Design...

rluther — Fri, 14 Jan 2005 18:27:22 +0000

Well, I am not crazy about your colors. And the information write up in the beginning does not really tell me what the site is. Instead of telling me it is the idea of your vice president, which means absolutely nothing to me... tell me what I am looking at.

That's my 2 cents.

Robb

JeevesBond — Fri, 14 Jan 2005 13:33:22 +0000

Well, when you realise tables are evil you're half way towards the freedom and glory of standards based, semantic markup

syawilim — Fri, 14 Jan 2005 05:01:24 +0000

OK some tips to help get your site validated:

To help tidy things up a little put your styling info into external CSS files
Forget about using tables to layout the page, use div tags that are defined in your style sheet
Use lists for your navigation buttons

At the moment things are a bit all over the place, you have content prior to your opening body tag, no opening table tag, a whole heap of center tags at start of the page with no closing tags just to point out a few things I picked up.

Check out the link below it should give you a bit of an assist.
http://css.maxdesign.com.au/selectutorial/tutorial_intro.htm

SMterminator — Fri, 14 Jan 2005 01:31:19 +0000

The greys look very boring (a gradient is a good way to make it exciting) and maybe a flash menu or something.

TaylorAtCTS — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 02:50:23 +0000

W3 validator can be a bit confusing, but it works very nicely and is brutally honest

travelagent — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 19:19:57 +0000

I understand what you're saying, Jeeves -- guess this "old man" is gonna have to keep reading and trying ... thanks for the tips; I did have my site in those gawd-awful, cumbersome tables until I finally figured out how to shorten the code and load time using CSS.

Now...back to more reading...

JeevesBond — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 17:55:21 +0000

Don't think HTML think XHTML and CSS baby! What's more:
Tables are used to display data in a tabular format, nothing else.
If you code using XHTML and CSS (properly -- using the semantic web ethos of the great Mr Berners-Lee himself) you can change the entire design of a site just by using different CSS, with no change to the content!
You can provide a different look according to the viewing technology being employed by the end-user, for example: Screen, print, projector etc.

Bear in mind that CSS has been a W3C Recommendation since 1999, and that css written for print/screen (I haven't tested the others) will even work in IE5! Another item of note is that the number of Mozilla and Opera users is on the rise whereas IE is gradually losing market share (as it should - its W3C Standards support is terrible and it distinctly lacks many of the features of other browsers). Mozilla and Opera are both standards compliant, so there is no excuse for not designing to these standards.

Yes the web is changing, and for the better, the W3C validator is just one more peice of technology you'll have to familiarise yourself with.

travelagent — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 14:23:08 +0000

JeevesBond -- maybe I didn't make myself clear in the opening statement:

When I started doing websites, there was no HTML Validation system -- I can interpret results if it's written in a way I, and many thousands more, can understand ... perhaps you have more experience with the Validator than I do.

travelagent — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 14:19:10 +0000

Troy1960 -- do you always make "assumptions" in your daily life? No ... you're dead wrong about your assumption; I "reviewed" many sites of which didn't stand out that great to me and I don't need to "get my posts up" for a review.

However, after reviewing each site you have, it looks about like {yawn} a rating of around 2.0 for each one.

JeevesBond — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 13:18:43 +0000

Hmmff, there's nothing wrong with the W3C validator, if you know how to interpret the results. It can be rather ambiguous in its results but detecting exactly what is causing an error is often difficult for something automated (ever tried reading the output from a C compiler?)

Most likely is that you've typed a tag name incorrectly or forgotten to close a non-empty tag so always check for that kind of thing first.