ober

[a href=\"http://lanparty.whproductions.com\" target=\"_blank\"]Lanparty Central[/a] I threw this together about a year ago for some buddies of mine to schedule lanparties and let other people know about times and what to bring, etc. I recently changed the look. What do you think? I know it's not super fancy, but I was kinda proud of how the banner image came out.

As far as the contact page, whenever you submit something and there are errors, all you get is a page that says "here are your errors". Then, you force the user to use the back button to go back and enter new information. You should show the form under the errors and fill the correct information back into the form. It's just user-friendliness.

behindspace, if you can't get past a little sarcasm, I don't really care if you read my thoughts or not. Get a pair of balls and take it like a man. No one said I had to be nice (although, considering some of the other sites I've critiqued on here, I think my critique of your site was fairly well-mannered). Besides, I put a fair amount of time into creating that post to try and help you. There are 2 ways to be constructive: 1) Tell you how it is or, 2) Sugar coat it and make you feel pretty. I opt for option number 1.

1) There's probably a security risk, but it's probably not a big one. 2) Tried it, didn't use it hardly at all, uninstalled it. 3) It's alright, but if I want to store something on the web... why wouldn't I just FTP it to my web hosting?

Oh... the stuff these kids put on the web: 1) It's a dark band... yeah... I get that. That doesn't mean you have to drown the site in black. Use a gradient in the background instead of plain black, spice up the menu with some color or a reflective look or something... anything besides a simple gray underline. 2) Box it in. Nice header, but then the rest of the site just kinda floats under it, with nothing to hold it in. It's VERY boring and needs some definition. 3) Splash screens... I don't get them. Everything that is achieved with a splash screen can be achieved by a fixed announcement on the main page. 4) Images page... I assume there will be more, but why do they open in a new page? Why not just open in the same window or let me choose if I want to open it in another window? 5) Contact pages with no form. Why? You have an email address, tie it to a form so I don't have to copy your email address and open my mail client. That's just lazy and leaves you open to spam when the bots steal your address when they scan your site. 6) What I like to call "zero links". In your nav, it links to "forums". When I click on that, it opens a page that says "click here to open forums". WTF. If I want to go to the forums, and I click on the link to go there, WHY WOULDN'T YOU JUST TAKE ME THERE INSTEAD OF MAKING ME CLICK AGAIN!?! 7) Poor table formatting. Your upcoming dates: the date column is too skinny and it forces the year to the next line. Why? You're not even taking up the full width of the main container with the width of the table. At least do that, and force your date column to a width where the date won't roll to the next line. 8) Last but not least... I'm not surprised to find tables in your layout. Tables are for tabular data, not layouts. 9) Mention of things not found. On the splash page, you rattle off browsers you support, that you use CSS (who cares from a viewer's standpoint?) and that you use flash.... yet I don't see any flash, and if you're using some, shame on you, because you're not making good use of it. 10) Finally... validation. It's not even close.

A few things that I think would help: 1) The header... as mentioned by moberemk. The text looks awful and the name doesn't stand out enough. 2) Center it. I think centering it for larger resolutions would help tremendously. 3) Moderate the profiles that show up on the main page. The top image that I see is a guy laying there naked with his wang in full view. Refreshing supplied yet another guy with his crank out. For a "date site", this might scare some people off. 4) The name kinda sucks. No one will ever know how to spell that if you market it by word-of-mouth. 5) Contact page should show the form again when there are errors instead of just showing me the errors. The error messages appear to use the input tag's names. Spend a little time and make them spit out a better description of what is missing. 6) FAQ doesn't stay inside the main container width on 1280x1024. It's a good start, but needs some tweaks.

VPS are sometimes called virtual dedicated servers. It is an alloted amount of space on server that you can do whatever you'd like with. But they're not technically "fully dedicated" to you. Your space/CPUs/RAM are split between you and whoever else might be on the same physical hardware, but maybe on a different partition of the hard drive. In the case you suggest, you're probably all sharing the same physical hardware and bandwidth capabilities, but you're probably split up into different partitons of the harddisk. And yes, unmetered bandwidth is unlimited.

Technically, that should cover it.... but being a versatile web programmer, you're going to want to learn a lot more than that (ASP, ColdFusion, Perl, CGI programming, ... the list goes on). XHTML and CSS are the basis for a lot of great websites, but the back-end interaction can come in a variety of forms. Many web development companies are based off of the MS/ASP/ASP.NET platforms, so to say that learning the things you mentioned would get you very far would be misleading.

Good sites for what? To integrate games with your own database, I'm pretty sure you're going to have to write the games yourself or get permission to do that from the game creator(s).

