Prowlin67 — Mon, 09 Sep 2002 14:52:32 +0000

Hi Hoppy,
I checked out your site and it seemed pretty well done. Really easy on the eyes after surfin all night!! The only suggestion I really have is maybe stretch your banner wider and taller. It's hard to read what it says.

Later
Prowlin67

Busy — Sat, 07 Sep 2002 00:08:50 +0000

Want to know what a bad site is like, I'm doing one now for a company that a "webdesigner" did, this person had done courses galore ... but what he did for this client is made a site with blue background and used blue text, with blue links and had massive scroll bars at 800x600. not sure the reason behind the scroll bar (did have an image that was 950 wide) but turned out this guy was 100% colour blind. It's not his fault being color blind, and I'm sure there are similar stories out there.

disaster-master — Fri, 06 Sep 2002 12:55:03 +0000

Morning Hoppy,

I was just checking to see if you knew what I was talking about when I said not to use the image tags to resize your images??

As for the Ulead...I have an older version of that as well and it is a great little program.

Busy — Fri, 06 Sep 2002 07:36:58 +0000

Irfanview is a great program, I think its postware (send the creator a postcard) or freeware, I use it for resizing all the time, awesome lil standalone program. also allows cropping, resizing, color increase/decrease, color enhancement, slide shows ....

Comments so far

Aussie_Hop — Fri, 06 Sep 2002 01:34:49 +0000

First of all let Me thank the people who have taken the time to comment on My Site,Your input is greatly appreciated.
This 3rd variation of Hoppys World is getting more acceptable than the first 2.
Wow,I cant get over how "disliked" black backgrounds are so I am straight on to that,amongst other things.

To Julia & Sonia- I use a cheap star cam to take My pics and I do resize thru Ulead 3(old old program)and it does say something about a lossy file losing quality next time You open the pic(didnt know what that meant)I was just trying to get them down to a decent size for upload.A friend has suggested I use Irfanview to do the job.Any Suggestions.
I'm not downloading illegal software,I want to stay 100% legal.
To Nike_guy,Brooke and Busy- Thanks,no-one had said I have done a good job before and Yes Brooke,being a newbie I have put a "few" hours into this.lol
Cheers,Hoppy

Busy — Thu, 05 Sep 2002 22:58:32 +0000

try not to use blue, esp underlined blue text for normal text, most people still related blue (underlined) as a link.

Keep up the good work

Brooke — Thu, 05 Sep 2002 21:49:42 +0000

Hello there!

First off I have to say that you've done a good job! You obviously have worked a long time - it takes so long until you are completely satisfied with your own site.

I agree with what everyone here has said. I have just a few more things to add:
1. I personally would not use that black star background. It is out of date in my opinion.

2. The buttons on the home page are out of date too and the color and font that you chose are hard to read.

3. The logo seems small to me and that font is really hard to read.

4. You only have 12 main links on your home page and 14 on the other pages. That is a bit confusing to me. I don't know if you did this - but make sure that you links on the 2ndary pages have the same name as the links on the home page.

Great job Hoppy!

Brooke

nike_guy_man — Thu, 05 Sep 2002 20:38:49 +0000

I'd suggest putting a color other than white between the 2 black nav bars...
Other than that, it's great...
Keep up the good work

disaster-master — Thu, 05 Sep 2002 15:01:44 +0000

Hi Hoppy! I was wondering when you were finally going to let us see your stuff. Much better than my sites after 5 months of learning HTML.

Alrighty, here are my "opinions".

I don't particularly like the blue text in the body. Black is much easier to read. You could use the blue text to highlight things that you want to stand out.

Spinning, moving graphics or sorta out of date. They also increase your load time if that is something that is of concern to you.

The logo thingy at the top that is in the dark colored square would look better if it wasn't if the dark colored square. Gee, did that make sense? LOL

Looking at the first page in the Opera browser, the text in first paragraph is bold but the second and third paragraphs are not. To fix this, make sure that you open and close the bold tag for each paragraph. Same thing with font tags. Your code would look something like this:

text for the first paragraph
text for the second paragraph
text for the third paragraph

Make sure that your tags are nested properly. In other words, close them in the opposite order that they are opened. For example:

Correct way: Hello

Incorrect way: Hello

Moving on to the other pages.
First of all, that is a very nice looking family you have there. But they would look much better if the images were done properly. It looks like what you have done is used your image tags to resize the images instead of manually resizing them to you liking. Here is the actual size of your image:
removed image

The original image size is width="216" height="173".
Your code says Height="180" Width="140" and this is causing the distorted or "stretched" look.

Here is a resized version that isn't so big and the dimensions are width="175" height="140".

removed image

Do you have any type of graphics program that you can use to change the size of your images?

You may also want to consider adding text navigation links to the bottom of each page.

Oh cool!! You have a link to the webmaster fourms on your site. Thanks!!! Other than that, you have a wonderful site and it is apparent that you have put a lot of time into it. If you are like most webmasters, you will change things a gazillion times before you get it "just right".

Cheers,
Sonia

The Webmistress — Thu, 05 Sep 2002 07:54:07 +0000

The advantage you have got is that as this is a personal/family site you can really get away with doing whatever you like with it as long as you like it it's ok. I personally would use a different shade of blue as the one you have tends to be a bit neon against white and hard to read on black, which is another thing I'm not keen on - black backgrounds - but as a personal site that's up to you. I would also try to keep all pages in the same layout and be careful with your photos as they all look like they've been squashed rather than resized.