From: Somewhere over the rainbow Insane since: Mar 2001
posted 07-22-2003 13:24
The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.
I don't like to sound too nitpicky, but...
Look into doctypes and encoding. It's just a few extra lines, but it makes a difference.
As for the design...
Color scheme: I've seen numerous people attempt a gray/blue color scheme (myself included), but it never comes together just right. The grays kinda fall flat, and I can see that the blues are trying to liven up the page, but they're placed rather randomly, like little splotches here are there... But, hey, why are you listening to me? My color schemes suck too, so I feel your pain
Layout: The "best viewed in 1024x768 screen resolution" note at the bottom of the page is too literal. Better to code your tables in percentages instead of pixels.
Other stuff: Your navigation scheme is confusing. I see links for "today", "this week", "this month", and you have little modules for each of these and then you have a calendar in the center, and then there's another "navigate" module on the right that contains day, week, and month again?? I dunno, maybe it all makes sense to your intended audience, but I would simplify it a bit. As soon as I hit the page, I should be able to instantly see where I want to go.
Some uneven visuals: the blue bar with the header "This Week" is shorter than the gray bar on top of that with the 4 links. Why? Under "This week's events" There are some dark blue bars which not only contain nothing, but cut off before they reach the right edge. Why?
Overall, though, good effort. Just try to make it a bit more liquid, maybe use a little more CSS, and get yourself a doctype and some encoding
From: Somewhere over the rainbow Insane since: Mar 2001
posted 07-23-2003 09:17
The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.
I've revamped the site a bit color-wise and CSS-wise. I'm ecstatic I've happened upon the wonderful world of CSS. Got doctype and encoding, but I'm still not sure on the colors.
From: Somewhere over the rainbow Insane since: Mar 2001
posted 07-24-2003 11:30
The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.
Ok, this is going to be quite long and not too plesant, but I do like the site -- I just think it could be a lot better...
Colour wise, if you want to stick to the monochromatic thing you have going for a project like this I'd suggest you try and structure the colours much the same way you do the data.
Use the monochromatic values of the colours to signify the different levels of your data, as you currently have it the colours seem to be decided rather haphazardly to contrast against its most immediate container as opposed to fitting into any kind of structure to signify the data's place and the data's relationships to other elements in the document. For example, the colours for days of the week; the variance here for the current week is too strong and separates these elements too much and makes the data difficult to read. If you kept the text colour the same and only varied the background colour ever so slightly (just enough to be visible) the data will be easier to read whilst the current week will still contain a strong significance through the repetition of cells with a slightly different background colour but it won't separate it too much from the other days of the week.
The opposite goes for the colouring of the current day. Making this the same colour as the content headers makes this element seem completely static and non interactive.
Again, use colour and create a code of conventions for your site. i.e.; all links are green, all links are underlines, all headers where the header text is a link have a very dark green bg colour.
As it is, come links are green, others white, most with underlines, some without, some headers with green backgrounds and white text are links, and some are not. Most green text is a link, some are not, moth white text is not a link, and some are.
This makes things horribly confusing. Outline your document structure and colours/style elements rigidly so that you have a uniform convention for which to use for links, headers, highlights, sub elements, content blocks and so on, but make it cohesive and make it flow in a logical manner.
The contrast could also do with some work, sometime you have too much contrast, other times you have too little. The biggest pitfalls with monochromatic colour schemes is that there is no overly contrasting elements unless you keep everything rather low key except for one type of element like links etc... May I suggest colouring all of your structural elements in that monochromatic scheme but adding a highlight colour for the links, again work this into you style structure.
Oh and loose the gradient in the site header, there's absolutely no point to it as all it's doing it drawing un-needed attention to the wasted space you have to the right of the header (mainly because it's the only gradient you use; this also makes it look generally out of place).
Markup markup markup.... Your HTML is... rather horrible. Yes your using a Doctype and your using CSS but why?
