I have just started a website for my whistles. It is obrienwhistles.com.
It could well be the most rudimentary (rudimentariest) website you have ever seen, but I am open to comments and suggestions about what I could include. I would like to be able to include more sound files, but I don’t think I can.
Anyone who makes a constructive comment or polite suggestion in the next week will be entered in a raffle for one of my whistles.
Why do you think you cannot post more sound files?
#Since you state that in different materials comes a new sound, it would probably be pretty good to have samples of the different sounds too. Otherwise I for one wouldn’t be very sure whitch to pick if I’d want one.
Also the one sample I found doesn’t state what material was used or what key. Could help.
#Perhaps a wee mention on maintanence if any. Newbies – like me – would probably be interested in what to expect.
#Does the “oak” material assist in absorbing moist from breath?, what about the other materials where there are no wood at all. My only whistle is a clarke whitch has a wood plug, I never have problem with salivia building up like in other mouth-blown instruments I have shivers.
#There were links to places with reviews appearently. Lazy people like me will probably hesitate before clicking on them – fearing I have to do alot of digging on my own.
Thus, me thinks it would also be a good idea to perhaps put quotes of, or even entire reviews on your site. So that the potential customer get’s all the info delivier to him/her without much delay. If not enire then quotes or parts with a “follow link to read entire review” link perhaps?
#Does the price really incluce shipping worldwide? or only on the american side of the pond.
Ok that was everything I could think of at the top of my tired mind.There is always the easy one. Add it to your profile.
Also change your “send an email to” to open the viewers email composer. ( find a web site that does this and view/copy/steal/whatever the source)
Change the index in “index” to “O’Brien Pennywhistles”
Good luck,
Denny
edited for the usual spelling errors that occur when I don’t paste from something with a spell checker!
I think you’d probably want to change the pages’ titles to something like “O’Brian Whistles” and “O’Brian Whistle Fipples” instead of “index” and “page 2”. Remember that the page title is what the user sees when they (hopefully) bookmark your site to salivate over before purchasing.
It might also be a good idea to hone down the fipple pictures to a size that loads faster via dial-up – I found that I got bored and clicked away before the images were a quarter loaded. With a little fiddling you can get quite clear images that don’t take up anywhere near so much bandwidth.
I second the suggestions for sound clips of the different fipple materials, as well as asking the people who reviewed your whistles if you could quote them directly on your own site.
Overall, I’m in favor of rudimentary web sites – they tend to load fast. Now that I’m back on dial-up instead of broadband, page loading speed has become very important to me again.
Noel
It’d be nice if when you clicked on the picture, it gave a larger version of it. That way you can have smaller pictures initially to make the page load quickly, with more detail available if wanted.
The view of the nickel-plated whistle with the copper showing through the finger holes is pretty striking, you might want to include that.
You might want to mention the weight differences of the fipple materials, some people prefer a head-heavy whistle, some don’t.
Graphics look better when you resize them to the exact size you want on your web page, instead of specifying the size in the HTML file. For example, your knots look a little jaggy on my browser, try this resized version, or the second version here with a transparent background to match your web page color:
Nice to see you have a website, David. I think you have covered all the basics: whistle pictures, prices, guarantee, contact information. I was visitor 16 & 17 … I forgot to mark it on my favorites the 1st visit. 
The only suggestion that comes to mind – put your guarantee on the main page, in a lovely decorative script (of course). That shows you stand behind your product right up front – something I know to be true, 100%! That’s my 2 cents … Remember, you ask for free advice and you will always get your money’s worth. 
Keep up the good work!
~Judy
The way to do it is to prefix “mailto:” to the email address in the link.
However, I wonder if that’s likely to increase susceptibility to spambots harvesting his email address. Having my email address up on quite a few Web pages, I now get about 300 pieces of spam daily, which is kind of a drag, in spite of some fairly decent filtering by Apple Mail.
