting that problem. Overall...great feed back, next time I sit down with my web design buddy, we will view this thread, and take your comments into consideration


www.dillontree.com


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## M.D. Vaden

Your site designer identified his link on your home page as...

http://www.vccgraphics.com

After entering, I thought the work examples window was interesting.

Did you ever check out the page curl effect when the cursor is placed on the corner of the examples?

Remember when small animations were the latest and greatest.


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## M.D. Vaden

Tonight, I revisted Dynamic Drive

http://www.dynamicdrive.com

They have scripts that may be used. Basically, they just ask for a link back to them.

THE SCRIPT FOR THAT CAME FROM DYNAMIC SCRIPTS. They provide instructions.

Some are toys, some are very useful.


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## ASD

OK THIS IS OURS WHAT DO U PEOPLE THINK

http://WWW.SANDCTREESERVICE.COM


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## M.D. Vaden

Basically, I like the layout. The menu is nice too. I had thought of going back to a horizontal menu myself, but plan to stick with the text links for now. I've had 3 styles of menus and buttons already.

On your page, the bottome center image is the only main feature that seems a bit out of balance. Bigger than the rest, and not in line with the others.

At the top, I'd eliminate the second tree clip art, move the ISA logo over the menu since width matches better there, and switch the name with it's tree image over to the right.

But it looks very presentable regardless.


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## Ekka

Many web designers have no idea!

The eye appeal of a website has little to do with how search engines locate and rank them.

For instance, the Bartlett site's menu's are in flash ... unreadable to bots. Poor meta tagging, no geographical referencing are other problems.

Flashing animations, images etc can confuse bots, they cannot read them.

Over indulgence in meta tags descriptions can also turn bots away. Some people try to have like 50 keywords! Individual pages not meta tagged correctly, for example ... the stump grinding page isn't tagged or worse still repeats the same info as the index page.

Spamming keywords can also lower your rankings.

Poor use of headers such as H1,H2,H3 means poor rankings

Frankly, search bots dont see colours, they hate frames and tables, and despise flash.

So, whilst Bartlett's site may look good, it's junk in the SEO world.

TreeSpydie has one of the most comprehensive sites

http://www.mytreelessons.com/

But you'll find as far as some-one finding it off a google search it would be a fluke.

Know what you are selling, know what your clients will be searching ...marry the two up.

Colours, graphics, pictures, and all that jazz means little.

What makes Mario's site rank well .... content. That's right, words and information. Careful if you copy from another site ... you could get sandboxed!

The best menu is a text one, what links say is far best and ranks well. For example, *tree lopping* like this carries a lot more weight than some fancy button where the bot cant read the text or worse still a flash link. Look at the bottom LH corner of your computer when you mouse over a link, if you see the URL come up then it's a good start ... you wont see that with flash, neither will the bots.

There's a lot more to success in websites than what they look like ... you need to know the rules to play the game.


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## M.D. Vaden

Yes, I've been to "TreeSpydie's" site before too.

It has part of the resources I referred to earlier, that benefits the industry.

When posting in these forums, sometimes it's easier to to write one sentence on a subject, with a link to a website like that.

I tend to lurk around longer in websites with topics and photos.


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## Ekka

Sure, never forget the human factor.

I learned the hard way. I paid webdesigners $2k for a site. The site was all built in flash with the odd HTML page.

Search performance was zero. 3 years of that site running zero performance. So I started to tinker, and a whole huge learning curve had to follow.

Anyway, I figured rather than just pay some-one else to fix it up I could learn a few things so over the last 6 months I got pretty clued up and took some training.

In a nutshell, it aint rocket science, but neither is using a chainsaw however enough people show that it's a tough task in the injuries dept.

There's a balance. A balance between robot and human friendly. There's better ways to do things. And simple is effective.

Subscribe to newsletters on webdesign, there's thousands of them and ironically I see by the few I get that topics seem to circulate ... of course the authors subscribe to there competitors etc. Little things make big differences like font, bolding a keyword, using alt tags on your pics etc.

