Hey, I'm slowly building up a website for somebody, and I'm in need of advice. It's my first website at all (although I've used C# for ages so PHP hasn't been too much of a problem), so I'm still rather new to what makes a site decent and all that. The temporary host is at this address: http://kinross3142.dyndns.org/ (no, seriously, there isn't anything wrong with it...). There are some obvious corrections to make, such as adding some padding to cells etc but that'll be done in time. What I'm wondering is should I make the page scalable, so that its height is always equal to the browser's height upon load? The website's designed around a 1024x768 screen, so will probably look poor on a 1280x1024 one... Also, do you have any tips for how to improve the site as a whole? It would be much appreciated! Thank You! Mikleran
How have you created the hover over buttons on the left navigation without CSS. I also noticed that some the contact us one does not change blue like the others and only on a couple does the cursor change. I also noticed that the images took a little while to load and I'm currently at work in a Digital Media Centre so that is with good bandwidth available. You could have a look to see if you can shave off a few k on each of those - especially the banner.
Don not ever use .PNG files on your website. First export them to JPEG and use those; they weight less than PNGs.
Erm, I guess I've used CSS to the extent of writing "style="cursor: pointer"" in the img tags but it's not in a CSS file or anything. Unless you're meaning my onmouseover="document.image.src='whatever';" stuff to change the image when you move the mouse over? The images took a while to load because they're being uploaded over my crappy internet connection: the whole site's just stored on my PC at home atm. <250kb/s upload speed for the loss. Inkspace's only non-vector graphical output is PNG.. so I was kinda limited. APart from the banner, I think all pics bigger than a few KBs are JPGs anyway, aren't they? :s Thanks for your help so far, and sorry if you've seen the site with some horrible stuff such as the wine-red background gradient etc- I'm just playing around with stuff like that atm. Any more advice would be greatly appreciated!
It looks as if you have gone the hard way around creating a menu with the hover option. It is a very simple thing to do in CSS. If you place the list in a div tag with the id lets say left_nav you can use the a - anchor and a: hover attributes of css to style the whole list of links at the same time. I found this site really useful when learning css and html for that matter - www.htmldog.com
I think your site is fine. I wouldn't worry about making the page scalable. I would rather redesign it so to avoid that frame with the company's history. Make the page without frames. People (me) just don't like pages with frames. Good luck.
Again, thanks for the replies! Do you mean frames entirely or just scrollable frames? I think I accidentally left the history page slightly too large last time I edited meaning it had to have scroll bars... my aim was to rid the site completely of scrollbars, which is why it's so compact! If you're meaning rid it entirely of frames, originally it didn't have any! However, it did mean that the contents/banner were reloaded every time you clicked a link so I scrapped it... do you think I should reverse my decision? Ah, thanks very much. That's something to bare in mind in the future... I don't think it's worth changing how it's done now. PS.. Thanks for the link... helpful site! PPS... Did anybody peek into the projects section by any chance? That's probably had the most work done in it and probably needs the most refinement...
Not entirely true. JPEG images were intended for digital photography, PNG's were designed for use on the web. while it's true that because JPG's are compressed they will take up less space, they are also a lower quality. Also, PNG's can have variable transparency, never lose quality, and will show up on the other screens exactly as they appear on your own screen (gamma correction) - making it a better format for web.
Sorry if double posting isn't allowed, but it wouldn't let me edit my previous post. Anyway, this is what the site should look like... hopefully after some testing it will look like this in IE... img147.imageshack.us/img147/8834/websitetu9.png [That's in Ubuntu Firefox at 1024x768]
hmm, something funky happening there with your pattern behind the text. I'd actually remove that pattern or else make the stripes bigger, anti-aliased and WAY less contrast. Don't want it competeting with the type for legibility! I'd also think props are in order for using ubuntu *hi-5* I'm a big kubuntu lover myself, but it doesn't run correctly on my iMac yet
sorry to be mean but you designing in the 90's. needs a web2.0 feel. loads very slow for me. may be just me.
Well, I disagree, web2.0 is easily overdone and leaves a REALLY bad taste in most designer's mouths. his design isn't stellar, but it's certainly a good one. I didn't see anything outdated on his site, and I didn't see anything 'trendy either' so I imagine it'd be a good site that would sit well with most viewers and last for more than 2 months in the web trends world. Keep doing what you're doing
I'm not wanting to seem like somebody who dislikes all criticisms, but web2.0 was certainly something that I was not aiming for. It's one of these things that I truly dislike because it's so overused despite not actually meaning anything special. Like 'Amy Winehouse'. Anyway, what what would you reccommend I do then if I were to try to make it more flashy/modern? And yes, it loads slowly... I explained that earlier! How odd. Is that in Safari? Bah, even if not... I'd totally forgotten about having to test it on that because a fair few of the people looking at the site are likely to be in Safari. *hi-5s back*
Yep, PNGs have advantages but my comment was referring towards the size(it took a while for me to load), so maybe he could optimize some of that.