Ok, I'm game (Full Version)

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ThomasMobley -> Ok, I'm game (9/9/2007 13:44:40)

I normally do back-end applications, but I've been told I'm going to end up doing front ends soon too, so I've built these two sites just to get up to snuff on xhtml and css. I've only been playing with css for a week, so I expect some hard hits, but go ahead, I'm tough, I can take it. I'm still playing with the second one, so you may see changes happen before your eyes on occasion. The first one is very simple and static, the second is fairly complex and dynamic.

CarolinaComputerServices.com/index.asp
FaggotsInTheFire.com/index.asp



d a v e -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/9/2007 15:00:09)

re: CarolinaComputerServices.com/index.asp

i'll be blunt:
- it's plain but not in a good way. i would also associate those colours with the medical profession, not computers. try blue with a warm colour for a more high-tech look with some human warmth ;)

some images would be nice! even a logo

i HATE the way that using different size links on hover makes the page jump. just use the colour change - and some padding in your buttons would be good too, especially at the sides

the menu at the bottom is redundant

you have at least one spelling mistake "servces" on the first page.

since we've had proportional typefaces for quite a while now there's no need to leave a double space after the period (full-stop). it was fine for mono-spaced typewriter fonts to make it clearer but it's no longer necessary.

try verdana or arial for your choice of font instead of the more screen-unfriendly Times New Roman.

lots of centred paragraphs are harder to read than normally justified (i.e. left-aligned) text.

some subheadings would be useful as people skip to the relevant bits by scanning headings rather than ploughing through a field of text

to sum up it just doesn't look professional!


by the way, do you ever get your beard tangled up in your hair? :)




ThomasMobley -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/9/2007 15:18:50)

No, never had the two get tangled.

Thanks for the input. I kinda liked the green, but that's my favorite color so I'm a bit prejudiced there. I'm also terrible with colors, so It's not too surprising that I chose bad ones.

I'll jump into the css and see if I can make it a bit more professional.



womble -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/9/2007 15:30:22)

First off, congrats on getting to grips with CSS. CSS IMHO is the way to go. I was a little puzzled why you'd gone for XHTML transitional rather than strict? If you're going for CSS layout, for future-proofing if nothing else, you'd be better going for the strict DTD.

Looks wise, to be quite honest they're both very web 1.0 circa 1995 in that big text and not much in the way of graphics abound.

On 'Carolina Computer Services' I failed to find a single graphic on the entire site except for the 'xhtml' button. For a business site these days you really do need to look professional, and that means some graphics and a suitably un-garish colour scheme....and I'm afraid a pink/yellow hover combo on navigation on a green background just don't do it for me. You've also got a nasty text size increase on hover as well which is making the menu jump around on hover - in your CSS you've got a font size of 1em for the nav, and 1.1em size for the nav on hover.

'Faggots in the fire'...again a very 1990's look. I'm still trying to figure out what the site's colour scheme is - because it changes on different sections of the page. I'm guessing from your post though that this is a work in progress, so the navigation that doesn't go anywhere is to be expected I suppose, but that tiled background...[:'(] ...with the mish-mash of colours and rainbow effect text, it's just too much.

I was slightly confused by the site's tagline "Cranking up the heat in the Republic Views from my Libertarian middle". I'm guessing that should be two sentences or have some punctuation or a dash in it? On the site's title having something a bit different or memorable, or even seemingly provocative is often good from a SEO point of view, but unless you want to get deluged by complaints I'd suggest explaining the meaning of the title somewhere a little more prominent than buried in the midst of the site.

I'm wondering if given the content of the site that a blog might be more appropriate for you? Using something like WordPress saves you the tedium of writing pages of text in HTML, but you can still play about with XHTML/CSS and develop your own theme.

Good work on the coding though! To say you've only been playing with CSS for a week, it's coming along nicely. You've a few minor errors showing up on 'Faggots in the fire', a couple of <br>'s that should be <br />'s and a <textarea> that's self closing when it shouldn't be.