The biggest advantage of website stuff is the instantaneous thing, you change it and bang ... it's done. Where as if it's a print ad in the Yellow Pages you have to wait a year.


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## John464

Ekka said:


> Sure, never forget the human factor.
> 
> I learned the hard way. I paid webdesigners $2k for a site. The site was all built in flash with the odd HTML page.
> 
> Search performance was zero. 3 years of that site running zero performance. So I started to tinker, and a whole huge learning curve had to follow.
> 
> Anyway, I figured rather than just pay some-one else to fix it up I could learn a few things so over the last 6 months I got pretty clued up and took some training.
> 
> In a nutshell, it aint rocket science, but neither is using a chainsaw however enough people show that it's a tough task in the injuries dept.
> 
> There's a balance. A balance between robot and human friendly. There's better ways to do things. And simple is effective.
> 
> Subscribe to newsletters on webdesign, there's thousands of them and ironically I see by the few I get that topics seem to circulate ... of course the authors subscribe to there competitors etc. Little things make big differences like font, bolding a keyword, using alt tags on your pics etc.
> 
> The biggest advantage of website stuff is the instantaneous thing, you change it and bang ... it's done. Where as if it's a print ad in the Yellow Pages you have to wait a year.



see thats what been holding me up in getting one made up. I want to be able to add photos, update, change etc. I have zero knowledge on how to do this and it seems the "pro designers" want to have the ball in their court to do these updates so they can charge you the upkeep.

I would like to hear some recommendations on who to contact that understands arborist meta tags and can design a quality website with user friendly features that would allow us to constantly update ourselves.


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## John464

Ekka said:


> Sure, never forget the human factor.
> 
> I learned the hard way. I paid webdesigners $2k for a site. The site was all built in flash with the odd HTML page.
> 
> Search performance was zero. 3 years of that site running zero performance. So I started to tinker, and a whole huge learning curve had to follow.
> 
> Anyway, I figured rather than just pay some-one else to fix it up I could learn a few things so over the last 6 months I got pretty clued up and took some training.
> 
> In a nutshell, it aint rocket science, but neither is using a chainsaw however enough people show that it's a tough task in the injuries dept.
> 
> There's a balance. A balance between robot and human friendly. There's better ways to do things. And simple is effective.
> 
> Subscribe to newsletters on webdesign, there's thousands of them and ironically I see by the few I get that topics seem to circulate ... of course the authors subscribe to there competitors etc. Little things make big differences like font, bolding a keyword, using alt tags on your pics etc.
> 
> The biggest advantage of website stuff is the instantaneous thing, you change it and bang ... it's done. Where as if it's a print ad in the Yellow Pages you have to wait a year.



see thats what been holding me up in getting one made up. I want to be able to add photos, update, change etc. myself. I know that type of stuff cant be that hard. I have zero knowledge on how to make a website itself.

it seems the "pro designers" want to have the ball in their court to do these updates so they can charge you the upkeep.

I would like to hear some recommendations on who to contact that understands arborist meta tags and can design a quality website with user friendly features that would allow us to constantly update ourselves.


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## M.D. Vaden

John464 said:


> see thats what been holding me up in getting one made up. I want to be able to add photos, update, change etc. myself. I know that type of stuff cant be that hard. I have zero knowledge on how to make a website itself.
> 
> it seems the "pro designers" want to have the ball in their court to do these updates so they can charge you the upkeep.
> 
> I would like to hear some recommendations on who to contact that understands arborist meta tags and can design a quality website with user friendly features that would allow us to constantly update ourselves.



John464...

There are some album options that a web person can setup for you. But one easy option, is an album host like image event. Go to the link in my signature line that ends gallery1.shtml

Then pick any album on that page. Each one of those looks like it's on my website, but it's not. I insert a fragment of code from Image Event into the body of my page. It basically stuffs images from them, into my own layout.

Also, with website page ideas, you could find a blank template and tweak it to your needs.

