roopurt18

It's almost impossible to read the text that's overlapping that suit.

The site search box is still rather large, but it's better than before. It does sit higher vertically than your logo and text on the left, which makes it look weird. The only other complaint left over from my original post is those images, which you said you'd be replacing anyways.

Looks like cobol is on the rise! I can't believe VB is so high up there.

Thanks for the feedback so far. Is there a tool in Photoshop that suggest shades of colors matching the current foreground or background colors? I'm slightly colorblind so what looks good to me doesn't always look good to everyone else. Do you have a suggestion for the double gradient I used in the header? Perhaps a solid banner with the gradient background. I could drop the solid black bar and have the header blend right into the background. I'm very stubborn, so I'm sure this won't be a problem.

Hmm...I suppose a link would help: http://www.ibswebview.com/test/ps/layout.jpg So...tired.

I'm working on a layout for a new site. The intended purpose of this site will be for selling a web based service. I'm shooting for a casual, simple, yet still professional layout. I've had Photoshop a total of less than two days, so my skills are still very basic. There's no buttons or text yet, just a general layout. I'm interested in your opinions thus far on my direction in layout and choices in colors. Thanks!

Some pages are missing the border, which causes the logo to "jump." Yellow isn't really a good main color when set with a white background. Try using a darker tone of yellow or maybe an orange. The font is small and bold, thus hard to read. If you switched the main site colors to orange I'd change the font's color, maybe a shade of brown or red?

I'd use a more crisp family photo for your logo; you don't people thinking you and your family are made of legos do you?

The Good Nice, clean layout. You also managed to pull off having a large header graphic by keeping most of your content short and to the point; kudos to you there. The content topics flow well and you didn't forget to add the all-important direct link back to the home page from all other pages. The Bad You might consider bumping the font size up a notch and / or increasing spacing between letter; I found it a little difficult to read. Consider pushing Verdana or Georgia higher up in the font-family list in your CSS. Unless you're purposefully trying to attract major attention to it, your site search box is H U G E. Consider having any links to external sites under software and portfolio open in new browser windows; people will tend to browse them and clicking back a dozen times to return to your site can be annoying. Opening links in a new window is less of a nuisance now that all major browsers support tabs. The Ugly I'd update the following images with ones that look better at the resolutions you're displaying them: http://www.netgeekz.net/includes/images/lapclosing.jpg http://www.netgeekz.net/includes/images/lapkeyboard.jpg http://www.netgeekz.net/includes/images/webdev.gif http://www.netgeekz.net/includes/images/servers.jpg All of them look great at their regular resolutions, but scrunched up when inside your content they look tacky when compared to that large, crisp logo. I would call that a major detraction for a site trying to lure in customers with promise of, among other things, web expertise. Overall it looks good. Some of the issues I brought up (like the font stuff) could fall under opinion or just nitpicking.

The MS Script Editor has lately made my life much better when dealing with IE: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2004/10/26/247912.aspx The Firebug and Web Developer add-ons for FF are great as well.

[quote author=obsidian link=topic=119164.msg545433#msg545433 date=1173187923] one of the marks between the average and good programmers is the mark of optimal coding and style.[/quote] Just to elaborate on this comment, I couldn't agree more.  I've seen some programmers go "over the top" trying to optimize something for [i]minimal[/i] gains and sometimes even losses.  A lot of times these optimizations come at the cost of mangled or very difficult to read code. It's always nice when you see that someone spent good hours optimizing a section of code to be 20% faster.  It's even better when you look at the bigger picture and show them that particular piece they optimized accounted for less than 1% of execution time in a program that takes an average of 2 seconds to complete a given task.  Big whoop. One of my favorite examples that I experience first hand came at work.  As I've stated before, our Visual FoxPro server application sends data to the web for our sister application to process.  This is software for home builders so one of the functions online is to allow home buyers to shop for housing options online.  When I first started, the process of uploading and importing the data to the web took, for some clients, as much as 20-30 minutes.  Some of our clients were exporting ~40MB of data, which can take a while to upload.  Then the server has to kick in and import the data, which took as long as 15 minutes for some clients. Step 1 in optimizing:  Zip the data before uploading it.  This is one of those slap-your-forehead-and-say-"DUH" moments.  I don't know why the previous developers weren't doing this.  That 40MB upload dropped down to 1MB. Step 2 in optimizing: Look at the import process.  I noticed from import logs the import was spending about 15% of its time importing into direct-mapped tables on the web.  The other 85% was spent building a gigantic, super-table of housing option costs for when the home buyers browsed online.  Now, this information was already present in the other tables being imported, so I assumed compiling it into a single table was with the intent of avoiding queries with large numbers of joins and to increase performance.  Here's the kicker, as a buyer, it would take as long as [i]30 seconds[/i] to pull the information out of this super table and display a page to the buyer.  My favorite was selecting a category, waiting 30 seconds, and then having a display of "No options found within this category."  The solution?  Drop the table and use table joins when the buyers browsed options.  Option browsing for buyers loads almost instantaneously.  The actual importing of data by the cron script on the web now only takes 2 to 3 minutes to run. So now the whole process of importing data to the web takes only a couple minutes, when it used to take almost half an hour.