Most importantly though, does your mother like it? [;)][:D]



Tailslide -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/9/2007 15:51:30)

I'm afraid I agree with the others about the general look of the sites... but then again it's an early effort so don't worry too much. Many of us are pretty rubbish at the actual graphic design element of site building (well ok Dave's pretty good) but after a while you learn how to fake it to a certain extent and what looks good and what doesn't. It's really a case of looking and looking and looking at sites.

Pretty good effort code-wise for a week! CSS really is a wonderful tool once you get to grips with it - in the same way that includes make your life easier like we were talking about in the other thread.

I started on the road of CSS a few years back and I found this site to be totally invaluable;

General articles, layouts etc: http://www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/
Float tutorials and lots of lovely lists: http://css.maxdesign.com.au/index.htm

This site is still totally relevant and really really well worth getting into.

My tips would be:

1. Keep it simple until you get to grips with CSS layouts/browser issues.
2. Use floats to position chunks of the page and steer clear of absolute positioning apart from for really small stuff.
3. Use semantic markup - i.e. H# tags for headings, p tags for paragraphs (not break tags), lists for marking up navigation menus, blockquotes for quotes etc etc
4. Use as little extra markup (e.g divs, classes and ids) as necessary over and above the stuff that you can't do without like paragraphs, headings etc. (the tendency when you start out is to have 3 million div tags on a page!).
5. Keep accessibility in mind - look into web accessibility now when you're right at the start - it's not a difficult thing to implement and it really won't add much time or effort onto a build BUT it will add to it's value (not just financial)
6. Check your sites as you build them in firefox (primarily) and then IE7, Opera, Safari for PC and IE6 etc (multiple IE from Tredosoft) that way if something goes haywire you can catch it earlier.

You'll have noticed by now that I ramble on a lot and seem to like lists - so I'll shut up and go away [:D]



ThomasMobley -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/9/2007 16:11:30)

Per the look of the sites, I'm afraid I've never really been into aesthetics, so I'm struggling with that. Frankly I'm as happy with a command line as a wysiwyg with pretty pictures, so the critique on that count is actually better than I expected. You should have seen them before I prettied em up!

I've already removed the hover size changes on faggots, I'll get to that in ccs when I get done here. Obviously that one didn't go over well, but I'm still experimenting with what I can do.

I guess I can move the faggots explanation up to the top. My mother made me put an explanation of what a faggot is in there. lol.

The comment on "Cranking up the heat in the Republic Views from my Libertarian middle" kinda confused me. There is a <br/> between them, so those should be two separate lines.

Also, what navigation wasn't working? I may need an explanation on how the menus work. If a link has a + to the right in the articles section it's a slideout and not actually clickable.where on the pictures page it's a link to that directories thumbnails. I might need to do something there so folks don't get confused.

And I'm writing a section you can't get to that lets me write the articles and put them where I want them, so I don't actually have to write them in html.

Thanks for the comments.



ITG -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/10/2007 17:08:35)

Sorry to say, but http://carolinacomputerservices.com/index.asp is painful to watch... The content might be ok, but the font, the color choice, the lack of graphics... I think you need a hand by a talented graphic artist. Note; don't feel bad though - I'm a logic person like yourself; if I were to design a site it would probably look about the same. That's why I've teamed up with a talented graphic designer on https://www.IT-Globalized.com, a site matching people with IT-related professionals.

Although now that person is also doing most of the development side of things, I would never be able to pull off a good website by myself. Maybe you need a bit of assistance from someone...

Similar comments for the second website. I agree with the posts above.. it simply doesn't look professional. Investing in someone to help out with the design may be well worth it if you are aiming to make money of the first site in particular.



ThomasMobley -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/10/2007 17:38:11)

You're very right about that. I generally only wear bib overalls and chambray shirts because if I delve into colors I end up looking like my websites. lol.