You could use an image host like image event, and put a text link in your home page to the albums. In that case, it would go to a page like this...

http://imageevent.com/mdvaden

What you see on that image event gallery main album page, is the same thing available from my website album pages. The difference being that I stuffed 2 lines of code into a blank page for each album I want to have look like it's on my site. Either way is decent. That's why I chose Image Event - ZERO advertising whether I direct people to my album page there, or "suck' the album pages to my own page layout. They have a trial period for free, if you want to upload a few images and toy around with editing captions.

You could start with a single home page, with a nice photo, a few paragraphs and your contact info. The same page could link to your image host album, giving you complete control.

Or, have your own album on your own server and site. Although, that can raise your bandwidth use.

Image Event gives me no limit, and I can store about 1500 one meg images there for $24.95 per year.

The benefit to putting their code in your own blank page, is isolating viewers from any albums that may not seem "professional". Now my pet bird album doesn't exactly give the "corporate" image to an album. But then, I don't link to it from my website. Or, if I did link to the entire album page, I could skip having any albums besides just professional work photo albums.


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## Ekka

Also, just like this forum there's website building forums.

And if you dont know how to do something you just post the question and some-one gives you the code.

Go and look at this search, there's plenty of places to start. Many hosts will have a few templates available to get you started.

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=website+building+forums&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

Or you could go to some places like from this list and get a few.

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=free+website+templates&btnG=Search&meta=

It's easy really!

And dirt cheap.


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## John464

M.D Vaden & Ekka, thank you, very helpful!


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## M.D. Vaden

Hey, I tried some flash buttons for a while from this site...

http://www.flashbuttons.com

About $20 for a year, and quite a few menu styles are worthwhile. It's as easy as filling in tables and the code is generated.

You can retry again and again to get the hang of it. It takes a bit of practice to get the width right and stuff, but it's actually quite easy.

Colors adjust with most. There are 7 pages of choices with the membership.

*For the heck of it, I made a flash menu for the bottom of my home page tonight - check it out. *

I had to mess with it a few times, because I tried to make the menu 798 pixels or less, but it seems preset to 800 pixels wide, so I finally just went with that.

The key is to not close your working window. Feel free to delete the generated menu window, since you can regenerate, but don't close your workspace. It only takes 5 seconds to respawn so to speak. I whipped out a dozen until I stretched the button spacing the way I wanted by adding a couple of extra pixels between in each version.

You can even make isolated little menus to stick anywhere in your site. They insert easy, I stuck mine in a table.

Yes, it's bit of a toy, but it's fun.

My year membership expires in March, I see.


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## 046

sites that use flash as a primary means of navigating sucks!

flash when properly used can be effective. it's a common problem with web designers not knowing how important usability of a web site is. 

most folks attention span is under 5 seconds for web sites. if you are not able to navigate because your flash is not working. they're gone...

not everyone uses IE. lots to be said about lowest common denominator.


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## M.D. Vaden

046 said:


> sites that use flash as a primary means of navigating sucks!
> 
> flash when properly used can be effective. it's a common problem with web designers not knowing how important usability of a web site is.
> 
> most folks attention span is under 5 seconds for web sites. if you are not able to navigate because your flash is not working. they're gone...
> 
> not everyone uses IE. lots to be said about lowest common denominator.



That's for sure, and the reason why my main two pages with links, home and advice, have the primitive menus immediately next to the flash menus.

I find that not even the HEADING html tags display text the same in IE versus Netscape either.

The past few months, I've made a point to view my pages in IE, Firefox and Opera, just to be sure.


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## Ekka

Here's a site that I ran across recently.

http://www.drouintreeservices.com.au

What do you think?


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## a_lopa

thats one hell of a site!lol


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## JohN Dee

Lol lopa.

Ekka, who is your host and how much by the month? You told me once but i've forgotten it and where it was.. 

In the new year I plan to start designing a website for my business.

Diltree, out of all tree sites i've viewed I really enjoy your's the most; It's easy to navigate, looks good and is very informative and pictures (LOL Bright shiny pictures ).


