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New site, what do you think?

D

Da3DaLuZ

n00b
Joined
Sep 30, 2005
Messages
42
Hi all, i have recently made a new site, it is quite basic at the moment, but it is my first made with dreamweaver. Please give me some feedback on the site, what can i improve? How? I really need some help :p

The adress is www.swfanfiction.1go.dk

It will be www.swfanfiction.com within a few days.

Thanks.
 
Honestly, it's not bad for a first attempt. Though, for a site that will have stories and lots of text, I just cannot stand how large that top banner is. I think it's just too big. Plus, you're using frames below that so the text will always be in a small space.
 
I would agree that your banner/header is too large, both in terms of dimensions (1024 wide) and being 175K.

Frames are passe and unnecessary these days.

Don't forget to title your pages. "untitled document" isn't very memorable if I wanted to bookmark it.

The yellow and blue text on black is hard on the eyes.
 
I agree with Kris, in that for a first website its pretty decent. Though I am not a large fan of frames in any way shape or form, you use them well I suppose. I am also pleased that your page Validates as Transitional XHTML. So congrats on clean code.

Now, in all honesty towards content, I can't say that I am a large fan. The color scheme seems like something a 6th grader would put together. It does not yell "professional" to me. Once again I understand, yes your first time, but I can't see your page attracting a lot of viewers with such a "childish" design. (I understand I am being harsh, but I rather be harsh and have you create something much better, than be kind and have you change nothing). Personally I would trash the dark theme and go with something lighter. Surf your favorite pages for ideas and templates. Draw it down, then translate you drawing into a full fledged format in photoshop, and translate that to HTML. You can call that page version 2 :). You could split the entire page into say 3 Divs, or 3 Tables if you wanted to. And just apply a simple JavaScript (or AJAX) that will load the stories and your other pages into the container divs. innerHTML is your friend :). Just some food for thought for the future.

Now, since your page is obviously dedicated to Fan Fiction, perhaps instead of contacting you, you should invest in researching how to make a simple PHP + MySQL form. Pretty simple, just google for tutorials are there are plenty. Here is one to get you under-way Have it so they can just enter in Author, Title, Any Copyright Stuff, Rating, and Paste their story. Submitting it will store the various data into a table and correct rows. That way you have to do no uploading on your part as it will be automated. In this manner when people come to view your site, they can either search by Author, sort by Author, search by Rating, Sort by Rating etc etc. Thus creating effeciency.

I could keep going, but I wish you well and hope your learnings go smoothly.
 
Not a bad start.
You should think about some hover effect on the links in your menu.
I don't mind the header, it's big but it fits the content...
I'm not a big fan of frames, can I ask why you used them?
 
since this is your first attempt i'll be gentle ;)

first off, you do not need to use frames for your site. frames are very passe and people have pretty much hated them since the late 90's. so avoid them if at all possible.

i know you're still new at it, but take some time to learn the proper use of markup. i noticed in your code you're using multiple <blockquote>'s to indent your text. you should define margins in your stylesheet to do this.
also, give your classes more descriptive names, "style1" and "style2" are meaningless. names like "content" and "nav" have more semantic meaning so at some later date when you look at the code, the descriptive class names will make it much easier to understand what you did in the code.

yellow text on black background isn't my fav, but if i recall that's kind of the "star wars" color scheme isn't it? if so, then i can understand why you chose those.

for your list of links, i'd recommend you don't bother with it if all you're linking to is the popular and well known sites since most "fans" would probably know them by heart anyway or they would be quite easy to find using any search engine.
 
The graphics are very very large! The banner is 175,000 bytes. If I go into a submenu, I'm looking at five or six buttons that are 20,000 byte each.

Can't you tone it down a little?
 
Thanks for all the great feedback guys!

First of all: The frames. I have been thinking of making the page look somewhat like this one here: http://jag.kicks-ass.net/maniax/ But since i cant do that just yet, i had to use the frames, until i learn to make these kind of pages.

