Finally: my newest time commitment

The web page is finally up and running. Now for me to take on more duties: that of keeping it edited. Here is the Home Page for the Herb Garden where I volunteer, the Gardens at Gantz Farm, in Grove City, Ohio. I would love any feedback from friends about how to improve this site!

http://gardensatgantz.org/

Kathy

Hi Kathy I have to commend you on a nice looking website! You might want to provide a back link from Gardens of Yesterday and Gardens of Today back to the Home Page or other pages.

How fun, you volunteer there! Looks like a great place!

Lupy, the site and the gardens are beautiful. I bookmarked it so I can follow your obvious success there.

I have the site bookmarked too.Very nice.Were those tall plant markers throughout the site? Do you know where I could obtain some?
Zen

Wow what a difference between then and now! The new picture almost looks fake for the colors are so clear and pretty. very nice! great job!

The website is great. And those walks and beds - I love it ! So neat and clean and beautiful !

Beautiful Kathy!

beautiful site. The only thing I would do is to compress the pictures. 2 of them are over a megabyte in size and you can compress and still get great quality and they will download much much faster. something you want for dialup users. it is a great site!

Beautiful site.....such a lovely garden and so much work done to make it beautiful......very good job.
Dee

The color scheme you used compliments the subject matter. It's really nice-looking!

I agree about the images. The ones scan124.jpg and scan138.jpg, for instance. Scan124 comes out huge, even on a monitor set at 1024x768. Aside from the file being very large, the image does not need to be so big (that's my entire monitor screen in the picture).

I'd resize them to 640x480 or 800x600, 72 or 96dpi (anything denser does not make any difference when viewed on a monitor) and save the JPG's at 70% compression.

This message was edited Dec 4, 2003 12:27 AM

For instance, on Scan138.jpg, these are the settings you had for it. The 1200 dpi makes the file gigantic and there's no visible benefit. Even for printing images, 300dpi or 600dpi is usually more than sufficient. The dimensions, 1500x1000, are very large.

Taking the same image, I made the longest side 640 and let Irfanview fill in the corresponding height. I changed the dpi to 96.

Here is the resulting image. It is now only 67.2kb in size, rather than 1.85mb.

Oh thanks Gardenwife.......now it's loading faster and I can take the time to view what I couldn't yesterday......
Sometimes my server is slower anyway so when photos are really big it takes forever for them to load.......I have dial up since nothing else is available.....boho....
What a beautiful place to work......
Dee

Wow, that's beautiful! They must have a fortune in brick.

Dee, I didn't do anything to the site, just suggested what Kathy might want to do. Glad it ran better for ya, though! :)

LOL.....I think it's my server...yesterday it was sooooo slow and took longer especially anything with photos. Today its better so I just assumed someone did something to the site......
Dee

Kimberley, thank you so much for your instructions on how to re-size the images. I am going to work on the site on Thursday (I hope). I didn't do the original design work on the Web site: it was done by another volunteer, who received her Master Degree in Education specializing in Web designs. The mechanics of it still aren't wonderful, but the overall look is breath-taking.

I am hoping that by March, the site will also include all the projects that volunteers can check daily or weekly, to get more involved. Big project! Lots of maintenance to be done (by me).

Yes, the Garden is magnficent! The funds were provided by the State of Ohio because it was created to be part of AmeriFlora in 1992. The farmhouse was built in the 1840's, and keeping it as it was is of prime importance. You are right: the brickwork was very expensive, because it had to be matched to the farmhouse brick (all hand-made antique brick).