Topic: Site for critique (suprise...)

Hey, this is sort of a cross between asking for critique and some questions about the best way to approach the layout.

First, the site is at www.pufxoorz.com. As far as purpose goes, eventually I want it to be kind of like a blog where friends and I post ideas for fantasy things. There will probably be different sections for categories of ideas like races, places, people, etc., but I doubt it'll be much more comprehensive than that.

I'm using pMachine (which is a pretty cool php/mysql publishing thing) for the backend of the site and I've hardly changed any of the text formatting from the default template, so I know I need to mess with it more. Any suggestions as to how it needs to change would be great.

Mainly, I'm curious on what you think about the general layout; specifically the background image in relation to the content. The base image I'm working with ends abruptly - the snake pointing towards the middle doesn't have a head - so I want to have some kind of border adjacent to it as often as possible.

(note: I'm using IE5/mac so problems and such may or may not be specific to that)

Initially the head was to the left with a box containing all the content floating to the right. It was pretty easy to make sure the border of the box covered the end of the picture, I just added a margin offsetting it X pixels from the left. I flipped the head to the right because the head took up so much space that a lot of the times the user would have to scroll over to see the main content (it was a little bit bigger back then).

With the head on the right, I could make sure the box's border covered the edge by using absolute positioning and offsetting it X pixels from the right side of the window. That caused some odd behavior though; when the window shrunk below the size needed for the offset and the box, the left side of the box would be clipped and there wouldn't be a scrollbar to see the rest of it.

I finally got rid of the box and incorporated the border into the image so I didn't have to worry about the positioning of the content. Cons are that the background image now needs to be 800 or so pixels tall to accomodate higher resolutions.

Any suggestions on that or just general comments on anything would be great.

Thanks!

P.S.
Uh, and as to the actual content, it's so rough that it's scary. Ignore it.



[This message has been edited by Nemesio (edited 07-04-2002).]

I'd box the blog and move it away from the left side. Mainly for balance and to shorten the length of text lines.

Allewyn

Yes, definitely box the blog. As it is, the text lines are way too long, and the text sometimes runs over into the graphic on the right, making it impossible to read. Considering how tiny the text is, long lines are not a good thing.

Is that pure red for the links? I know it's conventional, but it looks really sick against that green (oh, and that's not "sick" in a good way ). Maybe it's just me.




Cell 270