Yesideez Posted July 9, 2007 Share Posted July 9, 2007 Hi, one machine that really took me off my feet was the Amiga. I started with KS1.3 A500 and ended with a KS3.04 A1200 with 1.5GB hard drive, FPU, accelerator, 6MB RAM and more. If you think 1.5GB is small, 80MB was considered HUGE back then! Having spent so much time with my head stuck in assembler and playing some of the best games ever written I started making a warez site. Now before anyone start screaming "warez are illegal" none of the software on my site is illegal - the Amiga has been dead for many years and although distribution of the Kickstart ROMs are still prohibited many games and applications are now freely distributable. With many you don't even have to own the original like you do with many systems. The site even has some software packages I've created myself which are available for free download. http://www.pictureinthesky.net I know there is a buit of a bug in the navigation when selecting certain items and pages in "Applications" - I'm working on it. What I'd like to know, is there anything that anyone can suggest that could be better if changed? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
s0c0 Posted July 10, 2007 Share Posted July 10, 2007 Well you have an alternating image as your header. One is in plain text and white and I think its the best, the others are more difficult to read. The layout is very simple and boring and there is nothing to make the links on the side stand out. As a good point your site is not hideous and painful to look at. Thats a huge plus, it could just be designed better. I would try perhaps a curved border for your main body area, set your navigation on the left to a background so they stand out, and stick with one image for your header image. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndyB Posted July 10, 2007 Share Posted July 10, 2007 Viewed with IE6 @1024px Opening page (and presumably all others) fails html validation with absent doctype. CSS has one validation error. The page layout appears to have been done with tables. OK many years ago, but surely a CSS layout should be used now - it's a very simple layout. Use tables for tabular data, nothing else. The page footer isn't centered on the page. The size of font for navigation is too small (for me) and the options too close for comfort with a sloppy mouse. User control of font size has been disabled - why? Viewed with Firefox - same criticisms, except that user control of text size is available. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yesideez Posted July 10, 2007 Author Share Posted July 10, 2007 Well you have an alternating image as your header. One is in plain text and white and I think its the best, the others are more difficult to read. The layout is very simple and boring and there is nothing to make the links on the side stand out. As a good point your site is not hideous and painful to look at. Thats a huge plus, it could just be designed better. I would try perhaps a curved border for your main body area, set your navigation on the left to a background so they stand out, and stick with one image for your header image. The alternating images are fonts that have been ripped from various sources within the Amiga community, mostly scene demos and I'm trying to reflect that by using some of the more famous fonts. In the Amiga scene you'd more than likely recognise them all and I have more planned. One thing I forgot to mention about my choice of layout is to try and follow the theme of the Amiga. It didn't have curves and very few demos did, everything was very "square" plus I think with the advent of flashy graphics many are getting lost with the purpose of the internet - to relay information. Many sites these days are getting lost behind flash graphics. I'll have a rethink about the left links and see how I can improve those - hopefully I'll be able to come up with a nice background. Viewed with IE6 @1024px Opening page (and presumably all others) fails html validation with absent doctype. CSS has one validation error. The page layout appears to have been done with tables. OK many years ago, but surely a CSS layout should be used now - it's a very simple layout. Use tables for tabular data, nothing else. The page footer isn't centered on the page. The size of font for navigation is too small (for me) and the options too close for comfort with a sloppy mouse. User control of font size has been disabled - why? Viewed with Firefox - same criticisms, except that user control of text size is available. I'll have a crack at the validation. Thanks for mentioning the points about tables vs CSS. One thing I can't understand is why??? It fits the purpose so why not use them? Why use CSS? I must admit to not knowing how to do this so I would be extremely grateful if you can supply a link to an example page and supply a link to where I could learn this. Font. One word. Oops! (I forgot to check this part with IE) Thank-you both for your input. I'll have a look at more control with CSS before I do any work on it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndyB Posted July 10, 2007 Share Posted July 10, 2007 Lest there be any doubt about tables. Tables for layout = bad: semantically rubbish, poor accessibility, irrational, code-bloat Tables for tabular data = semantically correct, fully accessible, rational, logical - exactly what the table element was designed for. I only expect your LAYOUT to be table-free. Edited - here's a quick CSS page generator for you: http://www.inknoise.com/experimental/layoutomatic.php Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yesideez Posted July 10, 2007 Author Share Posted July 10, 2007 I've just been spending a while reading up on CSS for making tables and one site in particular caught my eye http://www.decloak.com/Dev/CSSTables/CSS_Tables_01.aspx It seems to make some very valid points and from what I've read on there I really don't see the need to convert my site to use CSS to the extent of making full use of DIV. I will, of course, read further and see what I can find out about picking it up. I've looked at some source to pages that use CSS and DIV to control the layout and one thing I noticed is the the readability of the source starts to fall and the size of the site increases to get the same result. For now, I think I'll stick to using tables because they work. I think I've joined the majority of those who secretly regret asking for criticism although I'm being open and admitting it. I am, however, embracing the criticism as well and using the feedback for future work. I've been toying with the idea of scrapping the current site and making a completely new interface which is why I'm here. A few years ago I had wanted to get into web design on a serious level and maybe employment but it was an accidental occupation change a while back which I had planned as temporary actually woke me up to what I wanted to do. Not a computer in sight! Thanks for posting the link to inknoise, I've had a quick play with it and I think I like it! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guardian-Mage Posted July 10, 2007 Share Posted July 10, 2007 Nice website, clean and to the point. Except for the title, that got hard to read at times. Well done. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yesideez Posted July 10, 2007 Author Share Posted July 10, 2007 Hi, I've started making a new version with some comments mentioned above taken on board. http://pictureinthesky.net/amiga/ At the moment this is just a plain XHTML file - no links work, they're just for show and I'm currently working on the file so if anything weird displays give it a few minutes and refresh I've placed the menu inside a box colored separately to the main body and I've also changed the font measurement from px to em. I'm running 1280x1024 and from what I've read up on em font sizing, I'd be interested to see how it appears on different setups. The header font images will be staying as this is an Amiga site and they're actual fonts from Amiga demos. They're very well known and I've not met anyone from the Amiga scene who can't read them easily although now I've said that I'm bound to get someone saying they can't. I was going to scrap the site completely and work on a gallery site for my photography but after reading through my emails sent via my contact form I've decided to keep it but rewrite everything from scratch. I've also decided to make the yellow background dark and use white text to make it easier on the eyes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yesideez Posted July 10, 2007 Author Share Posted July 10, 2007 btw this demo scene site has alternating titles and although not entirely covering just the Amiga some of the title images are difficult to read as "Pouet" if you don't know what it reads. http://www.pouet.net Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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