Topic: TWD Site Prototype is back

OK - I took on board a lot of the helpful criticisms from the members both here and on the Gurus Network, and reworked the "sliding pages" site to make it a bit cleaner running. In addition, I added a facility to skin the pages. I intend to leave it as a "secret option" but for you all ... click in the middle of the flying doo-dad. Only 2 skins at present, the original plus a very simple proof of concept, but now I need to get my code hat off and my arty-farty hat on and see if I can come up with some skins.

Here's the latest offering (edit .. done - it's live and I sink or swim by it /edit)

As ever, your comments will be more than welcome.

P.S. I tracked the jittery movement down to the fact that I used backgrounds for all the moving parts. I thought it would help, but in fact the converse is true. When you use a background image, and resize a div, IE5+ goes back and reloads it from the site (I think). If you have your cache options set to always check (which most designers do) it visits the site at every step of the slide movement .. hence ... jitters.




[This message has been edited by trib (edited 11-09-2002).]

haven't seen the original version... so this is a fresh review with no background.

loads up, hrm.. that's a pretty dark blue on my monitor. i don't really like that tone of blue, not my style, i'd go for something even darker and more rich if you're choosing that color. no big deal though.

site looks weird, i haven't really seen anything like this before. not a fan of the rounded and curved lines. click around for a while and the scrolling movement you have is interesting. i wish there was actual content in the page so i could get a better grasp of how it'd handle the real deal, know what i'm saying? regardless it's decent enough and for the time being doesn't appear annoying, cool?

tried clicking on the button to change skins but it appears after navigating for a bit that's not an option (at least from the portfolio page), reload page to start over. ahhh, designer jeans? where's the stitching and 200$ price tag? not too bad, though once again i don't especially like the lines with their drop shadow and separation from the background.

weird, i clicked portfolio, then tutorials and the navigations turned into absolute mush. it was like multiple lines of text all scrunched up, unable to read. links were still present, but it had turned into mystery navigation.

now i can't duplicate the error... which is even worse, there's something lurking in there that messed up ie5 on a pc (pretty standard, right?).

just clicked on "trib" and it said "close menu?" i clicked okay, nothing happened and got the message "Done, but with errors on page."

so there are a few things to work out yet perhaps. the site navigation and movement makes me want to explore more so that's good. unfortunately i'm not feeling your color selection or graphic choices right now, but that's cool because you've already demonstrated the skinning ability of this page. i'd maybe work on a few different color schemes, maybe some lines etc with actual texture and feel to them. looks like this could be a lot of fun though with some further development, good stuff.

Sorry Mikey .. you probably caught it as I was altering the pages to try and get the forum "latest posts" page to appear in the forum nav area. It was about the time you would have been looking at it. I use a php page, so I can't really do it offline for that bit.

I tried beating it up pretty heavily and can't get any major glitches with IE or NS6, except that NS's rendering and redraw is pretty cruddy.

Designer Jeans was just a fill in to test the concept ... as you say, double lines of yellow stitching, a mottled denim background, and a $200 price tag is what I should have done to get it feeling right ... there again ... at my hourly rates, $200 would be pretty cheap for this pair of designer jeans

[This message has been edited by trib (edited 11-05-2002).]

[This message has been edited by trib (edited 11-05-2002).]

Wicked as always Trib!!

heh, I think I reviewed this over at FxZone a while back.

Did you change something with the centre ball though, I seem to remembe it looking a touch cooler before?
just curious.........

maybe one you get some content and such to go in it, make the drag bars match the site, a nice silver and blue site dosnt look to hot with fat grey scroll bars in the middle of it...

Be sure to keep us posted!

Thanks Swavey .. yes it's a complete rework based on the original principles (actually the 5th incarnation now). In the process of trying to make the motion smoother, I also redrafted the "flying doodad" to make it a bit less jaggy, and a bit more simple, and the dimensions a bit more standardized.

While I was doing it, I realised that I could make it skinnable too ... so I did ... but that now means that I'm going to need to design a couple more skins of a slightly more attractive nature. I'm not really an artist, so that bit will be painfully slow. Well at least I proved the concept with this release. (if you didn't try it, click on the Trib logo in the middle, and select a skin).

Unfortunately, because of the way I skinned the border and "arms" it doesn't leave scope for texturing them or making them more interesting (they're stretched, 1px wide images), but at least that means that I have only the corners, intersections and doodad to really work on.

I think it will need to go through about 2 or 3 more re-works before I'm fully happy with it, but now I really do have to start thinking about some content before I go any further with the development process.

On the subject of the internal scrollbars .. they actually do come out as dark and brighter blue on IE6, but not on NN I'm afraid. Because of the way I set it up, I might be able to add custom scrollers at a later date, but that's on the shelf for now.

[This message has been edited by trib (edited 11-06-2002).]