Topic: I need input [again]. I have re-designed my site [again] (Page 1 of 1)

Hi all. I haven't been here in some time. I've been working on my site, and I have it to where I want it. There is still a lot of work to be done, but input of course is important. Input would be great. It's as striped down as I can get it. Thanks everyone.

I forgot to add my link. Sorry. Thanks for reminding me.
http://www.mob68.com

Man I need more coffee.

I only have a moment right now, so I can't go all out, but wanted to make sure to drop in and say that the overall impact of this one *much* better than the previous version.

Your deprecated code still frightens small children though =(

Ahhh... that's much better


What's the splash page for, though?

much better! very easy on the eyes. on your day-to-day blog...i don't care for how all those borders are in there... just feels very 'clutered'? also, when you click 'home' it takes you back to the splash page....i'm lazy...that's one click too many for me. i think it would be better if, when you clicked 'home', you went back to your main page...not the splash.
i'm no pro, so i'll leave the rest of the 'under the hood' stuff for someone else

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Cell 1007::

Thanks guys. I'm starting to work on on the code to make it not so scary. I wanted to get the idea for my page done. So I now I can concentrate on more things. I will change "Home" to the main page, and a few other little things. Thanks again.

Even thought I think web site merchandise is one of the most ego centric ventures any design site can partake in; I can understand coffee cups, mouse pads or maybe even a t-shirt but....



...dear god why?

Ha Ha Ha Ha... A friend of mine told me I should do that one, against my objection. Thankfully these items will be getting their very own graphics which are currently in the works. LOL. It is funny. LOL.

Ok, some more comments...

I don't know if you already know this, but the splash page link doesn't work. I'm talking about the large graphic that says "mob68". Right now it's an <a rel="nofollow" href="#"> dummy. But I think you're going to fix that, right?

Most of the ugly borders from the earlier version are gone, but I have to say, I'm not sure you even need any. Just a bit of white space would negate the need for all the horizontal rules and borders.

The yellow-on-gray text in the blog area is hard to read. There's no problem with contrast or anything, it's just the colors. The light gray on dark gray in the other sections are much easier on the eyes.

I noted this on the earlier version, but the header graphic is a little over-compressed. I recognize the need to keep image sizes down, and it'd be fine if the header graphic was just a graphic, but as it is, there's a lot of text in there too, and the artifacts make them ugly and hard to read. Maybe isolate the text and make it a seperate GIF, or better yet, use HTML text instead of a graphic.

Another little thing... I noticed you included an xml prolog on your page, the part that comes before the doctype:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>

While the W3C recommends that you use this on strictly compliant XHTML pages, it's known to cause problems with certain browsers. Now, if I remember correctly, the xml prolog causes IE6 to be thrown into quirks mode, even if you have a doctype. That's certainly not what you want. Since it's not required, it's safest to simply omit it and specify the encoding with a <meta> tag. I don't see it used too often in real world sites, either.


Well, that's it for now. And remember, keep that code clean!



[This message has been edited by ozphactor (edited 08-10-2003).]

Ok. I've made some minor code and tweak changes overall. I'm probably going to change the header graphic slightly. The boarders are gone from around the blogs, and I've turned my main CSS into a linked one. I'm still working on getting this thing working nice. I'm getting there.

Much better than the previous one!

First thing I noticed was the splash page. It serves no purpose and it only makes me click the mouse one more time before I get to the page. So you should remove it.

You should change it so that the main table's width changes with the browser window. With a fixed width of 700px (as you have now) it will only look good on resolution between 800x600 and 1024x768 (might look good on 1280x1024 as well). On bigger resolutions the content will fill a very small space and leave too much white space left around. A width of maybe 70% would be similiar to 700px on 1024x768, and it would scale nicely on other resolutions.

When the user clicks the header it should take him back to the main page (welcome.html).

In the menu you have a misspelling of 'General'. There are also too many items in the menu right now imo.The fact that you have some seperators in there helps a lot, but you should combine some of the items. I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that the human brain only can observe 4-5 items like that in a single glance, if there are more items you have to concentrate om them to 'see' all of them. You could for example move all the 'design' links in under a 'main design' link and then access the more specific design sections through a sub menu. The same can actually be done to most of your links.

You should also change it, so that the menu link leading to the page that the user is currently on is disabled. It should also look somewhat different from the other links. The reason for disabling it is that it doesn't serve a purpose considering that the user is allready on the page. It should look different from the other links so that the user easily can see where he is on your page, as well as to emphasise that this link doesn't work.

That's all for now. Keep up the good work


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

All points taken. TY. The pages are built around a template in Dreamweaver. I'm working on Library items for them menu, so that there will be no link to the page the user is currently on. I will try to work out the spacing thing for other browsers. I'm tweeking it as I go. Thanks for the mis-spelling. Thanks again.