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I'm working on a new web site for my new NCSU page:
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~mrellinw/

Any comments/criticisms are appreciated.

I plan on coding the navigation and link areas so that the whole line the link is on highlights when you hover over it, and that the whole line is the link (instead of just the text).

The color scheme is based off of the Atmospheric Science page at NCSU:
http://www.meas.ncsu.edu/02-p-ug-atmos.html


EDIT:
I will also add a banner just under the "Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences" that runs the whole width of the page... I put something there to fill in the space for now.

Amorous Eyes said:

Well I was gonna write up the first thing that came to mind, but then I see you already thought of that yourself:

Ross said:

I plan on coding the navigation and link areas so that the whole line the link is on highlights when you hover over it, and that the whole line is the link (instead of just the text).

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Yeah... I gotta dig up one of my old sites that used that code and add it in... but it's a bit late for me and I'm going to bed. I'll try to get around to it tomorrow

The colour scheme looks nice and relaxing but the striped background doesn't quite fit in with that.

Other suggestions:
- always leave room between text and borders - the main block of text feels aggressive when it flows all the way up to the borders.

- don't be afraid to use PNG images instead of text for titles - it allows for more freedom and will look better and not like a Word document

- try to use DIV tags instead of tables

- add some more colour contrasts or even colours

Well those are the main ones I think

Icarus said:

The colour scheme looks nice and relaxing but the striped background doesn't quite fit in with that.

Other suggestions:
- always leave room between text and borders - the main block of text feels aggressive when it flows all the way up to the borders.

- don't be afraid to use PNG images instead of text for titles - it allows for more freedom and will look better and not like a Word document

- try to use DIV tags instead of tables

- add some more colour contrasts or even colours

Well those are the main ones I think

Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestions! I know DIVs are much, much better than tables, but I haven't gotten used to coding with them yet... that's the next step. I'll definitely take a look into your other suggestions as well.

Well, they're not necessarily "better", just more syntactically correct. Ultimately they're a little more flexible. But if you're planning on a static row/column layout, I say screw syntax. I think that went a little overboard back when the big layout/presentation split happened. It's honestly still a lot easier to get a multi-column layout to look consistently good cross-browser with tables.* (The W3C people are putting their fingers in their ears going, 'lalala not listening!' when I say that.) Image headers will definitely give you a prettier range (until the standard finally gives us embedded fonts. I mean, geez, it's freakin' 2009. Why not?!? And I'm not talking browser-specific crap either.) I suggest keeping backwards compatibility on them by using a span with the text version of the header in it and a 'display: none;' style applied. Maybe you get blind readers, or maybe you want to revert back to text one day.


*For the record, I don't use tables for flexibility, but if you want quick dev and it's a small site, don't feel pressured into not using them.

What class is that for? Say E115 and I will smack you.

---------- Post added at 05:30 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:26 PM ----------

fade said:

Well, they're not necessarily "better", just more syntactically correct. Ultimately they're a little more flexible. But if you're planning on a static row/column layout, I say screw syntax. I think that went a little overboard back when the big layout/presentation split happened. It's honestly still a lot easier to get a multi-column layout to look consistently good cross-browser with tables.* (The W3C people are putting their fingers in their ears going, 'lalala not listening!' when I say that.) Image headers will definitely give you a prettier range (until the standard finally gives us embedded fonts. I mean, geez, it's freakin' 2009. Why not?!? And I'm not talking browser-specific crap either.) I suggest keeping backwards compatibility on them by using a span with the text version of the header in it and a 'display: none;' style applied. Maybe you get blind readers, or maybe you want to revert back to text one day.


*For the record, I don't use tables for flexibility, but if you want quick dev and it's a small site, don't feel pressured into not using them.

Click to expand...

The thing I hate most about developers (myself included) is that there is always the "THIS TECHNOLOGY IS BAD AND YOU SHOULD NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER EVER USE IT NO MATTER WHAT!!!!!!11!" (ones placed intentionally by developers). Use a Table when they're better suited that divs and vice versa. use a procedural language when its best for the task at hand not because "ALL OO LANGUAGES ARE CRAP11!!!11!"

and for God's sake pointers are NOT evil, and code is not automatically crap because you spotted a single goto statement.

