hassloch — Tue, 04 May 2004 21:06:08 +0000

Thank you for your help!

Suzanne — Tue, 04 May 2004 20:51:38 +0000

PaintShopPro can do a better job than that -- by losing the dynamic menu, you'll have more "space" for the images in terms of file size and you won't need to compress them so much.

Realistically, you can build a site with Notepad and PaintShopPro that looks as good as Dreamweaver + Fireworks or Photoshop. Really! You don't need high-end systems. They do help in many many ways when you're working on heavy sites or need to work in the industry standard, but if you're optimizing photographs, most bitmap graphics applications do comparable jobs of the task.

hassloch — Tue, 04 May 2004 20:38:59 +0000

The person I designed the site for- wanted the large pictures. I had difficulty shrinking the file size of so large an image- that explains the "visible compression and artifacting" I use Paintshop pro. The others like Adobe are just too much.

Suzanne — Tue, 04 May 2004 20:26:26 +0000

lol, yes, the learning curve can be a doozy when you're starting from scratch.

1. Don't make text into images, use text (as much as possible)
2. If you need to make text into images, they should be .gif or .png
3. Photos should be .jpg or .png only (never .gif) and check your quality -- visible compression and artifacting is the hallmark of the amateur and easily avoided
4. Don't use DHTML menus! Okay, sometimes they are useful, but usually they aren't. Most of the time they cause problems in getting the site to work everywhere, and can easily lose and frustrate users. Sensible site architecture means sections in your case.

Dreamweaver is a great application, but has its own steep learning curve. If you're going to keep doing this, you'll need to improve your quality of images significantly. A solid graphics editor would be more valuable than a development application if you have to choose -- you can hand code a site, but you can't hand code an image (well, it is so problematic as to be unreasonable to do).

See this excellent reference for ideas on navigation that don't involve huge amounts of JavaScript and that do degrade well in older or incapable browsers: http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic/

Text, text, text. It's the most valuable and fastest way of communicating, don't hide it in image files.

ezhtml.net (Busy's site, he is a moderator here) may be of use.

hassloch — Tue, 04 May 2004 20:15:10 +0000

Good advice you all. I got the script for the navbar at dynamicdrive.com It said it would be good for "ALL" browsers. Guess not. I need a good Design tool that works with all browsers. Any suggestions? Dreamweaver was mentioned. Any others?

Also, I followed the link to validate the code. I'm just too knew- I have the slightest idea what to do next.
I love doing this. I'm getting more requests to do it. Oh the learning curve.

Greg K — Tue, 04 May 2004 20:05:53 +0000

Quote: It breaks my heart to see what crap FrontPage puts out. Seriously, you would be far better to learn the basics for a site like this than to have to undo the damage that FP does.

I'll second that! I tell everyone to learn to do it by hand first, get a text editor, beyond that, I recommend Dreamweaver.

-Greg

Suzanne — Tue, 04 May 2004 20:05:30 +0000

Re: validating your code

When you are creating websites that have to work in multiple situations, the safest initial method of ensuring the sites will work is to:

1. Use standard markup (nothing proprietary to one browser or another)
2. Avoid the use of heavy DHTML menu systems that don't degrade to text links
3. Start simple and get the message across with text. Add images and design as you learn more about how to do it.

Validating is like spell-checking for code. It makes sure you have all the parts in the right place, and that all the parts are the right parts. It doesn't ensure that your page will work, but it goes a VERY VERY LONG WAY towards ensuring that! It also helps you learn the language better, and gives you more proficiency through that knowledge.

Suzanne — Tue, 04 May 2004 19:59:15 +0000

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.herkomission.org%2FTuesday.htm&charset=iso-8859-1+%28Western+Europe%29&doctype=HTML+4.01+Transitional

It breaks my heart to see what crap FrontPage puts out. Seriously, you would be far better to learn the basics for a site like this than to have to undo the damage that FP does.

To make it worse, you've chosen to use a dynamic menu that doesn't work cross-browser, and is a massive load of code. Don't start complicated. Start simple and build. It's a lesson that applies across the board that when you start complicated, you create messes that fail to teach you how to make successes (which is the real failure!)

Safari: no navigation, images are in the right place
IE 5.2/Mac: navigation, images are overlapping at the bottom (text images upon text images) and the big photos are shoved down a bit and the menu is very touchy and hard to trigger the actions
FireFox: same as Safari (and all other Mozilla browsers are as well).

You are using images for your textual information, which will result in a mess, regardless, plus it makes the information inaccessible and annoying and actually fairly ugly as well, which I would imagine is the opposite reasoning for having it in an image!

hassloch — Tue, 04 May 2004 19:49:08 +0000

Sorry, I'm a newbie- what do you mean by validate the code. About the mac users- two people have told me they can't bring up the site. I did a screen shot last evening on a site that uses safari- for that purpose. I showed that my site had problems. Java navbar wasn't up- and so on.

Mac users can't veiw Frontpage site

hassloch — Tue, 04 May 2004 19:44:34 +0000

My url is herkomission.org.

You should see a navbar at the top of the page.
There is a tropical landscape to the left and revolving pictures to the right.
There also should be three phrases at the bottom of these pictures.

I was told that in some places in the site- the text is on top of each other. Pretty messed up.

I have only accessed the site on pc's- no trouble. Just a couple quirks- but I can fix them.