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We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.
Website Critque wanted...
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CoinOperatedBoy
Golden Member
A few tips from running it through the w3c validator:
- You should declare your character encoding. Something like this:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
- You use a couple attributes, TOPMARGIN and LEFTMARGIN on the body tag. These aren't valid attributes. While you're at it, you should remove the link color attributes and toss them into your CSS (as you should with all style information).
- You should include ALT text attributes for all your images.
- All of your sidebar images use a self-closing tag style, which is not valid in HTML 4.01. You should either omit the forward slash from the end of the IMG tag or switch your document to XHTML.
- You shouldn't use the CENTER tag inside an inline element like TD. It's better to apply a style instead.
As for my own thoughts:
- Don't use tables for this layout, or just about any layout that doesn't specifically call for them. HTML/XHTML should be used to create some structure and hold content only, while CSS styles the page.
- You needn't have "themes" to justify having a separate CSS file. It makes it easier to maintain, not harder.
- For your sidebar, you can do similar mouseover effects with CSS if you want to avoid Javascript since some people have it disabled. The :hover pseudo-class is made for this. Either way works, though. You might consider using a different "bone" graphic, maybe something a little more realistic?
- As others have suggested, this might look better if it were centered.
- Sorry, but the whole masthead section looks pretty cheesy. The big Tahoma, mixing italics and bold, the logo... I understand some of this might be placeholder text, but I hope you're considering a big change up there. For example, the bark2paclogo.gif you have in the masthead is badly cut out / has some weird edge enhancement and looks pretty bad with the Arial and stencil typefaces. Don't mean to harp on the masthead, but if it's going to be present on every page and is the first thing anyone sees, it should be nice and clean.
- Other than that, just want to say it's cool you're doing this, and for free. Keep it up.
- You should declare your character encoding. Something like this:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
- You use a couple attributes, TOPMARGIN and LEFTMARGIN on the body tag. These aren't valid attributes. While you're at it, you should remove the link color attributes and toss them into your CSS (as you should with all style information).
- You should include ALT text attributes for all your images.
- All of your sidebar images use a self-closing tag style, which is not valid in HTML 4.01. You should either omit the forward slash from the end of the IMG tag or switch your document to XHTML.
- You shouldn't use the CENTER tag inside an inline element like TD. It's better to apply a style instead.
As for my own thoughts:
- Don't use tables for this layout, or just about any layout that doesn't specifically call for them. HTML/XHTML should be used to create some structure and hold content only, while CSS styles the page.
- You needn't have "themes" to justify having a separate CSS file. It makes it easier to maintain, not harder.
- For your sidebar, you can do similar mouseover effects with CSS if you want to avoid Javascript since some people have it disabled. The :hover pseudo-class is made for this. Either way works, though. You might consider using a different "bone" graphic, maybe something a little more realistic?
- As others have suggested, this might look better if it were centered.
- Sorry, but the whole masthead section looks pretty cheesy. The big Tahoma, mixing italics and bold, the logo... I understand some of this might be placeholder text, but I hope you're considering a big change up there. For example, the bark2paclogo.gif you have in the masthead is badly cut out / has some weird edge enhancement and looks pretty bad with the Arial and stencil typefaces. Don't mean to harp on the masthead, but if it's going to be present on every page and is the first thing anyone sees, it should be nice and clean.
- Other than that, just want to say it's cool you're doing this, and for free. Keep it up.
CoinOperatedBoy
Golden Member
That won't do anything. The reason it's not working is that he's relying on text-align:center, which shouldn't be used for this purpose. He needs to wrap the contents of the body in a div and center that. Like this:
<head>
<style type="text/css"><!--
BODY {font-family:Tahoma,sans-serif; font-size:10px; padding:0;}
P {font-family:Tahoma,sans-serif; font-size:10px;}
FORM {margin:0;padding:0;}
#wrapper {width:850px; margin:auto;}
--></style>
...
