Please give me stick !! :-)

[richie19rich77]

Hi Everyone,

 

Been trying to building a website for my local table tennis league, if it's any good I may see if they want to use it. at first I jumped in at the deep end doing loads of PHP, AJAX and JS. Have now decided to do the layout first and then develop the backend after.

 

Not much too it at the mo, but is it worth carrying on and should I start over. Link is: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/richard.farthing/Working.html

 

The main data will all be dynamic, allowing admin staff to only update there own html page. The current site I am trying to replace if it gets accepted is www.mtttl.co.uk.

 

Thanks

 

[redbullmarky]

you're on the right lines. it doesnt look too bad at all. (though to be brutally honest, even if you replaced the current site with the new one as it is, without even bothering to add content, it'd be a step up )

 

obviously there's not much to critique right now, but from what you say/what i see:

1, don't go down the ajax/javascript route. you'd be just another one of those people using it for no other reason aside from "just because it's there." It's a simple site, so keep it simple. If, later down the line, you REALLY see a need for it, then fine.

2, I reckon you could do alot better with the image of the ping pong player. it looks a bit grainy - and whilst the header in general needs a few tweaks anyway just to spruce it up, sorting that out would make things up top look a bit cleaner.

 

Be interesting to see what it looks like with a bit of content, but as it is, it looks fine and definitely an improvement on the existing site...

 

Good luck

 

Mark

[Nitroware]

Ya, it looks really nice!  After looking at theit current site, yours looks like a professional site.  LOL

[rcorlew]

I would have to echo Mark's comments, header image needs a little tweaking, but as long as you don't overdue all the content per-page ratio, I think you should have a solid site!

[richie19rich77]

I am going to start a fresh, been looking at some other sites and my design just looks to blocky.

 

Just got going so not much on there, but the design is cleaner: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/richard.farthing/Untitled-1.HTML

 

Only done the css for 1280x960 in IE7 for the time being, will do css for all resolutions once finalised on layout.

 

Thanks for the coments, will reply once I have done the dynamic content.

 

Thanks

 

 

[AndyB]

wrong approach.  Your code assumes that everyone uses their full screen width so regardless of how I adjust the width of my viewing window all I ever see is the 'too high' alert and unstyled content.

 

And, using different CSS for different resolutions is going to be a maintenance problem for you.

[richie19rich77]

How would I get around this then, I see websites that say have a auto left and right margin and width of 800px.  but then you have big borders in higher resolutions.

 

Ok if I go back to the above of auto margins and 800 width, what is the most used res ?

 

Does the design / layout look ok ?

 

Thanks for the coments.

[AndyB]

I have no idea how it looks because all I can ever see is unstyled content following the 'too high alert'.

 

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/March/res.php - summary of many millions of visitors' browser sizes.

[richie19rich77]

Ok that should work for you know, I will have to re-think the css with the comenst you have made.

 

Thanks

[redbullmarky]

personally, i think the decision to start again is a bit of mistake - considering now you have these issues that you didnt have before, and your previous site was not bad - just needed a few tweaks.

 

Oh well, good luck anyway.

[richie19rich77]

Sorted out the problems now, and have decided to build the site using 1024x768 res.

 

Very happy with it, just have to do the dynamic content.

 

Thanks for all your coments.

[richie19rich77]

New page: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/richard.farthing/Main.html

 

Will post back in about a week once I sort out some AJAX problems.

 

Thanks

[redbullmarky]

ok now we're back to something that looks good. i was a bit worried you'd lost the plot when i saw the site before the CSS

 

anyway. i will restate my point from earlier in this topic:

 

1, don't go down the ajax/javascript route. you'd be just another one of those people using it for no other reason aside from "just because it's there." It's a simple site, so keep it simple. If, later down the line, you REALLY see a need for it, then fine.

I'd personally discourage you from using AJAX this way, for now at least. I prefer to look at AJAX as a tool that provides little quirks to a website (search results, autocomplete, form validation, etc) rather than something that provides an entire page of content for no good reason (i've been there and done that myself and these are just some of the issues i had). When you use it for smaller scale "widget" type stuff, it's easier to get it to degrade more favourably than just displaying a completely empty page.

 

There are alot more further implications of using AJAX, such as breaking the 'back' button, etc, but I do believe that Google doesn't follow "anchors" - the type of links you're using in the nav with an 'onclick', so those pages maybe left completely out of search results. Also, whilst a small amount, users that don't have Javascript turned on won't be able to get your pages - it'd be a shame to dismiss these users over something that's not really needed. Most of the people who I find have JS turned off are the non-technical who just turn everything off and AV/Firewall themselves to the teeth without really knowing why. Correct me if I'm wrong, but table tennis is not really aiming itself at the technical types, so odds are you may find a few people who wont be able to get involved...

 

Oh well. There's my £1.50 worth anyway.

[Daniel0]

I get a 404 error...

[richie19rich77]

Try now I had the page down while updating.

[richie19rich77]

Site now moved to new host that allows PHP and MySQL. Host abit slow but works.

 

http://richie19rich77.prohosts.org/Main.html

[Daniel0]

You rely too much on Javascript. If it is turned off the site doesn't work. Also, people cannot bookmark specific subpages as the URL never changes due to that all pages are loaded through XmlHttpRequest in Javascript.