posted
I finally got a website up that I made for a company. (the hosting is not at it's best) I need those of you who don't use Microsoft Internet Explorer to please look at the website and tell me if it looks decent. The links should light up when the mouse is over it. And the buttons should look as if you push on them when you click. There is a truck picture that is missing because I don't have it yet.
Yes the formatting needs help and I'm aware of that at the moment.
I mostly want to make sure the flash buttons work (not the links) Especially those of you who have pop-up protectors, sometimes I have to click on "show content" to see the buttons because I have those protectors. Heres the link: http://groundcoversllc.com/
Thank you very much for your help.
Posts: 1417 | Registered: Aug 1999
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The trucks on the side are surrounded by a white box. But the buttons do work.
The photo of the guy with the hose is not centered.
The text breaks strangely. The word "quantities" is all by itself.
There is the word "Truck" in black next to the photo.
There are not enough spaces between items on your Contact Us line. You need more punctuation there, perhaps bullets to separate them.
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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posted
Oh - are the trucks not supposed to be in a white box? I got that too. I also got the weird line break with quantities. Decreasing the font size can help you with that.
Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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posted
It's one big white box that contains all the trucks. I'm assuming it's the background of your Flash movie. Have you tried changing the background color of your Flash movie to match the HTML page?
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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posted
I changed the background in the HTML part of the buttons to match the webpage... I may have forgotten another part where you put the color, but the buttons themselves may have been saved with a white background in Flash.
posted
While I hate to seem like a spoilsport, just thought I'd let you know that all of what you did with trucks could be done easily with a little CSS, instead of flash. Plus you wouldn't annoy all the people who hate flash.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
Yes, I'm afraid your page rates highly on the "annoy-Tom-O-meter." For one thing, you use Flash. For another, you have a HUGE splash banner that only clicks back to your home page. And you have an E-mail address that isn't clickable, which is near the top of the heirarchy of web design sins.
You can also solve the problem with your text wrap -- I get "large quantities" by itself on a line, since I'm viewing this at 800x600 with large fonts over a TV screen -- if you just used CSS with a justify tag. I wouldn't even try to center that much text on a splash page.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
First of all the email isn't clickable because I had made it clickable for the contact page (which I will put up soon) and didn't think about putting it on the home page.
Who hates flash? I've never ran into anyone who hates it? ..well now I have...
And what's wrong with the logo on the top of the page? It's common sense that all logos link to the home page....
posted
I hate flash in most uses. Its flaws are numerous and benefits few, and except in certain very particular situations should not be used.
Emails should always be clickable because people want to click them. When someone goes to your home page and says "oh, I want to send them an email", they will try to click the email on your home page, not your contact page.
That is not just a logo. That is a large banner of the logo. (Also, that logo as there will not look very good in print.) By having it be so large you are taking over screen real estate which prevents the user from seeing the content lower on the page right away. Make the banner smaller, at least on every page but the first (and there's really no reason not to do so on the first as well).
To do what you did, only with CSS:
Use a tags in a list (styled to not do anything other than be a vertical list, no padding or any such, no bullet points). Make the a tags block tags and set the size to the size of the trucks. Set their background image to the larger truck version. On a:hover, change the color of the link, and on a:active, maintain the color change but also switch out the background image to the smaller truck. All done.
Now you have a menu that looks like this in the HTML:
It loads slow. I'm on high speed, and it took close to 8 seconds - maybe ten - to fully load. When the picture of the truck gets there, it'll be even slower. If I were a typical customer, I'd go somewhere else rather than wait for the load time.
The concept of truck buttons on the left is pretty cool, but I'd find a way to make them smaller and flush left. Perhaps same length but not as high? There's all that wasted space around the truck buttons that you could be using in a better way.
And I agree with other comments re punctuation, quantity being on a line of its own, banner too big, and such.
Good concept. Good luck!
Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
I went to the page using Netscape 7.1 running on a slow computer with Win98 and cable internet. Also with "no unauthorized pop-ups" on in Netcape preferences.
The page loaded pretty quick (for my antique Compaq), 3-5 seconds. The site looked OK, an average commercial site. A little boring, but how exciting is spreading compost?
The trucks were a nice touch. The text in them changed color to yellow with the mouse over them (as did other links), and they did move like buttons when clicked.
I don't hate Flash per se, but I don't like it on links because then I can't open a new tab, instead it opens a whole new Netscape window, causing my computer to waste memory.
posted
Actually it is getting very common to not have 'clickable' email addresses on your web page since the pages get crawled and email addresses get gathered for people's spam email lists.
I just got done working on a new version of my work's site that also uses flash...which I like btw...and also doesn't have clickable email addresses. We put very small .gifs in there that contain the email addresses so they can not be grabbed.
