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site review

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theEclipse

theEclipse

Programmer
Dec 27, 1999
1,190
US
Its time. I am putting it out on the chopping block for all to thrash and beat to a pulp.

I have included a link to the validator at the bottom of every page.


This is a website I maintain for personal gratification, family and friends updates, posting pictures, and pretty much whatever else I want.

My goal for this website is to be valid xhtml that somewhat gracefully degrades to still readable text when no styles are applied (add [tt]?nostyles=true[/tt] to the end of any url to remove the stylesheet). The website is generated by a php templating system.

my test environment:
WinXP Pro SP2
FF 1.0.7
MSIE 6.0
Opera 8.4

quick note: in order to get the site to degrade gracefully I made the stylesheet a php script that tweaks it alittle for IE. You can view the stylesheet at . It will be different when viewed with ie/ff.

Robert Carpenter
"Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose." - C.S. Lewis (Preface to Paradise Lost)
ô¿ô
 
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anyone....bueler....anyone?

Robert Carpenter
"Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose." - C.S. Lewis (Preface to Paradise Lost)
ô¿ô
 
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Like the yellow TR-7, In the 80's they were quite popular where I live in the U.K, but when I see them nowadays (very rarely) they are usually covered in rust, that one is in pretty good condition, although it's on the back of a trailer (might not have an engine?), but still.

site looks good, only thing I would say is, some images over-lap the background div. (viewed in firefox)
 
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Thanks Fendal -

Its a work in progress. No offense but the engines your country produced are wierd! Its a slow work because 8months out of the year I am away @ college, and if I am stuck on something waiting for a part it takes 2 weeks minimum (okay if I pay for "overnight" shipping it takes 10 days....). I am trying to restore it; its a project that, despite the speed, is coming along well.

Thanks for viewing it all 25-ish of you who did. I'll take the lack of (in depth) comments to be a good thing! ;-)

ConeHead- I agree that its abit dark. But my last page was abit bright. And besides research shows that brightness doesnt really affect visitors (excluding the extremes) as long as a gently contrasting color is used for text--which I tried to do.



Robert Carpenter
"Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose." - C.S. Lewis (Preface to Paradise Lost)
ô¿ô
 
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aight rob, you caught me. i looked earlier, but was too lazy to post. mainly because nothing screamed "tell my creator he sucks". which, yes, is a good thing.

however, now i will leave you what comes to my mind. i'm on my girlfriend's computer (she doesn't have firefox), but when i looked earlier at work (with firefox), it seemed the top background image remained where it was, even when i scrolled. when i scrolled down, i still saw the image.

this, to me, was ugly and unnecessary. i like it better when i view it now in IE. also, not sure if this matters to you, but the name and password fields are so tiny. earlier they resized to regular size in FF, but they don't do it now in FF.

the color scheme is somewhat bland, to me. also, try to use a little bit more imaging. i understand that text leads to highest accessibility, but sometimes a LITTLE pretty font/image/etc is a good thing.

try to avoid using absolute font sizing (px). instead, use relative font sizes, either em's or percentages. here's an excellent article that makes a lot of sense. when i change the font display in IE, your site doesn't compensate.

that's what i've got for now. good luck with everything.

*cLFlaVA
----------------------------
[tt]I already made like infinity of those at scout camp...[/tt]
[URL unfurl="true"]http://www.coryarthus.com/[/url]
[banghead]
 
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check the descriptions on your gallery images. Some are incomplete


Tony
 
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Hi

Robert Carpenter said:
[gray](...)[/gray] gently contrasting color [gray](...)[/gray]
Click to expand...
Gray on gray and black on dark blue ? Even if is gently, I find it more difficult to read. I prefer ugly pages with better readability.

I agree with cLFlaVA, regarding the fonts.

