jha2297255 — Sat, 12 Apr 2003 03:07:32 +0000

i love the large text, one of my monitors is a dot-junk and small text looks fuzzy. I dont really like the border on white area. -Josh

Karen Cardinal — Sun, 30 Mar 2003 18:12:17 +0000

Thanks so much for the great suggestions Suzanne!
I'm working on replacing the navbar images with strait text and a background image roll-ver. It's hard to know exactly what to use to set the main links apart (I'm avoiding making "cute" little colored pencils under the text because every cp site seems to be using that).
...oh well, I'm sure something will come to me.

You are so right on track with the reorganization of the sections to make it easier to find things. I just wish I knew this site would be this big when I started. I have my flow-chart made and am going to get things organized for the redesign.

I'm also trying to work out the best way to eliminate the drop downs without having to send people back to the main page of the section everytime they want to see a different artist or lesson.

Thanks again for your suggestions. They really did make me look at the organizational structure of the site (it stil makes me shudder) and since this redesign is in order to make things more accessible, those changes will definately be a high priority.

Suzanne — Sat, 22 Mar 2003 17:29:22 +0000

I find the elements with the gradients somewhat heavy-handed. And ironically, I find the text too large. If I were to make subjective visual recommendations, it would be to make the "buttons" more subtle and less metallic (more in keeping with the subject of the site, but really, it could be argued that colour pencils and metal enjoy quite the relationship, so that's pretty well something you'll have to decide), and to reduce the font size just a little. And perhaps to utilize a graphic look that's more in keeping with the easter egg illustrations, or the tools (pencils), than the gradients.

From a functional standpoint, I find the drop-downs really painful, and would like to have a gallery of artists that I could click through, from beginning to end, and a solid html page with the list of participating artists, et cetera. Having to access a drop-down with such a large list isn't easy to use.

I'd also suggest, from a usability standpoint, having the growing tutorials sorted by artist, by tutorial title, and by tutorial type.

Having the galleries IN a gallery, such as, well, Gallery -- http://gallery.menalto.com/index.php -- would make it much easier to view the various galleries, though it would lose the "others by this artist" option unless you scripted that in, and had another section for each artist's contributions.

There appear to be a number of orphan pages, and pages that only exist if you get deep enough into a section (the about section is particularly bad for that) which makes it somewhat confusing.

So that's not quite design issues, in the graphical sense, but rather in the functional sense. I hope that's useful feedback for you.

Karen Cardinal — Sat, 22 Mar 2003 14:05:18 +0000

Wouldn't life be so much easier if we could just ignore the older browsers... but then what would we do with all our free time.

I finally got to check my site on a friends computer with NS 4 and NS 4.7. I'm not as happy with the way the page looks, but at least it all shows up. Although I'm not sure why the "body" div is crowded into the "main navigation" div.

Now that I've figured out which elements work in paticular browsers (I hope), I'm ready to move into the next phase of honing the look.

Like a fool I asked to have the template checked at the forum at coolhomepages.com.
I only got one response and that was to tear apart the look of my page (but it did confirm that all the elements were showing up).

So I was hoping to get some feedback from you here about the look of my template. What works for you and what doesn't.
I know this is very subjective, but I trust your judgement here... you've never steered me wrong.

Thanks so much again!

Suzanne — Fri, 21 Mar 2003 18:24:46 +0000

here I am hoping to be totally done with N4 so I can remove OS9, lol...

It looks okay in N4, a bit of overlap with the main navigation and the drop down. It does look quite different, but mostly in layout.

Karen Cardinal — Fri, 21 Mar 2003 16:14:09 +0000

Thanks for the suggestion Suzanne.
I'd have to remove a lot of files from my hard drive in order to make enough space to partition it off to install 9.
As soon as I get the energy for it, I really should do that so I can switch between the two.

What I did do is go through the code and create a (hopefully) NS4 friendly version.
The layout isn't quite as pretty, but it should look good.

The new css should also take care of some of the inconsistant elements in the other browsers.

If someone could check to make sure it actualy does work, I'd appreciate it!

I also dropped the doctype back down to 4.0 transitional, because I'd read that xhtml can cause NS4 to load pages then re-load them, throwing off all the layers.

Thanks again for all the help everyone!

Suzanne — Wed, 19 Mar 2003 23:01:05 +0000

Karen, you can install N4.x on your machine -- it'll just run in OS9. Unless you have removed that option?

I have 99% of the programs working in OSX, but I still have OS9 installed for things like, well, N4.x.

Karen Cardinal — Wed, 19 Mar 2003 22:54:35 +0000

Thanks so much for looking Megan!

The overlapping is something I"ll (hopefully) sort out in the final version by placing my float divisions in the right spot in the text.

I'm making my list of browsers it works in and browsers it doesn't, so ANY feedback is appreciated!

Megan — Wed, 19 Mar 2003 14:22:54 +0000

It looks fine to me in Opera 7 (no bold text here) except that the caption under the bottom horse drawing is overlapping the bottom borders (and that seems to be a screen res problem) Good job!

Karen Cardinal — Wed, 19 Mar 2003 12:19:59 +0000

Thanks so much for the compliment Renegade!

Quote: ...Better thank anything I could create...

I doubt that... I'm not that clever.

I envy anyone who can code PHP. Simple css causes me enough grief. So kudos to you!