<body>
<div id="wrapper">
...
</div>
</body>
alkemyst
No Lifer
I am going to clean up the code. I was mostly looking for content and the feature comments.
As many as don't like the dog bones here, that was a big winner in the non-technical crowd I had comment on the design. This is targetted to outdoor types with dogs...from a tech site look it's dated and probably even 'corny'.
I don't know what to do with the masthead. The paw is a rough sketch..the owner hasn't gotten back to me yet and I'd rather not do post-production work until an idea is good.
I will work on it some more tonight.
CoinOperatedBoy
Golden Member
Then stick with it! If your visitors like it, you've done your job as a designer. Other designers will tend to give you advice on what they would like to see, so ignore us in that regard if it contends with the views of your actual target audience.
As for the masthead, I always prefer a logo with a smallish graphic and simple, bold type. See:
Jason Santa Maria
Daring Fireball
Hivelogic
Adding a splash of color behind the logo can be nice:
happy cog
I think you just have too much text up there. Go with a paw print and "BARK" or maybe the whole text of the name, but "Beaches ARe for K9s Too" looks very clunky to me.
Check out CSS Zen Garden when you get some free time if you're looking for inspiration on color schemes or CSS wizardry. Some of them suck, though.
GodlessAstronomer
Lifer
Agreed. I personally think it's tacky, but design for your audience, not critical hyper-nerds like me 🙂
alkemyst
No Lifer
made some changes to center the page...I see what was meant. I never noticed sites being over to the left versus centered in my browser window as long as they were centered on themselves.
Still thinking about the masthead. The guy and I are going to talk about why he wants to keep his current site the way it is...
If he does I will rebrand this and go a bit further to use as my own campaign site.
We have 3 active websites now, a feature on the late night news (better than nothing), and a couple facebook pages starting. No one knew about each other (I found them all the same day I started thinking about this). I think once we all align and work together we can start making those 50,000 signatures a reality. I did get the original guy to unlock the petition forms so you don't have to email him to get them.
We are thinking of planning a dog walk along the beach area but at the same time want to avoid those that feel we should protest by walking down the beach itself. Personally this would be a good idea if our county did something stupid like ban dogs from anywhere but one's own property, but we have plenty of dog accessable areas (all the bike/skate paths along the beaches are dog-friendly...it's just the beach itself that is not except for one area very far north for the majority of the county or another that's in a county down south of us (about the same distance...45 mins for anyone in the central area).
Still thinking about the masthead. The guy and I are going to talk about why he wants to keep his current site the way it is...
If he does I will rebrand this and go a bit further to use as my own campaign site.
We have 3 active websites now, a feature on the late night news (better than nothing), and a couple facebook pages starting. No one knew about each other (I found them all the same day I started thinking about this). I think once we all align and work together we can start making those 50,000 signatures a reality. I did get the original guy to unlock the petition forms so you don't have to email him to get them.
We are thinking of planning a dog walk along the beach area but at the same time want to avoid those that feel we should protest by walking down the beach itself. Personally this would be a good idea if our county did something stupid like ban dogs from anywhere but one's own property, but we have plenty of dog accessable areas (all the bike/skate paths along the beaches are dog-friendly...it's just the beach itself that is not except for one area very far north for the majority of the county or another that's in a county down south of us (about the same distance...45 mins for anyone in the central area).
CoinOperatedBoy
Golden Member
Oh my lord, your background is now an almost pastel green. It looks like a pistachio ice cream cone.
CoinOperatedBoy
Golden Member
I figured, I'm just busting your balls. And fyi, the content is still not centered in FF3.5.
CoinOperatedBoy
Golden Member
We're afraid of alkemyst because he's meaner than us.
But seriously, the layout itself isn't that poorly conceived. It's mostly the use of tables and styling choices (color, typeface, some images) that offends the senses. But as has been said, if the intended visitors like it, who cares?
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