</rant>

fade said:

Well, they're not necessarily "better", just more syntactically correct. Ultimately they're a little more flexible. But if you're planning on a static row/column layout, I say screw syntax. I think that went a little overboard back when the big layout/presentation split happened. It's honestly still a lot easier to get a multi-column layout to look consistently good cross-browser with tables.* (The W3C people are putting their fingers in their ears going, 'lalala not listening!' when I say that.) Image headers will definitely give you a prettier range (until the standard finally gives us embedded fonts. I mean, geez, it's freakin' 2009. Why not?!? And I'm not talking browser-specific crap either.) I suggest keeping backwards compatibility on them by using a span with the text version of the header in it and a 'display: none;' style applied. Maybe you get blind readers, or maybe you want to revert back to text one day.


*For the record, I don't use tables for flexibility, but if you want quick dev and it's a small site, don't feel pressured into not using them.

Click to expand...

Oh, I didn't mean to say he HAD to use DIVs but it's a good practice to at least try to, because of the advantages.

And embedded fonts won't happen any time soon.

Even in the graphics industry, fonts are still a sore spot. Fonts are ridiculously expensive to buy - you will easily pay $200-300 for a font family and most of the times, a font is only used for limited usage like a title. In fact, an article in an industry magazine showed that 90%+ of all fonts used, are used for less than 10 words. Most fonts only occur once or twice in the same magazine (ads, special features, etc.) making it extremely expensive to use a font just a few times due to the price tag.

Now, there's a whole "sharing" community. Basically, companies buy the standard Adobe font pack and the most used fonts and that's it. All the other fonts are given to them by the advertising agencies, the art bureaus, etc. All illegal of course, but it's the only way. To be legal, every printing office would have to buy every single font used in every single ad and that's just not viable.

With an embedded online font, similar issues would appear - the fonts now used are standard ones that come with your OS. The moment a site uses other fonts, they will have to pay for them meaning that font piracy will be a huge problem. Due to the font incompatibility between the OS systems, the huge majority of free fonts won't be sufficient - Macs hate TTF and other PC fonts and visa versa and only OpenType fonts (which are very expensive) would work on both and very few fonts are in the OT format.

And fonts in general always cause headaches - Macs, especially, are TERRIBLE with fonts. The move from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X led to major worldwide headaches due to the poor system used to manage fonts. Heck, even with the standard fonts, you already have issues between different browsers and OS.

Oh, I didn't think you were saying he had to use divs. It was more of a general rant.

On embedding, though, the fonts themselves could be secured. The actual files wouldn't have to be available to the end user. It'd be similar to the way music and video is shared. The bulk of web devs already use fonts to create image headers. You could have browser with a built-in ttf rendering engine or the like, which probably would hook at a high level onto the OS font rendering engine.

Also, I'm not sure if you're talking about pre OS X Macs, because I can't say I've ever had a single problem with any TTF fonts on Mac OS X. Or PS1 or OT for that matter. Every font I've tried has worked fine. Font Book has worked like a dream.

yea I've never had a single issue installing a TTF font on OSX, or windows for that matter.

I didn't say TTF - I meant fonts in general. Trust me, I work in a printing office and we have over 100.000 designs with thousands of different fonts and we've had MAJOR font issues from day 1. The reason you won't have any problems, is because you're not using artwork made on a different Mac. Designs made on PC or Mac OS 9 pose a huge problem for example - even if the Mac has the exact same fonts used in the designs. And even designs made on Mac OS X but on a different Mac will throw up errors quite a few times. It's been quite a nightmare and we constantly have to watch out for these because there's usually no warning.

Heck, yesterday we had a label which used a certain font. It was active in Mac OS X yet no software could actually use the font. According to Acrobat & Illustrator, the font was loaded yet when making a PDF, it would look wrong. A double check showed it was active but only when we moved the font and then moved it back, was it finally correctly loaded. This is just one example. Another is how you can have both a TTF version of a font AND an OpenType active and one program may use the TTF and another the OpenType, leading to inconsistencies.

It just strikes me as odd, since OS X is based on the PDF standard whereas windows type management is not based on any standard. I believe you, I just find it strange that an OS that went through precisely the effort to eliminate those very issues is having more problems than an OS that didn't.