Hellebore website

insam · Post by **insam** » Mar 02, 2006 11:57 pm

I'd like to invite comments and criticisms about a site I've been working on. Most discussion of hellebores occurs in the shade forum but many, if not most, hellebores can also be grown well in sun. Let me know what you think. I hope it will be a good reference in the future for anyone interested in these plants. I will update it and add sections in the future, particularly after April when I visit the Balkans to study and photograph species there. I'm currently working on a plant and flower structure section, and the hybridizing section is a long-term project. But much of it is ready for public viewing.

www.hellebores.org

Thanks, Joseph

Post by **Chris_W** » Mar 03, 2006 1:12 am

Hi,

Hope you don't mind the critique, but personally I like the interior pages much better than the home page. If you want the search engines to find you then you will want a lot more information on the home page. Looking at, for instance, the helleborus x hybridus page it is formatted nicely, has easy access to the links on the left, but also really draws you into the page with lots of useful and easy to read information. Your home page should really do the same. This is a mistake that a lot of beginning website designers make. They make the home page the "front door" and then make you knock to come in. Instead make it the front room. They already came in by clicking on a link to your site or typing in the address directly, so give them something useful right from the start. Otherwise they may not see anything and just leave. To be honest, that was how I thought, and then actually thought I was at a different website after clicking a link.

Hope that helps, and by the way, any chance of us getting a reciprocal link on your website?

Keep up the good work!

Chris

impatience · Post by **impatience** » Mar 03, 2006 1:15 am

Wow! Very nice. You have quite a site going there. Have you been doing this long?

Bosnia?? You must have an interesting life.

Thanks for sharing. Look forward to more info and more posts.

Doris_J · Post by **Doris_J** » Mar 03, 2006 9:11 am

Excellent, Joseph! I'll be checking this out over the weekend! And you're right, Hellebores can grow and thrive in sun. Just depends on the conditions. Most of mine are in full sun (Pacific Northwest full sun!)

kHT · Post by **kHT** » Mar 03, 2006 12:37 pm

Joseph, nice start and I kind of like the plain Jane home page but it a person is really looking for information they will enter! One ooops I don't see HG listed in the links?

LucyGoose · Post by **LucyGoose** » Mar 03, 2006 1:12 pm

Boy, there is a lot I do not know on these pretty plants! I wonder why I have never got any...

Yep, if you added GW, you MUST add Hallson's!!

insam · Post by **insam** » Mar 03, 2006 10:17 pm

Thanks for all the nice comments. Impatience I'm not sure how interesting my life is, but plant addictions make people do strange things like travelling across the world to look at little wild plants.

Chris,

Excellent advice. I have thought of that and will almost certainly change the home page. It is certainly not friendly for the robots right now but I'm learning slowly and it is a work in progress. If it was a commercial site I'd probably be in trouble (the code is pretty bad too)! One person who volunteers as an editor for Open Directory Project suggested I say something about myself and why I created the site, so maybe a description about the site and welcome would be helpful from the start which would include keywords and all the links etc.

And I would be happy to reciprocate a link. The reason I have the other forums is that they specifically have hellebore forums like there are hosta and daylily forums here. But I know there are plenty of people here who discuss them in other areas. I'll add it next week when I upload several other changes. Do you think there would be enough interest in a hellebore forum here? After all the hybrids were named perennial plant of the year.

Sometimes I forget that there are addicts of other plants too. haha

thy · Post by **thy** » Mar 04, 2006 9:06 pm

Ups Chris, do not like to disagree with you, but if I am Googling for a topic and met index pages with a lot of text, I go to the nest one, looking for one easy and quick to overlook for the topic I want. So, if it was me, I would give it a bit more info and a few more pics to cach the interess

Great site by the way

Pia

insam · Post by **insam** » Mar 05, 2006 1:15 am

I think Chris also had in mind how Google for example views the page. What we see and what the robots see is often totally different. For example they generally avoid any text or links that are saved as an image but will pick up simple texts and links on the page. This provides a bit of a challenge because if you want artistic elements (or even particular fonts), sometimes the only way to preserve them across browsers is to save them as images but then that makes information contained in them insignificant to the robots. So he is definitely right from that side. Typing "hallson" in google and getting it the number one hit among many, many possibilities is proof. Unless done well, even the best looking site in the world will never show up in searches, but often a plain one with clean code will have a high ranking. Anyway, thanks again for the encouragement. Hopefully one day the information will get to the people who are searching for it. I think i have a long way to go and may need professional help to clean up the code. Or maybe I'll bite the bullet and learn it myself.

doublemom2 · Post by **doublemom2** » Mar 07, 2006 1:53 am

Insam - Lots of really good info on your website! As a very grateful recipient of some of KellieD's hellebores, I'm addicted and badly LOL!

Just a quick note, one thing I had a hard time finding on the website was a contact link to email you. Maybe it was there but I didn't see one anywhere.

I don't know if you've heard of Elfi Rahr, she's been hybridizing hellebores in the Seattle area for at least 25 years, and she has about 10,000 hellebores on her property. I don't think she has a specific website of her own, but if you search for her on the Internet, you'll find a lot of good information about her and possibly a link or some information to add to your website.

Some day I want to tour her garden, it would be absolutely amazing in late winter!!!!!!!

Andi

oldcoot · Post by **oldcoot** » Mar 07, 2006 5:27 pm

SO much, he bookmarked it, so he can use it for reference

THANK YOU.. OC

oldcoot · Post by **oldcoot** » Mar 07, 2006 5:28 pm

SO much, he bookmarked it, so he can use it for reference

THANK YOU.. OC

Hallson Gardens

Hellebore website

Hellebore website

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