Preserved Topic: first site review please (Page 1 of 1)

I just finished most (all but one page) of a site. The site is basically for family to see and some of them had questions on
making a web page and that sort of thing.

Let me know what you think.
http://electricanvil.com/c_prompt

This is not a happy site.

First of all, for some reason there is a horizontal scrollbar because your side links are way the hell over to the right. Very bad boy.

Your C:\ at the top, though a nice effect, doesn't match anything else. You need to either change the color of it or the rest of the site. Personally, I would drop the bevel coming out of the background, it cheapens the effect on the rest of it.

Mostly what bothers me is the layout. There seems to be a lot of empty space there for no real reason. You could make things much more compact to make better use of the browser window.

Also, on the little (+) and (-) buttons they don't look quite right. Maybe you moved your white layer too much? Try changing the blending mode to overlay or soft light? Something. Right now it doesn't look like a real bevel.

I do like the color scheme though. Its not too common and easy on the eyes.

You've got a few suggestions there you might take but most of all, if you like it, keep it.

At a quick glance it looks like you were going for a fairly simple 3 column layout? That would be a good idea I think. Your nested tables are jack-ed up and I'm not all sure what you're after with the use of tables and divs, they seem to be redundant. You could simplify things quite a bit by just going 3 col table like:

<table>
<tr>
<td width="20%" align="center">left</td>
<td width="60%" align="center">center</td>
<td width="20%" align="center">right</td>
</tr>
</table>

or something to that effect. I had to expand my browser out to almost 1280 wide before that horizontal scrollbar went away.

Not bad looking for a new guy teaching the family stuff

Jason

Clearly learning is the thing. Need to choose one way of designing and then stick to it

One issue I had viewing it at 800x600 is that, when you expand the gallery menu, it cuts off some of your middle column.

Thank you for the critisism. The problem that I am having is mainly with the menu on the left. I had to use <div> tags because of the DHTML menu. I could not use <table>'s for this. Then my other problem was the resolution. I can not find a good medium that will look good with 800x600 and with 1024x768.

The freaking menu is driving me nuts though. I thought that it was a good idea and kind of nifty but it is becoming more of a headache than being cool. Might have to figure out another way around it.

I wanted the front page (index) to be kind of plan and just focus on the "news" part. The other pages have more to them. I am going to rework the C:\ at the top. After staring at it for a couple of hours I started to hate it.

Thanks again for all the feed back it was quite helpful and I have started to notice a lot that I didn't before. I will be re-working the menu and the resolution problems. If you could please review it again on my next post I would greatly appriciate it.


CPrompt

messy...messy...code.

.linkcontainer {
position:absolute;
left: 1050px;
top: 327px;
width:150px;
hegiht:200px;
background-color: #00444C;
layer-background-color: #00444C;
border: 1px none #000000;
}

Can we point out the spelling error?

body {
background: #C0C898;
scrollbar-face-color: #C0C898;
scrollbar-shadow-color: #005086;
scrollbar-highlight-color: #FFFFFF;
scrollbar-3dlight-color: #C0C898;
scrollbar-darkshadow-color: #00444C;
scrollbar-track-color: #00444C;
scrollbar-arrow-color: #C0C898;
marginheight=0;
marginwidth=0;
topmargin=10px;
leftmargin=0;
}

marginheight marginwidth topmargin & leftmargin are not CSS properties.

...and then I realized that I had another hundred lines of code to plod through to get to the content. I'm sorry, I don't have the patience for that. Clean up your code. Word of advice? Absolute positioning is meant to eliminate tables. If you're gonna use tables and absolute positioning, you're going to get really crappy results. Lose one or the other.


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