I actually found two books that look like they might be useful. How to Wow : Photoshop CS2 for the Web Photoshop CS Type Effects Picked up a couple magazines too. This should keep me busy for a couple weeks.

fert's puzzle with the steps is designed so that you always get D for your letter. I have to admit, the first place I thought of that started with a 'D' was Denmark, but I wasn't sure if it was a country. I had to use google to find another country starting with 'D' and got Dominican Republic. Which lead to cat and tan. Anyways, kangaroo is the most probable choice for an animal starting with K and orange is a likely color for one that starts with O. Well designed puzzle IMO. I got 4100 on the math one too. I failed counting the F's. 8[ Here's one my fiance got me with: Say the word milk ten times. 1) Milk 2) Milk 3) Milk 4) Milk 5) Milk 6) Milk 7) Milk Milk 9) Milk 10) Milk Now, what do cows drink?

LOL Thanks neylitalo, I owe you one. (She was just overwhelmed with how many Adobe products exist and was worried I may have accidentally purchased the wrong one. For shame, to think I could make a mistake!)

Thanks jcombs. I was going to head down to the book store this afternoon and pick up a decent book if they had one; but if I can't find a decent one that addresses the topics that interest me I think a month subscription to that site would serve me well. Can someone also, for shits 'n' giggles, explain why I bought CS2 over Premiere to my fiance. She's non-technical and it would really put her mind at ease (and consequently make my life easier) if she didn't have to worry that I just wasted a shit-ton of money.

Jane's Addiction or the Dee-Lite -- Groove video. lol @ access denied.

I'm not sure I agree with the too many colors comment; it sort of fits the theme of the site, at least as far as the group headings go. Here's a possible idea for the big white gap at the top. Your building blocks graphic could probably be moved into that big gap, then have it fade out about halfway between the 'Help' link and the site's logo. You'd have to move the 'Login' and 'Register' buttons, perhaps into the top left, below the logo, above the adverts, float them to the right of the 'Welcome' message, etc. Just try and find a place where they don't appear squished and that isn't so "chaotic." I said before the coloring is fine, IMO, at least as far as your group headings go. But the sheer amount of blue present in the 'Latest Articles' and 'Tags and Stuff' is a bit overwhelming. You might get away with coloring those links black, just leave the underline when the mouse moves over them, and I think most people will figure out you can click on them. You could probably color the user names black in the 'Newest Members' as well, since it appears the avatar takes you to the same page as the user name. I think if you cut out a lot of that blue from the links, the color sensory overload that jcombs mentioned might be lessened.

I like it. I'll have to send this to a friend of mine who just became a dad last Thursday. "New Dad Quiz: When Will You Get Your Next Shag?" - lol

So I purchased a copy and have no idea how to use it. Can anyone recommend a good book on how to make the most of this software for web design?

The catch is that the OP is hoping you'd read it as "How many are left inside the house?" Which is what I almost did, being tired and all.

Your jedi mind tricks will not work on CV, you weak-minded fool!

http://us2.php.net/manual/en/language.variables.scope.php#37427 Doesn't look like you can do it.

You can only include variables inside of double quoted, not single quoted, strings. Change the single quotes around: 'update hub_directory set ad_counter = ad_counter +1 where id = {$_GET['id']}' to double quotes.

Round a float to the nearest integer: $nearest = (int) ($float + .5); No need to call a function. In your case you'd want to do: $loan_max = (int) ($points / 25);

I've been using EditPlus for a long time. I'll probably upgrade to ZDE, although I'll still use EditPlus for my Javascript, SQL, and CSS for the syntax highlighting.