Please Review My New Site Design / Layout / Test In Opera

Jimmy

Mar 17 2007, 12:16 PM

Hi, I just finished setting up a new design for my site and got it successfully validated too

yippee!
Anyway I used css, along with a couple of embedded css lines for my pages (mainly in order to get them to validate! - darn background tag is not allowed!

)

I'd appreciate it if you guys could tell me what you think of the design / text and link colour scheme, and anything else you reckon I could improve on...
All pages are there, and now there is content on every page... yay!

Also, if someone would be able to see what it looks like in opera browser, and maybe anyone with a mac on safari, thatd be great!
It displays how I like it in firefox, and also looks fine in internet explorer, so comparisons to firefox (preferred) or internet explorer please

www.projectjim.co.uk

Thanks
James.

Tetraca

Mar 17 2007, 01:40 PM

Well, your site looks just dandy in opera. Your coding isn't the best though. Consider changing to XHTML 1.1 to clean up the code a little bit, and consider writing your site in divs rather than tables for various reasons.
http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/

FLaKes

Mar 17 2007, 05:17 PM

I dont have opera but I can tell you it looks good in Firefox. You might want to go with Tetraca's suggestion on changing it to xhtml1.1 and writing it in Divs if you would like to take it one step further. It looks nice though, good job

Jimmy

Mar 17 2007, 05:44 PM

Thanks for the feedback, its good news it works fine in opera, thats everything pretty much tested.
Looking at that link you showed, it does seem a nice idea to get rid of my tables and use the css / divs more throughout.
Trouble is, I'm really not familiar with div's that much nor am I the most able css coder, I'll see what can be done though

P.S. What is the difference between xhtml and standard html?

heavensounds

Mar 17 2007, 08:12 PM

I use opera and it looks great. If it got validated it should look good in all browsers i guess, so no need to worry. I just have to remind you, that you have a few broken links on the "links" page...that is the worse thing a page can have so fix that as soon as you can..

Otherwise a very nice site!

Best whishes, Mark

Jimmy

Mar 17 2007, 08:22 PM

QUOTE(heavensounds @ Mar 17 2007, 08:12 PM)

Yeah thanks

Getting some nice feedback.!

I only just got the page up so those links are temporary, so I can just see the layout I may end up with.. they'll be gone soon as long as I can get the content done

I'm in the process of setting wordpress going, may need a bit of help..!! we'll see..

street

Mar 17 2007, 08:48 PM

the sites looks really good in opera and firefox even thou coding for opera browsers is not all that good. But the site design and the color scheme is simple and not a lot is going on and it draws attention to the things you want the viewers to see.

Tetraca

Mar 17 2007, 09:11 PM

QUOTE(Jimmy @ Mar 17 2007, 05:44 PM)

P.S. What is the difference between xhtml and standard html?

HTML is a very loose standard - you can get away with a lot of errors and the browser will do nothing about it. XHTML is a much stricter standard that forces you to make code cleaner - all tags and attributes must be in lowercase + termination marks in single tag tags are the most noticeable differences which were imported from XML. There are also some discrepancies in where you are able to put tags(for exa
mple you cannot put <p> tags in <a> tags and you cannot embed tags as so: <p><b>Content</p></b>). Other than that there aren't any major differences from HTML unless you make the server transfer the document as application/xml+xhtml as the W3C wants you to do, which will force your coding to conform to XHTML perfectly or it won't display in the browser(currently if you were to pass correct XHTML with the application/xml+xhtml mime type to an IE browser, the browser will not parse it. This is no problem for Opera nor Firefox, though. I suggest you don't worry about the mime type now until IE supports it.).

masugidsk8r

Mar 18 2007, 04:32 AM

I viewed it in Firefox and it looks fine. Going with the previous posters, the code needs to be tidied up. I recommend upgrading the mark-up to XHTML 1.1 it's nicer to understand and look at. I emphasize that you convert the tables to divs and use CSS to place them in the right places. The reason for this is to trim down loading time.

Another thing I noticed was the Java applet you have for the countdown time, I recommend using Javascript/CSS to achieve the same result. The reason for this is to allow the viewers who don't have J2RE installed on their computer. It took me a few minutes to view such a small program. If you're too experienced in JAVA and have no time to learn JS, you can use Google WebToolkit which compiles your Java source code to Javascript/HTML/CSS.

mixxoys

Mar 18 2007, 03:05 PM

If you are using tables, please consider switching to CSS and if your using Dreamweaver, its extremely easy. Css, is the web standerd now and its probly one of the easyiest languages to learn...
ex: (HTML) <div id="logoarea">test</div>
(css) #logoarea {
width:120px;
height:323px;
margin:auto;}

So as you see, its very easy to learn, and even dreamweaver has every bit of code and helpers in it to help you learn! Also its alot funner to do it in CSS because it makes you feel like a real designer, coding and stuff.

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Jimmy

Apr 4 2007, 11:27 PM

Thanks for all that advice saint m. and thanks blessed for the positive notes and good bumping

OK Here's whats new:

QUOTE

-that background gradient get rid of the white and go with a lighter color then just the white to bluish color

As you suggested, i think I understand you right that you mean to change the entire background colour to nearer to white, I've done that and I must say... it helps

I combined the two title images and a lot of the other template images in my redesign as suggested by you

- This helps in two ways, it did easily make the files smaller overall and it was way, way easier to recode my whole site down to the barebones (looks no different

QUOTE

-add a drop shadow to your site either on the sides or on the bottom.

Right... I see where your going... and I agree! this would be a nice direction to take. i will be working on this for the coming days... trying to do it withought destroying the rest of my page!

