I never coined myself a webdesigner; just learned enough so i can do it myself for my biz. The VP from where I used to work saw a couple of my sites and had his admin ask if i could build one for his organization... I took the job. Although it is not done yet, I thought I would post so you can see it so far. It's a huge job. I still have to add a basic forum, more contact info, and maybe some more photos if they supply them to me. I did not take any of the photos that are in the photos section. They are thinking of having links to EACH page for EACH hall of famer. that will be a huge job. not sure what to charge for that since i would have to do all the research for over 400 players! anyway, here it is.....
thanks guys. yes, the spacing needs to be fixed a bit. unfortunately it may look a little odd depending on the monitor it is viewed on...widescreen, standard etc. and especially screen rez. i'm designing it on a 25" widescreen so i have to keep referring back to my laptop rez to doublecheck.
You may want to have a HTML version for those not lucky enough to be on broadband. I know thats hard to comprehend not being on ultra fast cable but I just had a customer who was still using....wait for it.....netscape....:roll: so that just proves there still people on dial up and/or still using completely obsolete software..
ha.... copy and paste numbers.... don't tell me you sat there and figured something out, although i guess it doesn't matter after the 3.141. jax, what co. did you own again? was it video if i'm not mistaken? lefty robb, you're right, and i thought about it....i may do that since flash doesn't show up on search engines as well as html anyway. thanks for the thought on that.
Looks promising so far. Flicked through in IE7 and Firefox 2.0.0.13. Here's a few observations (none meant to be criticisms, just my initial thoughts on what to tidy up)...
The site is slow to load even on broadband... I have 4mb connection and from a cleared cache it still took about 20 seconds to load the front page so it displayed all the elements. Firefox tock over 50 seconds before it stopped transferring data. That could be my flakey connection though!!
On my monitor (22" widescreen) the Latest News and What's New boxes are all over the place - you have an index.htm file and an index.html file with differing coordinates for the div containing the news content boxes. Neither sit (as far as I can tell - don't know exactly where you're aiming for) correctly on my monitor although the .htm file is closer. Is there a reason you are using absolute positioning for them? Why not float or use % to automatically correct for different resolutions?
The 2 news boxes are different heights - lack of consistency.
The index.htm(l) page is set like a fixed width page (central column to sit well in most resolutions with dead space either side to compensate) but the rest of the site acts like a fluid layout which automatically resizes to 100% width. Again, a lack of consistency.
All the links to 'Home' link to the .htm page which is not the one a user sees when he/she just types in the url - that would be index.html... which at the moment is different. A user would be confused as to why the home page looks different when he/she returns to it from a link and it shouts coding errors to any web dabbler.
In Firefox the menu bar overshoots the central column on the right hand side, as does the Search button on the content pages.
The home page fails validation with 25 errors. The document type is set to XHTML 1.0 Strict which is a tough one to comply with anyway. However, it also fails XHTML Transitional and standard HTML document types aswell.
Other pages also fail (for example, the events page has 67 errors and the Hall of Fame has 61 errors).
spag, thanks man, you are right on all counts. the client wanted something up RIGHT NOW, so there were things i couldn't tackle before doing that. i will be getting rid of the 2 boxes on the main page mainly because i'm tired of dealing with them and in my opinion, it looks a little cluttered with them. i followed you through all the way to the end....and then you lost me....
The document type is set to XHTML 1.0 Strict which is a tough one to comply with anyway. However, it also fails XHTML Transitional and standard HTML document types aswell. Other pages also fail (for example, the events page has 67 errors and the Hall of Fame has 61 errors).
not exactly sure what this all means, as i said, i'm not too in-depth in webdesign, but i will look it up. thanks again!
The document type is set to XHTML 1.0 Strict which is a tough one to comply with anyway. However, it also fails XHTML Transitional and standard HTML document types aswell. Other pages also fail (for example, the events page has 67 errors and the Hall of Fame has 61 errors).
not exactly sure what this all means, as i said, i'm not too in-depth in webdesign, but i will look it up. thanks again!
