Bookworm — Mon, 21 May 2001 23:51:48 +0000

Very, very impressive for a first site.

Hell, it's impressive for any site!

My only quibble is the time it took to load. There are still some of us poor brits on 56k modems who won't wait for a 40k splash to load before clicking the ENTER button.
A minor but important point.

A beautiful site (and a beautiful woman!)

TFE — Mon, 14 May 2001 22:44:35 +0000

800 by 600 is the screen resolution most commonly used but keep in mind that 640 by 480 is still the internet standard and what most businesses will set their computers to. We as web designers always have to design with this in mind.

Netscape users...check that site out..

I agree

The Webmistress — Mon, 14 May 2001 12:17:41 +0000

Firstly, welcome aboard!

I personally don't like it when a site says "This is best viewed at blah blah blah"!! Any good website designer should try to make it look no matter what screen size/resolution, browser or OS the visitor is using. Otherwise it's like having a shop & saying you can come in only if you wear these sunglasses and flipflops!!

The first image does take too long to load, but I love the colours you have chosen. The pop up isn't too bad looks wise, but I personally just don't see the point.

The links definately need to be changed so that the rollover shows a definate colour rather than appearing to disappear & where you don't have the status bar showing it does sometimes feel like the link hasn't worked as the new page takes some time to open!

I also find centered text a tad annoying as it makes it hard to read & looks unprofessional. I also think that where you have such a large image of her on the left, the text is squashed into the right side and I personally find that off putting as you are continually scrolling.

All that being said, for a first attempt this is very good indeed

Fringey — Mon, 14 May 2001 02:31:07 +0000

Wow, this layout is terrifically impressive for a first-time-website! The majority of advanced webmasters don't come close to this level of design. Simple, sleek, aesthetically pleasing and interesting. I love brown color-schemes, they are very underused.

The image you used of Erykah is very large for such a slow connection. For the splash-page image you could crop it into a smaller picture or reduce the size in your image-editing program. The one on the pop-up is fine i suppose, you can't do much about slow servers.

Personally, I never run active desktop on my computer. It can mess up games and is just irritating, so .bmp backgrounds is nice; i don't have to convert them myself. However, many people don't mind, you might think of putting both file types up. Time-consuming, yes, but thoughtful .

Really, this layout is amazing. I don't mind pop-ups so much personally, as long as it doesn't look like someone tried to cram a full sized page into one, which yours doesn't.

Oh, one last thing. I noticed that your frames are resizable, which means users can resize your page. I ccidentally made the nave frame disappear and couldn't find the border again so i had to close the window and wait for it to load, again. ll you have to do to fix this is put "NORESIZE" in your frame tags.

mairving — Mon, 14 May 2001 01:26:04 +0000

Exe, bmp files are so huge. The same file that you had in bmp format at 1.37Mb, I saved in Photoshop as a jpg with medium quality. The size was reduced to 19.7Kb. I tested it on my desktop. I couldn't see any difference in the image quality. You would lose some quality if you tried to save it as a low quality jpeg. You are right 800x600 is the most popular size. What I was saying, if you use jpeg's where the image size is smaller why not give you viewers a choice. 1024x768 is a pretty popular size.

A desktop can actually be either a bmp or a jpeg. It is kind of a weird Windows thing though. If you have a picture that is a jpeg, you can't use that picture as your desktop unless: you have active desktop enabled or that picture is already on a web page, in which case all you have to do is right click on the image and select save as desktop and it puts the image on your desktop. Actually I used to have a lot of fun with that at work. Someone would leave their desk and I would go over and find a picture on the internet and set it as their desktop.

Anyway if you need any help with images, post back here and we can help you. The other thing that I was meaning to tell you was to be careful what you put up on your site. Some record labels might not appreciate it.

bmp/jpg???

eXe — Mon, 14 May 2001 00:08:49 +0000

thanks all for your advice and input:)

but about the the bmp/jpg thing
see im pretty new at this and when i was using photoshop and paint shop pro to make the desktops bmp always had a WAY better look of quality to it,while in jpg format some colors didnt show up right and they just didnt look as good as they looked in bmp format:(
plus arent most desktops made in bmp format???

im confused,WHICH IS BETTER???

and is there a way to make jpg images look just as good as bmp images???

please help me if you can:(

thanx

ps-isnt 800x600 the most common screen size also???

mairving — Sun, 13 May 2001 23:20:47 +0000

You are really going about this all wrong. Why have a huge zipped bmp file? You could save the image as a jpeg and as long as someone has active desktop enabled, they can download the image and use the jpeg as their desktop. You have the right click disabled since you can right click on the picture and make it your desktop. This can slow your site down a bit if enough people link to it. And why offer just a 800x600. Why not a 1024x768 & 640x480. What I would do is to create jpeg images for 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768 and put them all in one zip file. The file size will be about 100K. You won't gain much compression at all with a jpeg since it is already compressed but the zip file will enable them to download it.

As far as the site goes, just a bit of things that I would fix. I don't like the disappearing links. Change the color maybe but don't make them disappear. I don't really like the pop-up page. When you combine the disappearing links with a slow server and the pop-up it makes me wonder if the link is active and I am on a cable connection. Not being able to see that it is a link in the taskbar doesn't help either.

On the pop-up page, I would advise against using frames like you did. What I would do instead is to use tables. Set the background color to the beige/brown. Create a table at about a width of 90-95% for your second table. The next color takes a width of about 80-85%. You could also achieve this by using cells and rows. This will help people that have resolutions less than 800x600 to not have to scroll in the middle frame and search engines will pick you up better.

It is good for a first timer. You have apparently done your homework. I would just fix a few things and you should be cooking.

TheGizmoid — Sun, 13 May 2001 21:29:02 +0000

Yeah, everything Megan said!

On the splash page, the first thing I noticed was "thanks too
(host) for hosting me". The grammar geek in me has to point out that it should be "to" and not "too". There are numerous instances throughout the site where you should have a space after a comma or parens.

On the wallpaper page, you have links for the words "here" and "info" that are the same color as the background (not just as a hover color, I didn't get any change when I put the cursor over it) that don't show up at all (I'm using NS 4.5 on a Mac). And I would make "preview section" a link, not the word "here".

I don't really understand the point of the pop-up page... why not just have the splash page take you to that page instead of having a pop-up?

Overall it's a really nice site. Incredibly so for a first effort. You have talent!

Megan — Sun, 13 May 2001 16:13:10 +0000

Interesting beige colour scheme. It's eye-catching becuase it's unusual.

Link the graphic to the inside of your site, instead of just that little enter link at the bottom. It was a little bit hard to find.

You know, I don't totally hate the pop-up in this case. Normally those things are really annoying but I find it effective.

On the wallpapers page, you should link each thumnail to a download area, or the previews you talked about in the paragraph above. Actually, lose the thumnail page and link directly to the preview page.

It seems to me that your hover colour is the same as the background, which makes the links dissappear when you mouseover them - fix that!

When I click on a wallpaper to download all I get is a couple of pop-up windows.... Are you storing the .zip files on another server? At homestead? That's probably your problem.

Another thing (and i've been saying this a lot lately) - don't center paragraphs of text - it just makes things hard to read.

Overall, though, the design looks just great. I can't beleive that this is your first site. I wouldn't change a thing with that.