Actually the person I work for is very talented in the graphics/aesthetics department, as well as css. Right now these are more about learning css than anything so I can move to doing the front ends for her, as back ends have gotten scarce in the last few jobs and she has more front end stuff than she can keep up with. Graphics and color schemes will still be her department, for an obviously good reason. She's also given a lot of the same assessments of the site you folks have, though all of your comments have also been very helpful and appreciated. I've already implemented some of the suggested changes and intend to work on all of them.

I'm afraid since my real interest lies in the data and programming end I keep getting distracted by writing the php and asp to do things instead of dealing with how it looks, but I'm still on the css and things like color changes, fonts, etc..., so feel free to keep looking and letting me know about new mistakes. I'm very sure It will sway between just ugly and god awful.



Nicole -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/10/2007 18:15:52)

Welcome to OutFront Thomas!

I agree with everything that's been said so far, ITG - that plug for your own website wasn't as subtle as you may have thought!

Thomas, this is a good site to use as you go also, if you type your website address into the area provided, it lists a number of checks and validators, colour blind filter sites, download times etc.

The first thing I wondered about your sites were how they would appear to different colour blind conditions, surprisingly they were okay.

As Tail said, download those Browsers, I also have Netscape and Mozilla, check in all of them at different screen resolutions and by increasing/decreasing text size, and also check your site using the link in this post.




Tailslide -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/10/2007 18:16:41)

I wouldn't worry too much Thomas - I still draw people like stick-people (although for some reason i can draw aircraft reasonably well but then I am obsessed with them).

You'd be amazed how much you can achieve with a nice photo or graphic from somewhere like istockphoto.com. Maybe the odd light gradient or a stripe here and there.

Less is more works well - lots of white space with the odd nice graphic element usually does the trick. It probably sounds boring but it works!



ThomasMobley -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/10/2007 18:27:35)

I seem to be having a problem with the font-family.

On carolinacomputerservices I didn't have any fonts set, so as some suggested I decided to try some others. I've tried everything from cursive to wingdings, and there is no change.

I started with
*
{
font-family: verdana, tahoma, arial, sans-serif;
}
just to see what the diff would be, but when I saw no changes I started changing to things like wingdings and cursive with no effect. After that I moved it to the body instead, then a couple other tags, but still no change. I haven't pushed it up to the site yet (wouldn't want someone to open it and see wingdings or cursive), but if anyone has any suggestions as to what I might be doing wrong please let me know. I'll push it up to the site if it would help.



Tailslide -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/11/2007 2:50:21)

Try putting the same rule on the body element rather than the * It works for me when I change it via Firefox web developer toolbar on your site.



caz -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/11/2007 9:00:26)

Hi Thomas - you have a lot of new things to consider when dealing with the front end and I think that the most important thing is to make sure that your pages make comfortable reading for most of your users. I know that you like green but there can be too much of a good thing [;)] Dark text on a green background will cause problems for viewers with the most common eye difficulty which is red/green perception, you can check this by printing your page on a mono printer as well as using the colour checking services that Nicole has mentioned above. I have made a few small changes to your stylesheet which should help with this, 
body
{
    background-color: #fff;
    text-align: center;
    font-size: 1em;
    margin: 0;
}

p.menu a
{
    border: double green 1px;
    background-color: #FFE9BF;
    font-size: .9em;
    padding: 0 5px 0 5px;
}


I have also reduced your font sizes so that the pages don't 'scream' at you - more professional. [:D]



ThomasMobley -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/11/2007 10:51:05)

Thanks for the link Nicole. Very neat site, looks quite useful. I have opera, ff, ie7 and ie6, the folks at the office have a variety of other browsers too so we can check quite a few. Didn't realize there was a safari for the pc...does it really render like safari for the mac?