About the image on top, I think is ok, that in CSS capable browser is fixed, in others not. ( I think this is why we use different browsers. cLFlaVA do not like the fixed layer is FireFox, I hate the entry/exit morphs in Explorer. Important is to have access to the same information. )

Another thought about that top images. They are too different in content, style and color scheme. And as that images are big, in top and almost the only images, they capture to much attention. For simple decoration purposes I prefer less showy images.

Feherke.
 
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I hope you don't mind my color suggestions. Give it a try -in my opinion it will look better. So - for background - # 6d748c for text field- white (with black text). Instead of green try # 323540 with white letters. and for left menu # 505466

 
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I spent some time hacking at some of these suggestions. You guys seem to notice my weaknesses (duh?). I am not very good at designing the visual side of a website beyond making it not revolting. Anyways lets see...from the top:

clflava-

Thanks. I didnt have any idea that explorer wouldnt scale up the font when using px measures. I converted the font size to em -- as well as some of my box measurements. (Just in time too because my grandparents use msn explorer and they often keep their font size on "largest" -- their first view of the site was today).

I also removed the stickyness of the header. I left the navigation sticky because I am going for ease of use and it seems to make sense. It looks better this way. Thanks again. Also, great article!

As for adding images, this is my biggest weakness as a webdesigner. I am mainly a coder/programmer and dont have much graphic design in my blood. I added the images at the top as a last minute thing to spruce up the site.

fester-

I did know about that. Honestly what happened is that when I created the database on the live server I missed a zero on the field length and then the import data was truncated. I have never gone back to fix this.

feherke-

I know this may sound wierd but I originally designed the site without them but decided that something needed to be up there. I grabbed some that I thought might look cool off of stock exchange and put them up there. Some of them are on my list to keep and some are not.

jaz-

I like them mostly, but something is lacking. Its 2am tho so it may be my mind that is lacking. I uploaded the stylesheet as an alternate. Check out the site with a stylesheet and tell me if it looks like what you were thinking. In reality you can add [tt]?modstyles[/tt] to any url and it will switch the css to the other colors.

Robert Carpenter
"Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose." - C.S. Lewis (Preface to Paradise Lost)
ô¿ô
 
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The main point of changing the colors would be to: a) to increase the contrast between the main body of the text and background and b) as it is now it looks a bit too dark and "dirty" And the main "culprit" is the blue tone you have as a background for your main body of the text. I would suggest either you make it white (that's what I suggested in my color scheme) or you can
try # f5e0bb Anyway, either you leave you colors as they are or choose the ones I suggested but I'd change the blue background beneath the text for either white or # f5e0bb.

 
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TheEclipse,

i face the same problem as you - i'm graphically challenged. as you can see by my site, i use very few graphics, maybe too few. i know it's something i'll need to work on, but as you said, it's not easy coming from a strict coding background.

jazz98, i like your site design - it's unique and crisp. well-done :)

*cLFlaVA
----------------------------
[tt]I already made like infinity of those at scout camp...[/tt]
[URL unfurl="true"]http://www.coryarthus.com/[/url]
[banghead]
 
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Robert,

Finally getting to put virtual pen to paper on this one. It's coming on, though I think I still prefer your old white design. It's much harder (IMO) to make a dark colour scheme work, unless you're dealing with dark subject matter.

I like your use of photographs in the title bar, the one of the fountains/light show is particularly stunning, but they do present you with a problem - the header photos are fixed width, so the rest of the site really should be too. If viewed on a moderately big screen, the header image just ends abruptly. If viewed on a narrow one you get a horizontal scroll bar, so you're not even getting full value from the fluid layout. I'd contain the whole page in a fixed-width container and center-align it for those with big screens. Use a darker, or maybe lighter, shade for the background outside this centred region.

You need to give the page title a more contrasty colour to show up over the photographs, perhaps the same dark grey as the current background? If you do that, be sure to give the title <div> a background colour as well as an image, so the text remains visible if images are switched off.

What's that login/pass thing all about?

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd
 
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