Topic: End chaos - a new start for me

Well Well Well, i finally got my ass into the mood to try and creat a new site. Since dfpunk.com went defunct and expired i needed a new place and since im cheap i got geocities for now. Im buying the domain this weekend.

anyway here's the link:
http://www.geocities.com/endchaos/


i know the links dont work and that the ads are annoying. I ask you crtique the CSS and HTML and basic layout.


thanks, patrick


Cell 650

OK, here goes:

Basic Layout

Pretty straightforward. Interesting graphic on the top, menu bar beneath that, content window below that. Clean and simple. That's always a plus in my book. And I like the blue, too.

The only thing that bothers me is the placement of the menu links. Why are they kind of stuck in limbo there? Aligned left, centered, or aligned right would be cool, but where they are now is rather... ambiguous (sorry, doesn't really translate well). I would just go with aligned right, putting them even closer to the scrollbar.

CSS and HTML

Ah, it's table-based. Well, that would explain why you've got a vertical scrollbar on the page--the table extends down far enough to make the scrollbar appear. (I would take out the "height: 100%" declarations--the table will expand to fit the content anyway, so if that's the way you're going to go you should probably take them out. It also might be what is causing the table to extend down further than it needs to...)

And you've got an iframe. Personally, I would just go with straight, tableless (and iframe-less) CSS, but that's your choice.

A few comments on your CSS. For starters, you might want to make your menu a list, and then apply your styles to that list class (Taming Lists at ALA is a good resource for this). Your id names also don't seem to make too much sense. Table-site and Body-site? As long as you can keep track of them, I suppose it doesn't really matter, but the semantics freaks would recommend that your id and class names reflect what they actually do.

Overall, your CSS looks more like an afterthought slapped on at the end than a coherent, unified strategy. Not sure if that helps much...

Basically, I like the look of the site, but it does appear to be a bit of a mess under the hood...

[Edit: If DFPunk is extinct, you might want to take it out of your sig.

Also, I hope my comments here were organized well enough to be of some help. I just get the feeling that I was kind of jumping back and forth.]



www.liminality.org

Well i went back and created what i believe is a much better design. what do you think?
http://www.geocities.com/endchaos/

Like before i want you opinions on source and layout. I know of the ads. The links go to pages now.


Cell 650

I gotta be honest with you--I think I like the other version better.

Is the placement of the poll window deliberate? From where I'm sitting (IE6 - WinXP - 1024x768), it extends beyond the gray area. My first instinct was that it was draggable, since the placement seems rather arbitrary. Then I found out that it wasn't draggable, and I have to admit the positioning irks me somewhat. It breaks up the harmony of the page. Perhaps that was your intention, but I find it slightly uncomfortable to look at. Yes, I am strange--I have emotional reactions to web site designs.

The content area has also gotten smaller. You got all this space to work with, and the content area is this tiny little box. The gray area beneath the title graphic and menu is rather narrow, and it is not centered either, so that throws me off a bit, too.

I like the menu better centered, I must admit. The only thing I'm not sure about is the "a menu to use" text. Is that really necessary? It is obviously a menu, and the only reason I can imagine for having a title would be to maintain some sort of continuity. Why not just eliminate the light gray box and move the menu links up into the blue box? That blue box is the only thing constant among the three elements (menu/content/polls), so I don't think it would be too jarring to get rid of the light gray box. I think it would tighten things up a bit.

Overall, I'm not really sure where you're going with this design. Like I said, it is a bit jarring visually, mainly because of the non-centeredness of it all, and the poll box sticking out to the right like that. This is a very personal reaction, though.

I see you've incorporated more CSS into your design, and it has a more integrated feel now. The menu looks good, and it's now semantically correct. :-) I'm assuming that you'll move your styles to a separate document when you are finished with the development, and you are just leaving them in now to make it easier on us reviewers. I appreciate that.

A few suggestions that may or may not be applicable at this stage, but that you might want to consider as you develop. So far I think you're doing a good job semantically--make sure you keep that up and don't fall victim to too many divs. Also, you are obviously fond of i-frames, which is a personal choice, but you might want to consider what you can do without i-frames. The way it looks now, the i-frames are boxing you in, and I am getting more of an impression of disconnected elements than a coherent design. Just something to think about.

Once I got used to the placing of the poll box it wasn't so bad - I thought it wasn't meant to be there at first - but at least make it's top edge line up with the main content box. Another niggle is the title bars for each iframe, one inside and one out isn't looking coherent IMO. Like Suho said, the text at the top ("a menu to use") doesn't seem to be of much use. Sorry about those, they're just little niggles really, and it's sort of frustrating to see them messing up a generally good design.

The only other problem, which I think IS a problem, is your use of colours. The scrollbar seems annoyingly not-quite-the-same as the title bars, and the BG colours of the main iframe are not quite the same as the other dark gray. One last thing, the borders on those scrollbars make them stand out where too much, especially where they're not neccessary (think poll box and the page itself).

Hope that helps out, you're well one your way to a good-lookin' site IMO.

Suho as i write this i am working on fixing some of these problems. As a matter of fact, yesterday as was getting off for the day, i decided to do away with the iframes.

The poll box was intentionally put there but I couldnt think of a way to make is draggable. If you know how please enlighten me because I was i really want to know.

The "a menu to use" is stupidly placed. I am going to remove it as i fix the design.

One of the major problems i had was trying to make the grey area extend the entire page. I cant seem to figure it out and it is annoying me. So if anyone knows how to fix that it would grratly appreciated.

Anyway that is all i can think of to ask. BTW every comment ya'll have given is greatly appreciated. And soon the siter will be in a final form, untill i can get a good concept of flash web design.




Cell 650

ok. some updates to the design. No iframes. No tables. All CSS, P, and DIV tags. I cleaned up the CSS by rearranging modifiers, deleting useless modifiers, and renaming some of the DIV tags.

I think it is pretty clean for now but the background color and the H1 background are still being prefected, in hopes of finding the best match with the blue in the logo.


Cell 650

i guess any further conversation about this which i doubt there will be, will be in a new thread



Cell 650

First impression is good. Cleanly coded, except for the geocities crap. Incomplete doctype - might want to take a look at http://www.alistapart.com/stories/doctype/ - (actually it might be right, but IE won't think it is)...

you're using lowercase in the HTML and uppercase in the CSS. (for instance, you're using <div> tags in the HTML but "DIV" as your CSS selectors. same for class names.) CSS is case sensitive, so you should keep the case consistent. I recommend lowercase, since XHTML requires lowercase (so the conversion is easier if you ever decide to make it).

Perhaps a little more padding in the grey area would be nice, and the right margin seems sort of large.

You should put alt text in your image. I suggest "Ending Chaos" since that's what the image says =)

Here's an interesting thing. You're wrapping your menu's <ul> in a <div>. Why are you doing that? You can elliminate the redundant div tag, assign the id directly to the <ul>, and just slightly change the CSS selector and the code will be a tiny bit better. Maybe you had reasons.

Please don't use align="center". You can center things with CSS if you use a correct doctype (see above) and use margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;.