The doctype just tells the browser which set of (X)HTML rules you have used so it processes and displays the page correctly. Some tags get updated/introduced/cut with different versions and so the browser needs to be told which set you're using. 'Strict' means it uses only those tags within the set specification. 'Transitional' means it can use some older tags from previous versions of HTML.
This forum page is XHTML 1.0 Transitional. In the source you'll see:
Code:
(<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">)
Which basically means it uses XHTML tags but some older ones will also be processed and rendered.
Failing validation means that there are one or more errors in the HTML code according to the doctype you set. Some will have no effect and are many times caught by the browser. Others will affect the way the page looks (e.g. missing closing tags like ).
Another thought - Accessibility is a very hot issue right now in web design (coding it so that someone can still access and use all the facilities of the site using, for example, a screen reader.) Some countries are actually introducing legislation in relation to this... In the UK for example, although websites aren't explicitly mentioned, they should be adequately accessible by anyone with any disability, including blindness, as to be otherwise would fall foul of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) 1995. In Australia, a blind man successfully won a court case againt the Oz Olympic Comittee for their website's lack of accessibility.
BTW it's more common than not that the client provides the content (copy) and data for the website. If they want you to put in biographies, then either they should supply the text or quote them per hour for research (20 mins/person = roughly 133 hours for 400 people) on top of implementation.
Logo needs work (what's with the background?), check the fonts on both Windows and Mac - the fewer of them you use on the same page, the better, kill the music, fix page width issues in Firefox, remove date and time (the user already knows it), fix alignment issues.
But for a first cut by an amateur this is not bad at all. I expected much worse when clicking on the link.
micro, thanks, and i agree, ...they designed that logo and want to use it the way it is, and they wanted the date and time, etc. i do believe i will kill the music though. there are things i would like to change but they're the boss...not as much creative control. thanks for your input...i may go along with what you said anyway and just do it.
needs some work steve.... you can do better and cleaner... those 2 boxes need to go, they're all over the place and not the same height.
i'd remove the left navbar cluttering up other pages.... it's redundant to the top anyways
clean up the homepage and make it much simpler with a simple navbar on every page (preferably on top not mid-page). On the homepage get rid of everything below and including "the only place for Chicago Sports" on the frontpage. the music is not to my liking either but the customer is always right, let them decide. then put in some text for google & yahoo to spider, even if it's invisible.
really, the frontpage for a site like this should require NO SCROLLING at 1024x768 resolution. CLEAN, CLEAN, CLEAN ... glen
don't go by what they love, if they want the "Date & time" on the frontpage, that is a big clue
also get the domain pointing to the homepage not the hof list.
instead of the listbox i'd also try multicolumn text, would look alot classier imho (especially when you standardize all fonts the same size & face) ...glen
multicolumn? on one page? i thought of that; there may be some scrolling since there will be over 400 names. they also want the HOF names linked to places on "google" so users can read about them. that's a good idea but what if those sites go away eventually, if there are even any sites; resulting in dead links on pages. i suggested a short page for each....before i knew there were over 400 players...that's over 400 mini book reports that need to be written and create pages for...they would like it done asap. anyone like doing research and write-ups???
i'd rather scroll the page (with names CTRL+F searchable) then deal with the listbox. If each name links to an individual page (on the same site) i think that even makes more sense. that is alot of work doing a bio for 400 people! .. glen
Here's another idea, if I may. Think of three things that people want to do when they visit your site, and emphasize them in your design. Right now when I visit the site there's this "now what?" feeling and I don't know where to go. Site's main function must be immediately obvious from its front page, and if possible, no additional clicks should be required to get to the "top thing" the users will want to do. Every click creates a "funnel", and drops off users. If you require three clicks to get to what the users want, it's not uncommon to see that no more than 30 percent of first time users will get there.
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