Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve been on the boards OR worked on my website. But life has finally given me some downtime and a lot of creativity, so I have decided to re-do my website.
The first design was completely hand-done by me with just raw HTML coding. Now I’m bringing web design software into the mix. I figured I’ll make the website more attractive to look at, and teach myself some new skills as well.
Any opinions of the new layout are greatly appreciated; please, by all means, critique and suggest! And once the new design is done, I’ve got lots of new games to cover! Once I finish my backlog of games, that is! LOL
And please be aware that it is currently a work in progress. So the old navigation menu pops up in pages sometimes. I haven’t had a chance to clean it out entirely yet.
While not entirely standards-compliant, it wasn’t horrible. What was horrible was the “Best viewed with…” line…
This is often a bad idea…
rubs hands
1998 was 8 years ago. This kind of line comes from a time when many proprietary code was used in web pages, which meant that they often only viewed properly in a particular browser.
Your site shouldn’t be designed for a specific resolution, but be flexible.
It uses frames now, taking it even further back in time. They are outdated, a pain to work with, and bad for accessibility.
Why are you using images to display text on the opening page? If you want to display text, you should write it as text. If it’s to be able to display in that font, well,… It doesn’t seem to be easy to read.
Your pages lack either a DOCTYPE, a recent one, or a complete one. Until you have a standards-compliant document, use this one:
When it’s converted, use the strict one.
I suggest you learn CSS. It’s used to style web pages, which as a result separates the content from the lay-out. Easy to learn, tough to master. It’s a powerful asset to a webmaster/webmistress.
Personal opinion: I don’t like the new navigation boxes much. They seem messy.
Wow, brutal but honest. Thanks, Benoit. I mostly use the line about Internet Explorer because I see a lot of other pages with lines like that.
As for the texts with images, that’s what the web design program did, not me.
What is wrong with frames? I have no problem with frames.
I don’t really have the money to spend on really expensive webdesign software, so I’m trying to do the best I can with some of the free trials for cheaper programs.
Thank you for your honest opinion, Benoit. You gave me some things to think about.
Well, do you test the site in > 1 broswer? You should ideally test it in anything that’s a) free, and b) used by at least … oh, about 1% or so of the public.
I think that’s IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari.
All you do is d/l them, open the site in them, and see if anything sucks hardcore. (Preferably not on the machine where you develop the webpage; weirdness can happen where the browser picks up your local copy, not the REAL one, and be funky.) If it looks OK, you can take out the line about IE (or update it to reflect what you tested in).
Takes about 20 minutes tops, and that includes downloading them.
(Note: I am an app dev, not a webmaster. But this is what most professional webmasters are supposed to do, although many do not.)
When you code to web standards, most of the time you only have to test in one standards-compliant browser, and then fix whatever looks screwed up in IE. But, of course, it’s best to test in all of them if you can.
Best practice is to always test. “Code to standards” will often mean that popular browsers render your code incorrectly because they have bugs. (This is one of the reasons web developers hate Internet Explorer so much. It had hideous bugs that force horrific contortions to work around.)