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## Ekka

I use Ipower in the States but you should register a .com.au and then host it there. About $100 USD a year and has tons of space and bandwidth.


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## alanarbor

*While you're looking at websites*

look at www.thecareoftrees.com


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## Ekka

alanarbor said:


> look at www.thecareoftrees.com



That is a good looking website, some coding errors could be fixed and the designer has overlooked some typical address problems.

For example

http://thecareoftrees.com/ comes up as a different page to Google and it's not being redirected to the proper home page.

Alt test missing on many pics.

There is no clear HOME navigation and when you click on the top LH corner it takes you to http://www.thecareoftrees.com/index.php which is considered a different page to the original by Google and actually carries a different PR. They need to fix that in their coding.

Same Meta Tagging for every page.

No geographical tagging or targeting.

Insufficient text on landing index page.


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## M.D. Vaden

That "The Care of Trees" site ranks a 6 on Google rank meter, which is good in one way. Although I haven't seen how the site displays.

That might be tough to find out, because I looked at several pages and a critical piece of information is missing - "where do they work?"

Several pages don't have a return link to the home page - not that I saw anyhow.

The design looks good. That part would be a good example to follow.

Nothing is over-kill in it. It has a nice variety of color and images,


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## a_lopa

Ekka please stop telling them where there going wrong!!!


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## alanarbor

Ekka said:


> That is a good looking website, some coding errors could be fixed and the designer has overlooked some typical address problems.
> 
> For example
> 
> http://thecareoftrees.com/ comes up as a different page to Google and it's not being redirected to the proper home page.
> 
> Alt test missing on many pics.
> 
> There is no clear HOME navigation and when you click on the top LH corner it takes you to http://www.thecareoftrees.com/index.php which is considered a different page to the original by Google and actually carries a different PR. They need to fix that in their coding.
> 
> Same Meta Tagging for every page.
> 
> No geographical tagging or targeting.
> 
> Insufficient text on landing index page.



Excellent input!


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## M.D. Vaden

Try messing around with this site's contents for a few minutes.

It's out of the ordinary.

http://www.illuminatidesign.com/

Click on the black background, too.


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## Ekka

It's where flash can take you ... the sky's the limit.


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## M.D. Vaden

Ekka said:


> It's where flash can take you ... the sky's the limit.



If you click on one of Illuminati's icons around the item that looks like a bracelet, it shows various projects.

Some have interesting menus, like the Mahaila McKeller one. He also did a website for one actress Danica McKeller, which is probably related to Mahaila.

For pure visual interest, I'd really enjoy doing that kind of flash on my home page.

For practical use, I see little way that it would work in most of my websites pages. Maybe the same for you too.

Another option, would be a nice simpler home page, and then use a fancy flash introduction page for the advice portion. That way, the intro page would neither affect the home page search engine results, nor those of the information pages.

A way of adding eye-candy.


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## trevmcrev

So tell me whats right/wrong with mine. Made a few minor changes recently but the basis of has been the same for years. I should really learn about this stuff and apply it.

http://www.totaltreecare.com.au


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## JohN Dee

Trev, I was looking at your website(Nice website btw you should put caps for the starting letters on your left hand side navigation) and noticed a typo in a vital spot... Down the bottom - http://www.totaltreecare.com.au/3.html the number has a 0 instead if a 9


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## M.D. Vaden

JohN Dee said:


> Trev, I was looking at your website(Nice website btw you should put caps for the starting letters on your left hand side navigation) and noticed a typo in a vital spot... Down the bottom - http://www.totaltreecare.com.au/3.html the number has a 0 instead if a 9



The site looks good. 

My son was just mentioning Skype yesterday, and I reloaded it for web cam and mikes. But he did talk about the phone options too.

I took a screen shot of your home page. The images at the top, misaligned on my browser, but the other pages were aligned. I tried expanding and contracting the browser window, but couldn't move the header together to match up. 

Your code might be different on your home page, maybe due to percentages, pixel width or align left / right.

It's not too hard to read, although I like indented text so the letters are not against the edge of a frame.

