Topic: opinion before getting further

My fellow inmates, I'm asking your opinion on the test design and layout of my site before getting further and juggling with the CSS bugs in IE. At the moment it's designed for Standards Compliants browsers. Thanks in advance for you time and critiques.

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The banner is choosed at random. Refresh the page to get another one.

I'm glad I read those posts, or I wouldn't have noticed the random headers.

My initial reaction was soemthing along the lines of "ooh, very nice"

The background image of the page combined with the red header that I saw gave a nice little sense of subtle drama. The rest of the page flows in a very nice, clean, smooth manner. Overall, it is very attractive.

My biggest complaints:

1) without that red header, the others ar e a little....lackluster. that boldness of the first header I saw was a *big* part of what I felt made the page work.

2) once you go further down the page, where the header is no longer visible, all color disappears =( (excluding the 'code' block).
I would love to see hints of the vibrant red brought down in to things like maybe the borders on teh <h4>'s, the attributions for the comments, or some sort of highlight on the list (whether a bullet, or a left border, or whatever) etc. Just little things, but enough to re-provide that little sense of drama that I first saw.

and, to a lesser degree,

3) the page itself is awfully narrow. I can certainly understand liking it somewhat slim, but it feels a little too narrow for my tastes.

I like what you've done with the 'image' 'link' 'code' and 'quote' indicators.
The menu, though simple in appearance, is very attractive.

All in all, very nice page. The lack of color in the main body of the page is a serious detraction, however, as are some of the headers.

I would suggest (in addition to the suugestions on color above) reworking some of those headers so that despite having vastyl different subject matter, they retain a similar level of impact and balance.



(Edited by DL-44 on 01-16-2005 17:53)

DL-44: Thanks for this informative critique. Indeed the red cover has a big impact on the overall impression. I've updated a little the CSS to bring some touches of red here and there.

The content fits in 512px, which is already huge compared the 384px I planned at the beginning. I've read some reports and papers on usuability stating that a line width of ~400 px is the most convenient to read. That way the readers doesn't get lost by the long width of the lines. Alas it results in some longer pages.

Well, I could easilly make an alternate stylesheet with a width of ~768px.

In my browser (IE) the banner shows momentarily, then vanishes. Also the menu up top is kicked off to the right so it is not in the Frame area it should be.

Edit://
I missed the part about CSS errors in IE..so maybe what I mentioned is already known. Sorry =D

(Edited by Shifter on 01-16-2005 22:25)

I like the bits of red a great deal - draws the eye much more effectively, and pulls things together a bit more.

as far as the width - it works, it's just not what I would do

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
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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.
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Sure, but the fact is that ~85% of the users are in 800x600 or 1024x768, and a monitor of 17" ( or 15" for the laptops ) is still the standard size. However I fully understand your point, add to that that the main target of my site is more tech-savy than the average user, and will make the alternative stylesheet I talked about.

Ok, so I'll try to make this thing working in IE. I suppose I'll have to add 2-3 extra absolutely positionned DIV to work out the shadows and get rid of the transparent PNG ... Damn IE6 makes me think to NN4 5years ago ... maybe worse.

[edit] URL fixed. Of course it's just some stats, and their accuracy is not certain, but they depict a broad trend. Btw the URL was so weird you had trouble to replicate it [/edit]



(Edited by poi on 01-17-2005 16:22)

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
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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 always thought IE was the easiest browser to get working..and NN was horrible. Course, I dunno much about browsers. I have been seeing a lot about Firefox lately. No clue what it is though (well I know it's a browser)

I wish all browsers would just conform to the same thing..that's one of the only reasons I hate making webpages...compatability...

I think most people use IE...because the average computer user just uses what comse with windows...I just use it because I always have..and always thought it was the easiest compatability wise..'

Maybe someone can tell me about Firefox...although..this is off topic..sorry :P

It's not a matter of what's "easiest to get working". It is a matter of what borwser supports the standards, so that you can get it working *and* have it well coded.

After you do that, *then* you worry about other browsers.

The reason you have such a hard time with compatibility is that you are coding for the browser with the worst standards compliance, and then trying to adapt that to more compliant browsers.
If you create valid code that is well formed and semantically correct, and works in compliant browsers, it is far easier to adapt that code to work in other browsers than the other way around.

If you don't even know what firefox is, then you are quite behind the times, and need to read up.

If we are ever going to truly move forward, we nee to stop this notion of making non-standard HTML simply because it's easier and works in IE.

The idea that "NN is crap" should have ended years ago, when NN 4.x was made obsolete.

It's also essential to note that although NN and FF both use the gecko engine, FF != NN.



(Edited by DL-44 on 01-17-2005 18:08)

Shifter: To make it short, IE may be confortable and available by default on all Windows installation, but it does NOT comply with the standards of the web established by the W3C, like XHTML and CSS. Not to talk about the many security holes and the complete lack of evolution/upgrade aside the security patches and the little patch to prevent the violation of the EOLAS patent during the last 5 years.

On the other hand, there's a handfull of alternative browsers like Opera, Mozilla*, FireFox* ( and Safari and Camino* on the Mac ) that DO comply with the web standards.

The web standards are not here to annoy the developers but to give them the same and solid foundation to design and develop our web sites.

FireFox is quite popular because it's light, fast, customizable and has a hell lot of usefull extensions for the users, but also for the developer themselves. For instance there's an extension to edit the CSS of a website live, you can alter a page with JavaScript, you can translate a page in one click, zoom in/out the pictures, block some Ads, ...


You should check the Browsers to get an overview of the various browsers, their pros and cons.


ps: the browsers marked with a * are OPEN SOURCE, which means that whenever a bug is met all the community can help and fix it and thus provide a correction über quickly.

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.

quote:

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You can work towards standards no matter the browser you use to start because they all fail at complying 100% with standards, all of them.

---

That's true, of course, but is undeniable that IE is the worst offender, and allows far more non-standard code and even blatant code errorsto go through, meaning the coder - if unaware of the important issues - pulls their hair out for a few days trying to get it to work in a browser with higher standards.

It is significantly eaiser to worry about IE last at this point.

Ok, I think I managed to get preview of my site working in IE6

Of course some things are missing, like the soft shadow behind the navigation, the :focus on the form items, the :hover on the comments ( which I've just added ), the little texts behind the images indicating if it's a plain image or a link, but all in all it's usable and most of the essence of the design is preserved.

I've tested it with FF1.0 and Op8 too.

Wow, thanks for all the good info everyone. I will admit my MAIN problem is that I am not a hardcore or well educated designer..meaning I couldn't code a high quality and decent looking site only by hand. I learned with editors and usually use them..which I know is probably frowned on. If I had more time I would definately learn all there is to learn to hand code etc...

I still don't even fully know CSS or any of that. I normally just throw something together with Dreamweaver..

I dunno how well DW works with standards or whatnot...

The good news is I design fun..and havn't made anything in probably almost 2 years...but recently though about making another "for fun" site. I'm wondering now though about using DW..