A friend of mine has made that one, but he has alot of other projects, so he doesn´t have the time to teach a noob :D

My site so far is just a first, you could call it beta :p

Maw: You are correct about the color scheme. I know it is kind of dull, but i am going to put some kind of starlit sky background, if you know what i mean.

About the graphics: Should i make them .gif instead of .jpeg, they become smaller as .gifs, right?

Oh, by the way, i am going to post a lot of other links, i just added one, so far.
 
You can reduce the size of your JPG files without converting them by reducing the image quality setting when you store the file.

*.PNG is usually even smaller.
 
Da3DaLuZ said:
About the graphics: Should i make them .gif instead of .jpeg, they become smaller as .gifs, right?
Click to expand...
Not necessarily. It's a matter of using the right tool for the job.

The gif format is limited to 256 colors. It works great for "flat" images with few colors. If you are dealing with photographic images or ones with gradients (like drop shadows) you are better off using jpg, because its color pallette extends to "millions of colors". If you try to save a photographic image as a gif, it will "dither" in an attempt to create colors that don't exist in the gif pallette. The result is a dotty looking image with a bloated file size.

When in doubt, save to both formats and compare the image quality and file sizes.

I don't know how the creators of Star Wars feel about fan sites, but be aware that using copyrighted images/logos/etc. can get you into deep yogurt legal-wise. I do know that Disney is very aggressive about anyone using images of Mickey Mouse on personal sites, for example.
 
this redesigned image is 900x200...that is still way too big, IMO.

let's say that the average visitor is at 1024x768...1024...900...that is just too big. What if you get an old man visitor who uses 800x600...he's going to have to scroll horizontally just to see the entire picture. I run at 1280 and it seems too big on my screen.
 
Take a look at my banner...I think it fits perfectlly on my site and the banner is 680X75

http://www.jkmeyer.com/

/edit oh yeah Its not that great looking wise...kinda bland...but focus more on the size compared to the size of the content lol ;)

/edit #2 I purposely kept it a tad under 800 because some people still use 800X600

/edit #3 oh yeah and this is like revision #4 to my site. You'll do the site...then learn more about web design and want to change it...and so on...thats the great thing about websites is that you can keep changing them and making them better...
 
Thanks again for all the replies, but try to focus on something else than the banner :p I plan on using the new one, maybe i will rezise it, but im not sure yet.

Now, what i really need help with: How can i make the page look more interesting? I think that the background is nice the way it is, but i want it to be in the background, like this site: http://jag.kicks-ass.net/maniax/ I want the background to be behind everything else, and like a new area for the text, and the links and so forth. What is the easiest way to do this?
 
Da3DaLuZ said:
I want the background to be behind everything else
Click to expand...

one thing at a time so you don't get overwhelmed.

for background patterns i use somthing like this in my stylesheet
Code: 
body {
  background: #000 url(/path/to/images/backgroundimage.gif) fixed;
}

#000 (black) is the default color of the background (in case your user turned off images in their browser)
use "fixed" if you want the background image to not scroll with the rest of the page.

other options are
Code: 
body {
  background: #000 url(/path/to/images/backgroundimage.gif) repeat-y;
}
to repeat the image vertically only (repeat-x to do it horizontally)

or
Code: 
body {
  background: #000 url(/path/to/images/backgroundimage.gif) top left;
}

to position the background image only in the top left part of your page
 
Well, its not only that, the layers wont rezise! I want everything to rezise :S

Scratch that.

Is there a way to make it do that without altering the code of my page? Just through the menus? Or if someone is good at it, change the code for me? I really need help :(
 
That looks like my first attempt. A year after mine though, I had mastered HTML, integrated my forums with my site, and set up an individual sub menu for every section of my site. Then I got bored lol. Stay with it, hang out at forums where other webmasters are, etc. Oh yeah, this is the best advice I have: If you find a well designed site, right click and view page source. You can learn a lot about how things are organized just by studying the code.
 
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