Eventually I’ll separate all my personal stuff off to a new domain, and then I’ll even go so far as to put up my email address as a graphic, rather than as text. I definitely won’t provide a clickable link on those pages.
Thanks for all the advice. I have already incorporated some of it.
I would like to include more sound files, but I think I need to have them hosted and then have links to their URLs. Is this correct and if so can anyone tell me how to get them hosted?
How much space do you get with obrienwhistles.com? You should be able to upload them to your own site and link to them just as you do with your main image.
The sample you have up appears to be 409 KB. (Sounds very tempting–especially at that price–and I don’t have a copper whistle yet.)
Email me or PM me if you have any specific questions. You can see how I do my guitar sound files at http://www.coastalfog.net/flatpick/tablature/tab_main.html
Cool. Suggestion: add it to your profile so you get a “www” button that people can click, in your posts.
g
David, nice site. I agree that a simple site is best. No need to get all flashy and fancy. Just present the product in a clean, nice manner. Well done there.
I do have a couple of suggestions. First, on the Fipples & Finishes page, when you click on a picture to get the bigger version, please make the bigger versions higher resolution. You have the smaller versions for those who have problems with loading times, but the bigger versions are a little fuzzy, so they don’t really show all the detail that the pictures are there for.
Second, I think a great thing on whistle pages is to have a links page. Have links to C&F, to some pages with tunes, things like that. That way, people who stumble across the page without knowing much about whistles can find out more (and learn why they want one of yours), and others have a convenient place to find some of the resources they want to use in conjunction with your whistles.
Also, I agree with the ideas of putting the reviews right on the page, rather than using links (don’t want people leaving your page before ordering!) and putting your guarantee on the main page. At the very least with the guarantee, have that page match the color scheme of the other pages, instead of plain white with plain black text.
Good luck!
Steven
Great Webpage…Crisp Clear Pictures…Great Prices. Site is very easy to navigate & well organized. I wouldn’t change a thing.
Great Job David & Good Luck…
The following suggestions have been incorporated into my site:
-sound files are now available
-small versions of photos that are clickable for hi-res
-my URL is in my C+F profile
Keep those ideas coming and be automatically entered in a draw for a free whistle.
Also, a new review has been added, from tinwhistler.com
Woohoo! 100% of my suggestions were used!
I have a couple of web sites running right now and my older one (ladyofthecreek.com) had one clickable e-mail address on it that now gets lots of spam.
When I set up my second web site (doubledaggerpress.com), with a new e-mail address associated with it, I created a form for people to fill out to send an e-mail. That has created a wall the spammers haven’t breached yet. I included this line for those wary for forms:
Don’t want to use a form? Send a message to the publisher by assembling this information
correctly in your “to” field: mplank at doubledaggerpress dot com
The nifty part was that I could use a free “response-o-matic” form and it’s pretty darned easy to set up. Just replace the standard fields with your customization. See http://www.response-o-matic.com.
Remember that it’s not secure, so don’t use it for credit card transactions–but since you have PayPal, you shouldn’t have to worry about that.
M
PS–I love the graphics on the response-o-matic site
It looks like you haven’t included any of your customer comments from those you have sold via Ebay yet. Although not as detailed as a full-scale review, it is nice to present some of your customers saying nice things about the whistles.
Is there a reason for the first “click here to enter” page? Why not go straight to the information?
You might want to throw an overall Center tag into your html, so that if a page is brought up on a wide browser it is not all shunted over to the left. Right now I am viewing your page with about three inches of empty bright green on the right hand side.
Speaking of which…as a person with overly sensitive eyes, I would suggest a slightly more muted background colour, but that may be just me. I involuntarily winced when the page first came up though.
No I had the same reaction. But for some reson I didn’t want to comment on design. Becouse then I’d have to commend on the square images to(espcially the ones with non-transparency, but also how images didn’t blend with the background 
.. and I figured that were taking things too far
Interesting…the email address shows up in the source code even with a form, so spammers theoretically could mine it, but I guess they look for the “mailto” part, so using a form gets around that?