According to the w3c valuator ( http://validator.w3.org/ ) there are 244 errors in your code. Most of them because you don't use quotes ( " " ) for your HTML attributes but you have some major issues with having dumped one whole HTML document inside the body of another, your code:
code:
</div>
</font>
</small>
</td></tr></table>
<table><tr><td>
<html>
<head>
<style type="text/css">
<!--
Big no no there.
And I've found a lot of other really strange things around the place like this:
Where is that anchor ( <a> tag ) exactly? If it's not in the <body> of the document where is a browser meant to scroll to when you navigate to it? Modern browsers like IE6 may be very forgiving when it comes to how they handle these kind of things, but you can bet light weight browsers that run on PDA's and the like probably aren't robust enough to cater for errors like this.
Then there's your use of CSS; most of which is inline thus completely removing any benefit of using CSS in the first place. CSS is all about removing style from content. What if you wanted to alter the text size for each cell in your calendar? You'd have to alter 30+ separate tags in your document. But if you'd coded the CSS correctly and simply created a style class for those elements, all you'd need to change is that class.
It's a nice site but the colour and styles need some serious thought and the code needs a lot of cleaning.
[This message has been edited by Dracusis (edited 07-24-2003).]
Yeah, Drac's right. The purpose of a doctype is to show the browser that you took the time to code a clean, standards-compliant page. Run your page through the >HTML validator<, and try to fix up what you can. Sometimes, validation errors can be pretty cryptic, so let us know if you don't understand any of the gibberish that it outputs
I see that you've updated the design a bit too. You're taking a step in the right direction. I like the header, the simple gradient thing works better than the old header. The colors aren't wonderful, but with a few more tweaks, you can get it looking good.
The navigation is simplified, now that there's only two columns. I noticed it's liquid too. You don't know how many people will appreciate that (myself for one ).
And it's always nice to see someone who actually takes suggestions when they ask for a site review
i'm still surprised people bother giving such specific criticism, but i definitely appreciate it.
about the code, i know it's confusing. clean code has never been my strong point, and i definitely plan on working on that.
right now i still heavily rely on tables. the header and the footer are the first real <div>'s i've ever really manipulated style with. also i used a div float attribute. *proud of myself* but i still need a lot of work in that area. looking at different peoples' CSS files and different tutorials, i get very geekily excited about the options that css gives.
design-wise, i know the colors need work. the standardization of the colors through the documents needs to be put through solely CSS. right now its a combination of variables delcared and called in PHP, and minimal CSS. the logo was very obviously made in 2 minutes with photoshop at 3am with no sleep. i went to sleep saying "it'll do for now."
improvement doesn't come without shortcomings. thanks again.
The term "liquid design" means that your webpage will adjust to the size of the viewer's screen.
For example, a layout table with a width of 600 pixels is said to be "solid". That is to say, no matter what size the viewers screen is, your layout stays the same. So in a 640x480 it may fill up the whole screen, but on a 1280x1024 monitor, it will leave significant screen space unused.
A layout table with a width of 80% is "liquid" because it will resize depending on the viewer's screen. So people with a smaller screen can see the whole layout without horizontal scrolling, and people who've invested in a high resolution monitor will have the advantage of seeing more information in each screenful.
There's also a combination of both "liquid" and "solid" design elements which results in a "jello" layout, as some people like to call it
I'm removing tables from my site, and its very liberating I must say. The more I see good CSS, the more I want to use it. The more I use it, the more I see unnecessary old table code in my html.
So long tables. LATER!
On a less dramatic note, I'm trying to improve the site code-wise. What kind of doctype would be most suited for my site? Are there certain guidelines for "Transitional" and the like?
i changed the colors around from the dull grey look to this. the site still uses inline css called by php. weird way to do it, but it works for now. what do you think
posted 07-22-2003 10:49
I dunno, maybe it all makes sense to your intended audience, but I would simplify it a bit. As soon as I hit the page, I should be able to instantly see where I want to go.