Well, this is my CSS: [code]input, select, textarea  {     font-family : Tahoma,Verdana,Arial,sans-serif;     font-size : 8pt;     border: 1px solid #0099FF;     background-color: #DCDCDC; }[/code] And I have it set to a size of 20. Reducing or increasing that size seems to have no effect whatsoever. The weird thing is that if I flip to another window (say... Opera for example) and then come back, it works fine again. So I tried all kinds of shifting and returning focus to the element in JS, but no dice there either. It just seems odd that it would work perfectly in Opera and FF and not in IE. Not that I should be surprised, but this seems like a really basic issue to screw up on. I'll take any other suggestions any of you might have.

I have a select box (multiple select) that I fill and it has about 200, give or take a few, items in it. In IE, the downward scroll button fails fairly consistently. The upward scroll button works fine all the time. Has anyone else seen this? Does anyone know why it might be doing this? Using the scroll wheel on the mouse works fine as well.

Sounds good.... and as far as the db connection, I'd suggest that you go for it. Db connections really aren't bandwidth intensive and are some of the best ways to work.

Backend admin software is only worth it if you start with it. At this stage in the game, it might be a bit late to try and tie something in with an OTS CMS. You might as well write your own. They're not that hard. Besides, I'm not sure why you would want to build static pages daily. That seems to defeat the purpose of general interactive websites. What a hassle. You should really be thinking more dynamic. And I agree that moving the pics to the right does make it seem a little off somehow. I guess you could also leave it the way it is, but switch the nav to the right side. I guess it doesn't look that bad as it is, however. Just a thought.

Why don't you write one? Store it all in a database. Seems pretty simple to me.

I like the border, I like the new size of the header, the menu looks great. My only complaint at this point is how things are lining up. Maybe it wouldn't be so off-setting if you moved the pics to the right side of the header? That whole left side has too many borders and splits in too many different areas. Try and line some of that up or make it more uniform.

Still, the colors are awful. I don't see much change in the menu, and whatever you did totally screwed up the layouts for the most part, at least in Opera. On the 2 column layouts (something you really need to get rid of), the second column is down and to the right of the first column and the footer is now beside the left column. .... I think you made it worse.

I didn't spend a ton of time with it, but enough to find these gripes: 1) the background... really bad and really huge. Lose it. 2) You don't show anything by default. You don't help the user navigate. When I click on a report, show me a default report with the form to modify the parameters. And when you have a form that has a date in it, fill in the current date, or a specified time period. Throw in a time period of a few days or something. Short of that, it's really very simple and I'm not crazy about the colors. I think it would help to give the entire thing some definition with some borders and whatnot. It's a good start, but it needs some work.

Visio comes to mind... or if you're really hard up, Powerpoint/Word both have objects you could use to do layouts. But a graphics design suite would also have that capability.

LOL... I'm sure you've been just fine ;-)

Good to see you too James... sorry I haven't been around in a while. Just a small point on obsidian's post... don't forget to close the html after you close the body (ie. </body></html>)

Looks pretty sharp, Jeff. I'm not crazy about the flash, as it doesn't really add anything than a quick animation when the page loads.... and if you don't look at it until it's done loading, you'll miss it anyways. I agree with obsidian... if you can find a way to just keep the quotes in text, it'll save you some bandwidth. I know you like to use images for stuff like that on your sites (I'm recalling a price image on that orange site you did), but I think this is one case where you could work that one out with text. I'm the same with the other guys on the nav... you could get a better effect with straight CSS and I don't know that anyone likes a jumping menu item.

Looking good, looking very good. One small thing tho... since none of your nav items are very long, I'd suggest making the end of the nav area line up with the middle line of the set of 4 pics on the left of the header. It would make it all fall in line a little nicer. But now I'm just being picky ;-)

[!--quoteo(post=348551:date=Feb 22 2006, 08:16 PM:name=AndyB)--][div class=\'quotetop\']QUOTE(AndyB @ Feb 22 2006, 08:16 PM) [snapback]348551[/snapback][/div][div class=\'quotemain\'][!--quotec--]Learning CSS is not a 5-minute exercise. It's a commitment.[/quote] I couldn't have said it better myself. And the commitment is MORE than worth it.

2 setups: Work: I run Homesite 5.5 for my editing, Topstyle Lite for CSS, Corel for photo editing. Homesite ties into a mapped drive on a W2K Server running IIS 6 (not my choice). That ties into a MSSQL 2K server... well 2 of them... a development version running on a second computer in my office, and our production server running somewhere in a local IT server farm. Home: Homesite 5.5 again, and the same with the rest of the software. I develop the files locally and FTP to my remote host running Apache & MySQL. Testing: I develop with Opera but normally test with Firefox, IE, and Netscape. I also use a few web-based validators ((X)HTML/CSS). I'd love to own ZDE, but I don't have that kind of cash sitting around, and I haven't asked my company to buy it for me either.

I don't really see any differences either. What did you change??