Per the fonts, duh. I found that FF was set to always use Times New Roman for some reason. This was the first time I even tried to change the font-family, and I don't pay that much attention to fonts as long as I can read the text, so it never occurred to me that every site I look at always uses the same font...lol

OK, someone slap me with a wet trout...



caz -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/11/2007 16:03:39)

[img]http://2ni2.com/emoticon/animal/pez.gif[/img][img]http://2ni2.com/emoticon/animal/pez.gif[/img]

[img]http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v319/tankexmortis/Smileys/th_Cat_from_Alicia_in_Wonderland_by_jS.gif[/img]



womble -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/12/2007 18:50:04)

[sm=laughing4.gif]

quote:

Per the fonts, duh. I found that FF was set to always use Times New Roman for some reason. This was the first time I even tried to change the font-family, and I don't pay that much attention to fonts as long as I can read the text, so it never occurred to me that every site I look at always uses the same font...lol


Thomas - you should be able to change the browser's default font style in the set-up (for Firefox it's Tools > Options > Content (tab) and then on that screen Fonts and colours - let's you change the default font and font size) - I hate serif fonts and always set mine to one of the sans serif ones, so I always get sans-serif.



ThomasMobley -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/12/2007 19:08:08)

Yeah, but somehow I had set ff to always override the pages fonts regardless of what the page author said to use, so everything that showed up in ff was always times new roman. that's why I couldn't see my font-family changes.

I've made some piddling changes to the site, but I've pretty much gone from bad to worse I'm afraid. I just have an aesthetic sense that falls somewhere between raisin pudding and a taco salad I'm afraid. Either too bland or too much.



womble -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/12/2007 19:46:35)

Don't worry it'll come. You should have seen the first ever site I did (fortunately lost in the mists of time). Best advice I can offer is to have a wander round the web and look out for sites you like. Often you can get ideas from looking at other people's sites. If you're not sure how they've acheived a particular effect, hit 'view source' and take a look at how they've done it. Take a look at some of the template sites if you're stuck for inspiration.

As Tail said, look out for graphics - have a browse around some of the stock image sites likes istockphoto, dreamstime and stock xchng and see if anything jumps out at you, then build a colour scheme from the image (there's a list of colour tools in the 'outfront discoveries' bit of the forum, including some that help you generate a colour scheme from photos. My weirdest inspiration of a site's colour scheme had to be a coat, a coat stand with a scarf on it, and a paint shade card. I walked into the office of one of my colleagues at work and three colours in my line of vision just happened to be together from those objects...that formed the basis of the whole design of the site. [:D]



Donkey -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/13/2007 11:50:08)

quote:

a coat, a coat stand with a scarf on it, and a paint shade card.

Is that the legendary brown,chrome plated,tartan and magnolia colourscheme.



womble -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/13/2007 12:24:30)

Damn! I thought I'd deleted that one from every corner of the intraweb! [8D]



ThomasMobley -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/15/2007 13:09:45)

Here's something I just noticed. When posting to the comments section the times are california time (that's where the server is), so when you post a comment the time listed, for me anyway, is 3 hours off. Hadn't occured to me before, but now that I've noticed it is there a way to determing the users time zone so I can make the time adjustment for them? I can always note that all times are pacific time zone, or are UTC -8, although that wouldn't account for dst and most folk don't know UTC from their elbow, or I could just expect them to use their noggin and recognize that the times are not local to them.



Tailslide -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/15/2007 13:14:41)

There's a setting in your profile to determine what time you see with reference to the server time - maybe we can petition for time to be displayed as "Zulu"! (especially since I'm usually on zulu time anyway!!) Always made me feel terribly pretentious (i.e. I secretly love it) refering to time as whatever zulu!



ThomasMobley -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/15/2007 13:33:49)

Right, but that doesn't help my mother from Illinois, or someone in England. Would have been less confusing for me though. I actually noticed after I realized the data wasn't saving on the production server, while it was on my development server. I fixed that, uploaded my db to the server, and the next post I made was 3 hours before the post I had made on my development server, saved as my time in the db. Confused me for a while, as I thought new postings were not being saved since I was just looking at the last one to see if they made it. I could probably find out the users utc offset via javascript and save it to a var as long as the user had javascript enabled I'm thinking, then send that along with page requests and use it in the asp to adjust the time coming back to them.



Tailslide -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/15/2007 14:13:07)

Sorry Thomas i was being dense I thought you were talking about the time on here!! (blame the wind-rush from the indoor skydiving).

