Topic: Ongoing revamp (Page 1 of 1)

In progress here http://www.beyondwonderland.com/

Don't know what to do with this exactly... am fiddling, adding, removing, keeping it css/quirky html for now.

I like the appearance very much; code is painful to look at and probably painful (quirks mode, meh :/) to work with, too, though.

Well, thanks reisio. About the code, more pointers are welcome (what should I clean?), but it's handy for development as it is.
Layers are grouped as divs, all the css is in one block of code, etc.. makes for easy server-side separation/inclusion, and for easy javascripting later on.

But I'll make it w3c compliant, still...

Well you added a doctype. Still an awful lot of img's that should probably be background-image's.

quickie: in opera i can scroll down forever...strange.

The Space Between Us | My Blog: lukas.grumet.at

Thanks guys. Well, it survived the doctype definition with only that Opera quirk, but I'll correct that.

Corrected. Both issues.

All in all, the next plans involve building a php w/ xml layer, a javascript one to enhance the interface, with maybe some xmlhttp requests, and
then, once the content is well organized and the interface shiny...

Adding the final, java/opengl layer on top of the xml data.



Anything else as far as bug reports and design are concerned?
I am thinking navigation now... where should I put the banners? should I use a pop-up based nav? I'll use xml for the data, but should I take the occasion
to rss sindycate it?

Decisions, decisions..

I'm wondering who is your target audience. Technical geeks, 50yo mothers, recruiters, MySpace weirdos, ...

There's quite a few grahic style there: plain colors, pixelated pictures/bg, gradient. You should try and stick to one style.

The page can be scrolled down to reveal the copyright notice and a big circuit image. On my laptop, in 1024x768, those elements are not visible and there is not scrollbar either. I tried to mousewheel down and press space because I expected a footer.

What do you mean by navigation ? banner ?
Aren't those CV, C++, ... links your navigation ?
If your target audience is the technical geeks, ad banners are likely to be a waste of time as they will disable them at first sight.

Be consistent : keep the navigation in the same shape/position on every page. Splash pages are usually a false good idea.


pop-up based nav ? are you crazy ? people hate pop-ups with a passion, they even install google & yahoo "toolbars" to disable them. Leave people the choice to open the links in new windows/tabs if they want to.

RSS and ATOM feeds is a good way to notice people. If they enjoy your work, they'll certainly subscribe to the feeds to come back later. Otherwise they will most likely be one-time visitors.

Oh, and of course validate your (x)html, css, rss, atom, ...



Hope that helps,

I don't find there are many different styles, the whole has a feel of circuitry / blueprints. Still, I see your point and tried to make the graphics a little more homogenous,
and added an xml data layer, transformed using php and xsl, sessions, and some javascript.

And made it a bit more 1024x768 compliant.

More pointers are welcome.

===layout===

I like the layout, the navigation works well IMO, but perhaps you could shift it a bit more to the right, so you can free some place for the real content?

===skins===

The skins work well, they have consistent colours. They don't always charge well here though (FireFox, Windows XP), the page sometimes doesn't display after choosing a skin.

===graphics===

I like the dotted lines, but can't really understand why the ones on the right hand side, next to the menu, are not aligned with the ones in the header.
The two brushed lines in the yellow bit at the top just don't fit in the overall feel, you only have very defined lines, this comes a bit out of the blue.

===icons===

Maybe you could work a bit more with the icons, integrate them in a more interesting way in the layout; for example, the squares could have a dotted border, and the "Home" icon isn't very sexy.


In overall, some pages just don't load over here. And I can't really see the point of having a Word CV, it would look so much better in the content window... Then you can give a link to the Word document, with some indication of what type of document it is. But you probably have a very good reason why to do it this way.

===layout===

No.

===skins===

Thank you. Sablotron bug (xml to xhtml). Will contact the host's support if it persists.

===graphics===
Will rethink that a bit.

===icons===
Ok. Err. Ok.

For the moment, I am concentrating on the content, making it available and clean, and then rss syndication. Then automod and the webCC, and then OpenGL for the web.
And more OpenGL for me.

God. Am I organizing part of my free time this way?!!!

Oh, forgot to mention... many things there will go Open Source. The search engine and indexer codes. The Genetic Sudoku. Everything truetype for the web, the rss aggregator,
and maybe more. About 10 snippets will be published with free source, some already are available in that format (from the forums namely).

Hmmmm... how does it work with the Java banners? Oh, the pink banner may crash on old versions of Java, please let me know if that happens.
http://www.beyondwonderland.com

Java without any warning pains me personally, but it's your site.

Yeah, but it's for you users. Thanks for the tip, will add an "java on/off" switch at some point.

_Mauro:

Like Maurman, you're imposing drastic size restraints on yourself. There's no practical reason to place your content into a tiny iframe. Even if there were, there's no practical reason to place your content into divs that span half the width of that iframe. Why squeeze your hardwork into one quarter of the page?

I'm not crazy about the design in general though. Your images (links) appear pixelated and the font isn't overly appealing. I'd recommend choosing a new font and reducing the size. Also, I don't think the Java works well with the rest of your site. I think removing the banners and incorporating new images would go a long way to improving the site.