Did you have the frame to lift the big tree custom-built? Or are those available for sale somewhere?


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## M.D. Vaden

I think I figured out part of the misalignment.

It's the wide image of the trucks on the home page. The photo is probably forcing the table width wider, and pushing your header alignment apart.

On each page, the left table with the menu stays the same width.

So your home page field with the text and that wider image is the one that's expanding. Maybe you can crop the image narrower.


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## JohN Dee

M.D. Vaden said:


> So your home page field with the text and that wider image is the one that's expanding. Maybe you can crop the image narrower.



He doesn't have much to crop. :\ He may have to resize it instead.. Or if he doesnt like those two he can re-take a new photo where they both fit nicely with out over stretching the page.


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## M.D. Vaden

Here's a site that I liked...

http://www.northcoastphotos.com/

CSS?

Ekka... What do you think.


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## Ekka

No CSS!

Loaded with tables/frames and Javascript. Numerous HTML coding errors.

I dont like it, messy, not logical, no info on front page. It would be a dial up killer. 

I can see the creative side, it wouldn't be easy to have a photography site that's got pizzaz. Tough task.

Why do you like it?


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## M.D. Vaden

Ekka said:


> No CSS!
> 
> Loaded with tables/frames and Javascript. Numerous HTML coding errors.
> 
> I dont like it, messy, not logical, no info on front page. It would be a dial up killer.
> 
> I can see the creative side, it wouldn't be easy to have a photography site that's got pizzaz. Tough task.
> 
> Why do you like it?



Merely the look of it. Not the content, code or other - just how it looks.

How did they get the small triangles under the diamond shapes to highlight for the mouseover?


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## Ekka

Here's the string of code. Below is the 2 mouse over embedded pics which are sitting in a table. That particular string of code <csobj> and </csobj> I am not familiar with. Seems strange, maybe some-one else might know. From a quick look on the net is appears to be Adobe's CyberStudio code from it's page builder or something.

<td width="123" height="64"><csobj h="64" ht="images/dibotms2.gif" t="Button" w="123"><a href="gary.html" onmouseover="return CSIShow(/*CMP*/'button01botmid',1)" onmouseout="return CSIShow(/*CMP*/'button01botmid',0)" onclick="return CSButtonReturn()"><img src="images/dibotms1.gif" width="123" height="64" name="button01botmid" border="0"></a></csobj></td>


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## M.D. Vaden

Ekka said:


> Here's the string of code. Below is the 2 mouse over embedded pics which are sitting in a table. That particular string of code <csobj> and </csobj> I am not familiar with. Seems strange, maybe some-one else might know. From a quick look on the net is appears to be Adobe's CyberStudio code from it's page builder or something.
> 
> <td width="123" height="64"><csobj h="64" ht="images/dibotms2.gif" t="Button" w="123"><a href="gary.html" onmouseover="return CSIShow(/*CMP*/'button01botmid',1)" onmouseout="return CSIShow(/*CMP*/'button01botmid',0)" onclick="return CSButtonReturn()"><img src="images/dibotms1.gif" width="123" height="64" name="button01botmid" border="0"></a></csobj></td>



Okay, so the color switch is just 2 images underneath. I thought it was a triangle done with code.

I Google "<csobj>" with "code tutorial" too, and it looks like that might be a type of code produced in a program Adobe GoLive for web page editing.


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## M.D. Vaden

I found that photography site in a bunch of links on a page which also had this Redwoods related site - a bit more character...

http://www.discovertheredwoods.com

That, and the other, were in the links of this site

http://www.redwood-forest.com

I like the images on the home page


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## maxburton

From the web site: "Design. Form. Function."

I see the first, but not the second two.


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## M.D. Vaden

Revisted !

This was a fun thread, and had enough good links to be worth a bump.

Was trying to find a darn website name today, and remembered it was in this old thread. Figured I'd revive this one while scrounging through the content.

Also, since one of the users who posted earlier in this topic just finished a website contest, there should be a small cluster of tree services with new websites.

'Tis the Season, it appears. HO - HO.


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