Flash is much better then it use to be...it now even can support CSS and web standards. It doesn't have to be slow to load...that is normally a symptom of bad flash design / development. Most likely bad image handling (ie. too large, etc)
posted
Thank you Morbo! I was hoping a Netscaper would give me their input. Thank you very much! Is there a way to make it less boring? Of course business websites usually are boring anyway.
Traveler, thank you for your 2 cents, I am deffinitely planning on changing the size of those buttons... they are quite huge for the 800x600 resolution users. I should have been a good girl and started the website in 800x600 like I was taught in school.
The formatting is getting on my nerves. Is there an alternative to tables?
Also is xml really going to replace html? Better start learning that... dang college didn't even mention it..really.
Yes. CSS, mainly. And XML won't "replace" HTML, IMO, any more than CSS has "replaced" HTML. It'll add functionality and replace the broken bits.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
No problem, uni, glad to help. I just changed to Firefox and will probably uninstall Netscape, so you got me just in time.
No particular advice on jazzing it up. I don't know anything about webpage design, although I'd like to learn. Maybe a better photo?
Posts: 6316 | Registered: Jun 2003
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posted
Quite correct, indeed, XML can't replace HTML, its not a substitute.
The next version of HTML, though, is an application (in the technical parlance) of XML, where it was previously an application of SGML (and not a subset which fell within XML).
Basically, there are two very common standards for setting up markup languages out there, SGML and XML. XML is a subset of SGML.
An application of one of those standards is what we call a markup language that follows that standard's rules. "Old" HTML is an application of SGML, but not of XML. XHTML, which is the name of the current HTML specification, is an application of XML and of SGML (as any application of XML is an application of SGML).
XHTML, which is just the current HTML standard, not some new thing, is very like "old" html. If you've been writing idiomatic/good HTML, then your code will need extremely few changes to be XHTML. If you've been writing tortured/bad HTML, then your code will still not be all that hard to change to be XHTML.
CSS is your friend.
If you want to learn how to do good web design, do the HTML, CSS, and XHTML tutorials on www.w3schools.com, in that order. Experiment on your own as you go through. Also, read the stuff posted on A List Apart. Even if you don't understand a lot of it, you'll understand more and more as you go along, and will eventually be able to apply it.
Do not read what is on htmlgoodies. Their information is often factually incorrect or suggestive of bad practices.
posted
Nothing at all amazing about it, Dagonee, XSLT is a pretty normal programming language (functional, mainly).
edit to expand: basically, XSLT is a programming language "written in XML" (that's not quite right, but it works). It could easily be not written in XML, there are just some practical reasons for it to be. That it is Turing complete is no more remarkable than that other programming languages are Turing complete; its like it being surprising that "plan text/perl" is Turing complete (since perl is "written in plain text", and happens to be extremely well suited for dealing with plain text, similarly to how XSLT is "written in xml" and happens to be extremely well suited for dealing with xml).
posted
(and yeah, I'm really, really geeky, and quite like XML, RDF, and many of the associated technologies)
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
People generally treat CSS as a singular noun, and it makes sense in a way.
Cascading Style Sheets would be plural were it a phrase, but its a proper noun referring to a singular technology.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
I have changed the logo, so it looks great in IE... but it's awful in Firefox. ACK!! Why does there have to be so many different browsers.. it just is a pain for web developers.
Posts: 1417 | Registered: Aug 1999
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posted
Resize your logo in your image manipulation program, not your browser.
h4 and h5 are generally frowned upon. Also, you're using the headers to enclose paragraphs. If its a paragraph, put it in a paragraph tag. If its a header, put it in a header tag (most important header: h1 or h2, then headers of descending importance as descending numbers). Then style the tags as appropriate.
I have no idea why there's a </src> in there, that's gibberish.
<center> is bad form, use CSS to accomplish the same goal (there are several ways).
Don't try to create spacing around an image by using a <pre> tag. Instead, use the CSS spacing properties (margin and padding).
At the bottom you don't close your body and html tags, you just open them both again.
You should put a DOCTYPE on your page and validate it. Search for html validator and use the w3's. It is very important that you at least understand why your page not validate and have reasons for that, or even better, that it validate.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
My brain isn't working today. I forgot that I didn't change the size of the logo. Thank you for all your help so far. I appreciate it.
I hate validating a web page... they never tell you what's wrong with it, they just tell you what line is wrong. But I'll be a good girl and do it. (sigh)
posted
The validator does tell you what is wrong; sometime's its harder to deciper than other times, but you pick up the trick of it. If you need help with any particular validator responses, just tell me.
Oh, also, only try to fix the first error each time you validate. Often the first error cascades into most of the later errors, and attempting to fix them can just screw up your page further. Fix the first error, then re-validate.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Why does there have to be so many different browsers.. it just is a pain for web developers.