Also, in a twisted, double dagger effect of removing useless images! - I managed (really don't know how) to get the colums nice and have those page headings like "home page" and "my photos" to be coded into the browser instead of using images. I'm pleased with the result! the colours look nicer and it definitely makes it easier to modify for new pages.

QUOTE

-with the background border you have at the top move it down to image you have in your site (of course adjust the size to fit)

Hmmm I'm really not sure what you meant for this one... sorry about that! could you maybe explain it a little clearer with a quick ms paint knockup of the sort of thing that you mean!!!

THE SITE HAS BEEN COMPLETELY RECODED DOWN TO BAREBONES! I managed to do this withought changing any of the layout at all and it really shortened the code, removed most of the complicated tables and converted things to divs!
Don't forget to check out my photos page!! I found a really neat JS for photo views and it allows captions and html pages in it, resizes the window and everything, and best of all its clean looking, free and no links or marking! - PM me if you would like the link to get it

I bet you will!
Please tell me what you think of the changes

James

Saint_Michael

Apr 3 2007, 03:40 PM

QUOTE(Jimmy @ Mar 19 2007, 07:30 AM)

So is it possible to mix PHP coding with some xhtml, for example <div>s...?

Yes you can mix in (x)html into PHP here is an example of how it would be done

CODE

<?php
// Our log file;
$counter = "stats.txt";

// Date logging;
$today = getdate();
$month = $today[month];
$mday = $today[mday];
$year = $today[year];
$current_date = $mday . $month . $year;

// Log visit;
$fp = fopen($counter, "a");
$line = $REMOTE_ADDR . "|" . $mday . $month . $year . "\n";
$size = strlen($line);
fputs($fp, $line, $size);
fclose($fp);

// Read log file into array;
$contents = file($counter);

// Total hits;
$total_hits = sizeof($contents);

// Daily hits;
$daily_hits = array();
for ($i=0;$i<sizeof($contents);$i++) {
    $entry = explode("|", $contents[$i]);
    if ($current_date == chop($entry[1])) {
        array_push($daily_hits, $entry[0]);
    }
}
$daily_hits_size = sizeof($daily_hits);

// Daily hosts;
$daily_hosts = array();
for ($i=0;$i<sizeof($contents);$i++) {
    $entry = explode("|", $contents[$i]);
    if ($current_date == chop($entry[1])) {
        array_push($daily_hosts, $entry[0]);
    }
}
$daily_hosts_size = sizeof(array_unique($daily_hosts));

?>
<? echo "
<b><font color='#FF0000'>Page Hits:</font></b><b> " . $total_hits . "</b>"
?>

This is the html that the php script will display when someone goes to your website

CODE

<? echo "
<b><font color='#FF0000'>Page Hits:</font></b><b> " . $total_hits . "</b>"
?>

It's funny that people mention about going to xhtml heres the thing XHTML code is design for XML use and from what my teacher told me html 4.01 strict is the same as XHTML 1.0 transitional. So youdon't really need to go to xhtml unless your trying to have your site keep up in current coding. As long as you follow the standards to HTML 4.01 you can display very same thing as you would in xhtml.

Because if you wanted to make your site xhtml you would have to do it by scratch, since is coming from a validation test in xhtml trans in which you have 181 errors to fix, so I would go with coding to html 4.01 strict standards in which you only have 7 errors to fix.

Yeah XHTML is the new standard but thats because of the XML applications people are using for their websites (mostly businesses) and that XHTML used more for structure then actual design. Like I said you can do the same thing with regular html (albeit with a lot more code) but that is what CSS was designed for so you can remove most of that code and put it onto another file for universal means.

Although most of thats a bit contradictory due to the fact I don't code in html anymore, but that's me.

Also another that is worth mentioning is that you don't need get away from tables, the only reason people say get away from tables is do to the fact that if you design a site in tables you have to do deal with a lot of code and tweak it just to perfect in pretty much everything. But thats for business/professional sites.

for personal/portfolio sites as long as you keep the design simple and try not to get all bizzaro world on it then tables will be fine, especially if your design and slice temple stick with tables it generates. Im working on perfecting my skills of converting tables to divs in psd templates it's challanging because of all the tweaking, but it will worth it in the end.

But pertaining to yoursite I would fix/add the following things

-that background gradient get rid of the white and go with a lighter color then just the white to bluish color
-with the background border you have at the top move it down to image you have in your site (of course adjust the size to fit)
-add a drop shadow to your site either on the sides or on the bottom.
-with your toppic1.jpg and toppic2.jpg combine them into one image, with that you save on load time and some space
--I would change that grey to a gradient effect to go with the background bar you have

Other then those recommendations it's a clean looking design.

Blessed

Apr 3 2007, 08:53 AM

really professional site

propz

Jimmy

Mar 19 2007, 11:30 AM

QUOTE(Tetraca @ Mar 19 2007, 12:37 AM)

All that PHP does is spit out text processed by the server that is usually interpereted as (X)HTML by the browser. For example, what PHP does when you view this topic is pull a few template files filled with HTML out of the server directories, then replaces the correct area in the template dictated by a function or marking in it with values it retrieved from a MySQL database. The built page is transferred to your browser. Your browser then sees it just like a normal page. Your browser cannot parse PHP. PHP is processed by the server.

So is it possible to mix PHP coding with some xhtml, for example <div>s...?

Tetraca

Mar 19 2007, 12:37 AM

QUOTE(Jimmy @ Mar 18 2007, 11:43 PM)

Ah I think I see now.

So a php site is mainly a css coded one that validates (or not as the case may be!) as xhtml... the php merely dictates the code to the browser...??!

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Please Review My New Site Design / Layout / Test In Opera - Much Appreciated!

Please Review My New Site Design / Layout / Test In Opera - Much Appreciated!

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