I think you're probably right about using JS to check the IP address of the user - to make up for being dense, here's a script I found (can't verify it's quality): http://onlineaspect.com/2007/06/08/auto-detect-a-time-zone-with-javascript/#isError:false



ThomasMobley -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/15/2007 16:23:01)

Actually, I'm not sure why he was attempting to determine what he was, but I should think just saving the time of post in UTC at the db, then at the client side use the difference between local time and utc would give me the proper offset to use when I pull the comments from the db. No need to worry about dst or hemispheres that way. I'm gonna give it a shot and see how it works.



ThomasMobley -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/15/2007 17:46:02)

Well, my new attempt won't work either as I can only access the offset on a post or get, so that's hardly useful. I'm thinking that I can not load the comments section when the page is compiled by the asp engine though and use ajax to load that div when it gets passed back to the client. That way the client already has the page and I can retrieve his offset and pass it to the function that loads the comments div. It's an extra trip to the server so there will be a small addition with page load time, but if you take away the initial load at the client and add it back after client has the page I think the difference will be negligible. Will report back if anyone is interested in how it turns out.



ThomasMobley -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/15/2007 19:50:46)

Very encouraging results so far folks. I used ajax, called the asp to load my comments div with the offset from the server time and got the right time in my time zone in the comments section. I have my offset hard coded into the ajax right now at -240 minutes, since the date/times stored in the server db are all west coast and I'm east coast, but I'm about to change the db save function to save in utc and the ajax to determine the clients time zone offset. I think this is going to work very nicely. I might ask some of you in different time zones to post something so I know it works for you too, if you wouldn't mind.

On the other hand, my colors still suck. My mother even said so when I spoke with her about an hour ago, though she said it nicer than that. She was very impressed with the load time since I went from asp.net to asp though, so thats good. That .net stuff is just incredibly slow. Slow to change from my point, slow to load from the users point. It may sound sexy, but unless someone is paying you to do it and insists that you do, don't. The c# works very well on a desktop app, so that's not a problem, but don't go web with it.

I'm gonna work on the colors as soon as I finish this time thing. Unless I find something more interesting to work on like this time thing was. My pictures pages suck too, so those might get fixed first. Making things work is so much more interesting than things like colors and graphics all that.



ThomasMobley -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/15/2007 20:28:17)

Now that I think about it and made it work I have no comments section if someone has javascript disabled. Bad solution. Nice solution for folks with javascript enabled but no comments section if they don't though. Damn this web, damn it to hell. Can I determine if it's enabled and fall back to the straight asp if it isn't? Anyone got an answer to that one?



Tailslide -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/16/2007 3:00:16)

Yeah you really need the "graceful degradation" so that it will work without JS on.

I'm no JS expert - but what function does the JS do in the current comment setup - is it just validation? In theory there should be no problem with the form submitting straight to the DB with absolutely no JS intervention, just like a normal form...



ThomasMobley -> RE: Ok, I'm game (9/16/2007 10:58:47)

The javascript in place is validation. By using that if the user fails to enter password or the password/retype don't match, the page isn't submitted back to the server if they have javascript enabled. When they click the submit button they get an alert telling them what the data problem is and allows them to fix it, rather than submit to server, find out there is a problem, then have to post back the same page, get back to that section, show them an error message. I do that as well just in case, but it just keeps the round trip and time down when there are mistakes.

One way I could use the ajax to show the comments with the users actual time is to initially have a submit button load in the comments div telling user that they must either enable javascript or to see the comments without javascript enabled click this button. That would revert the page to strict asp and always load it via asp during that session. Also, if they were logged in I could save that in the db as a user preference and always revert to asp in the future. If they had javascript enabled the comments section would be loaded via ajax and that button would be overwriten and thus not show. The only difference with javascript would be that the date/time would be adjusted to the users own time zone so I'm not sure it's worth the extra work, though right now that would be minimal since I've done the rest of it. At least I know it's doable. Ajax can be very cool in some circumstances, though you either have to insist on javascript being enabled or allow for a backup.



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