Topic: Interesting (I hope) CSS layout

Have a glance at http://www.alanmacdougall.com/strieter/ . I'm only presenting the front page at the moment -- the rest is crap right now, and I probably won't need a review once I'm done with it, since it'll be considerably more normal.

You'll note that I've used absolute positioning, with percentages for x,y positioning and, in some cases, width or height. For instance, the sunny roadside at the right of the page will change width depending on your browser window, and the deer-crossing photo at the bottom left will change both width and height, although your browser would have to be pretty tall to see that.

I've tried to set things so that the layout will be different yet pleasing at 600 to 640 px wide, at 720 to 800 px wide, and at around a thousand pixels wide. I'm going to assume that most people with a desktop larger than 1024x780 don't maximize their browsers, but if they do, they'll just see a bunch of spread-out images.

If you've got something nice to say about this layout, I'll be delighted to hear it, but I'm more interested in hearing if there are any problems with it. If the layout is looking sloppy at one of the sizes I mentioned; if the design itself just isn't sufficiently spiffy; if there are technical issues; please give me some feedback. I'm particularly worried about technical stuff, since this page is pretty drunk on the CSS z-indexing and positioning. (Once the site is live and happy for modern clients, I'll be going back and optimizing for Netscape 4. Using NS4 style-hiding, it'll be a very different layout for those users.)

I've noticed one weird thing already -- when I refresh the page in Opera 6, the central text box sometimes gets overlapped by the dark-highway and blue-stag images, in violation of its explicit z-index and even common sense. It's an effect that I couldn't reproduce normally if I tried, so I'm assuming it's a rendering bug. Fortunately the page seems to work right on the first load 100% of the time, so as long as you don't refresh in Opera you should be fine... any similar weirdness should be reported to me immediately!

edit: Argh! Bastards! I clicked my own link in Opera and boom, there's that rendering bug. Resizing the page seems to fix it... any ideas, ladies and gentlemen? The text box in question has a z-index of 50, way more than anything else on the page. I've been spacing my z-indexes by 5s and 10s, to make it easier to insert objects later if need be.

[This message has been edited by Perfect Thunder (edited 12-12-2002).]

Hmm... well, without commenting on the technical aspects, I would have to say that the page just strikes me as too... busy. That's a heck of a lot of pictures, and while it may be nifty in the CSS-pos sense, it seems to be a bit much in a general design sense. I would cut down on the pictures and increase the amount of information on the front page.

Also, the links running over the photo just seem a bit odd. They're not hard to read, thanks to sufficient contrast, but they just seem wrong for some reason. I think the hover effect also contributes to this. Can't give you anything more specific than that, though.

Hmm, I quite agree about all the photos, honestly. My original version of the page was just a single striking image, not a lot of graphic goop, and more text. But you know clients... he pointed to http://www.hsus.org as an example of what he wanted, and his specific words were "I want my web to have more pictures." (The things we do for money...) Not having enough content to fill out such a design, I went for the graphicky approach.

Ah, clients... Hearing about some of your adventures makes me very glad I decided not to follow the path of professional web designer. I'm sure that doesn't make you feel any better, of course.