Topic: Site Review #3 plz (Page 1 of 1)

And another one, some day this project will end :P....

I have to say, finally not using frames, and then going too see how my page looked in NS4, made something inside me just *click* and now i too can happily say as most do around here - 'frames are BAD!'...

anyhow, i was amazed how nice it broke down and i didnt even have to do anything. Ahh i still have some problems with moz formatting, but i will fix that once im happy with the design.

Here is the new one, only about us, design, links, contact work atm.

http://www.jt-design.net/aae2/Contact.htm


Warmage: here was this what you meant? i took your advice and made most of the page absolute instead of relative. the content layers still need to be relative tho so they flow down the page. I also took out all the reused ID's and made classes where required. I think this is what you meant me to do please let me know. Do you think i need to use z-indexes at all, i thought they were a big part of css so i put them in, but i dont think i really need them.

I also took out a little bit of the pics to clean it up a bit, i just have to put a simple header logo that doesnt clutter it up too much.

Anyhow hopefully im getting somewhere now, i promise ill make it work for your mozilla next warmage =)

Yes, much much better =)

It is a far cleaner, far more cohesive design.

I'm hoping the open space above the content is the size you are aiming at for your logo size?

Very interested in seeing what you come up with.

Yeh im interested too see what i can come up with too =/ - Ill try something simple see what happens ;/ - Oh yeh that space up the top is what im allowing myself, i figure thats a reasonable space without taking up too much room, i have a past habbit of making them way to big, but time to stop that =) - i guess i was used to the 21" monitors at work, at high res it doesnt seem that big hehe

Hey anyone know what a good text browser is, i want to see how this breaks down. Also i was wondering if anyone actually uses text only browsers, is it for accessibiliity so the page can be read out to them et?




[This message has been edited by H][RO (edited 01-16-2003).]

I use lynx as my text browser, you could prolly find a version of lynx for windows.

[edit] http://lynx.browser.org/ <-- quick search came up with lynx that works with windows.[/edit]

I would say that it shows up OK. I think you need to add alt atributes to you images, they make no sence at all to me when I am browsing through with Lynx.

You could also improve the usability of your site if you add something similar to:

<a rel="nofollow" href="#afternav" class="none">skip navigation</a>

... navigation code ...

<a name="afternav" />

and for your style sheet:

.none {

  display: none;

}

That would allow me to skip the navigation if I don't want to use it, saving me a bunch of key stokes, and at the same time that information doesn't show up to a browser that properly supports CSS. It is good practice all around, makes the browsing experience far more accessible.

I have to say that I am still having a bit of trouble with the proper display of your site under Mozilla. As the links travel outsize of your Nav image again. But ignoring text your page is starting to come togeather nicely. For you corner image, I think it would be cooler if it expanded out past the white content container a little so that it would look like it was holding the container in place as oposed to resting on top of it. This last one is a bit nit picky, and might be hard to implement using only CSS, so it might not be feasible. It is only a sugesting, this desing is looking better. It is starting to come along, I can't wait until it gets more work done to it.



[This message has been edited by WarMage (edited 01-16-2003).]

There's a slight problem on IE5/win2k, the menu text doesn't line up with the menu images. But I wouldn't worry too much, it stil lworks fine from the 5 mins I spent perusing it. You might want to look at the CSS layout hacks for IE5 which are mentionned and exemplified somewhere on www.glish.com

I am now back at work and using I.E. for my browsing habits.

I think the hover color for your navigation should not be white, as you lose the text into the background. I also think the design is looking better.

The british flag and the map don't really fit the style, maybe you should do something to make them fit better.

British flag?... !!!

*slaps WarMage*

Bah!

^^ hehehehehehe

Australia... *slaps myself

lol, yeh australia hehe....... things like that are the final touches i guess i will put on it, mi pretty happy with the design now i think, just have to design a better header =/....... and get it all working properly now .

Thanks for that quisja ill check that out,

and yeh war i aggree with the menu hover, i think ileft it as the link color used to be white.

Ill put the php pages up tonight and fix a few things so that the whole site works.

I like the design, much better now

Before I start rambling on about the rest of it I was just wondering; do you want crits on compability and code things now, or only crits on the design?

_________________________
"There are 10 kinds of people; those who know binary, those who don't and those who start counting at zero"

Thanks ven, just design things atm, code etc next week after ive had a good go at it i think probably the best way, i have a few things ive thrown in temporarily etc which probably make the code and compatibility worse ....

Its my birthday tommorow so i wont get a chance to work on it (have to have one day off! ), and today i have to try and figure out how to link access with myob =/

Thanks again everyone i really appreciate the advice =)

Happy Birthday!

I've got one word for you, H][RO: encoding. As it is, the first letter in each menu item turns into a funky Korean character.

And happy birthday!

Hehe, thanks all.

Hmm really suho? it was one of those >> double arrow things, i think ill take it out anyhow it doesnt really add anything =)

Any idea why it would happen as you said anyhow, encoding?

Sorry for the delay... I was away for a bit.

As for why your double arrows turned into funky Korean characters, yup, it's encoding. Basically, you need to tell the client what language your document is encoded in. If you don't specify the encoding, the client will attempt to interpret it using its standard character set. This may not cause a problem for most people, but I live in Korea, and I have my system set up to work with Korean characters. Thus, when I come upon a page without encoding specified, all those special characters (this includes things like curved quotes, dashes, ellipses, etc.) get turned into really funky Korean characters--as far as my browser is concerned, they are Korean characters.

Don't take it too hard, though--an overwhelming majority of the sites I visit do not specify encoding, which means I have to right-click and then select the encoding myself so I can actually read the content (it's not just the special characters that get funkified, it's also the first letter following that character, so it makes the text a bit of a pain to read if there are a lot of special characters). In fact, the Asylum doesn't specify encoding either, so anytime someone decides to use proper typographical marks in a post, it gets all funkified (as soon as I get done with this post I'm going to mention this in the main forum...).

Fortunately, the problem is easily solved (which makes me wonder why so few people bother to do it). The issue is mentioned briefy in our lovely :FAQ:, but you might profit more from some internationalization information at the W3C. I would just go with ISO-8859-1, which is pretty much the standard for English language documents (and also the encoding recommended in the FAQ).

Hope that helps. You may never have to worry about this issue, but I guarantee you will make a better impression on foreign visitors. Personally, I'm always impressed when I see proper encoding--it shows me that the designer is not insular in his or her thinking, but considers the whole world when thinking about his or her audience.

Thanks for that suho, merely my ignorance as to why it wasnt in there ;P, i guess i assumed it would tell magically somehow hehe. Thanks for that ill be sure to chuck them in =)

Don't feel bad--a lot of people think the same way. It may have something to do with IE's "Auto-Select" option in the Encoding menu, which people might mistake for "Auto-Detect" (as in automatically detect the language). At least, that's what I thought when I first saw the option way back when. Silly me.

And it was my pleasure to provide the information. Anything I can do to spread the word.