I made this website over three days since the holidays started. I haven’t had a great amount of experience when constructing websites, but I thought I may as well start. It has actually ended up being a lot of fun for me.
To let it be almost instantaneous even to the modem users (for me, I have 56K, and the pages almost load instantly, the whole site is only about 50 Kb, without the gallery images)
To just generally check my website creation skills
One question though, should I create another version of my Gallery pages to have thumbnail images as links instead of text? I’ll have two versions, one for 56Kers and the other for broadbanders, but I don’t know how useful it’ll be…
PS, for IE users, do the PNGs work fine? Compatibility in general? I used Firefox and Mozilla for testing…
MadMesh - Cool, thanks, was worried about PNG support
ThePatrickl, rwv01 - Thanx =P
nico - The main reason of the thread is to just show what I made, I am proud of the site, but about the compatibility part, I’ve heard lots about Internet Explorer not having proper PNG support, and since the whole top row of buttons are PNG, I was a little worried about that.
thoro - Yeah, adding a second version of the page would start becoming confusing for navigation. I personally think that when you have the 2D/3D option in gallery that’s starting to become a bit confusing for navigation.
So yeah, I’ll try the thumbnail thing, just a matter of whether I can get it small enough.
And about the domain, yeah, I made the site to convince my parents sigh, yes my parents that I needed webhosting/domain name =P
Re. design:
Ooh boy, you should really get rid of that centre aligned paragraph text as soon as possible. Very much a typographic no-no, which won’t go down well if you’re showing this site to a designer or someone with a design background. I’d also leave out anything that’s missing, like the ‘Anims’ section. ‘Under construction’ messages are just sooo 1997, and look unprofessional, like you can’t complete things you commit to.
Images are quite cool, though! Good luck with the site.
if you don’t mind the look of www.Smerity.tk then you can get it for free (like I did with www.obi1.tk) from dot.tk (and you can disable the popups after you register)
I hope this doesn’t look like an add.
xhtml are you? [single tags like
are
to indicate that they close themselves, you have a link tag in that fashion]
images need ALT attributes
[what about those poor people using text browsers, or on dialup and running a browser that lets you specify the images you enable]
it is interesting you use the font tag, I’d suggest you use css because:
it is supported well enough [there are problems with IE and css2, but for only specifying fonts and stuff support is more than adequate]
it can reduce both the size of your page, and make it more easy to change the look
[by seperating the css file from the page it can be cached, and as it can be seperated you can swap it out with another should the need arise to make changes]
oh, and the problem with PNG support goes something like this:
IE:Win doesn’t support transparent PNG images [iirc you can do the same kind of transparency as in gif images, using a pallatized png. but I don’t think IE supports having translucent colors in a pallatized image]
and konqueror I have seen taking the alpha channel of a png image, and mostly getting rid of it. more opaque than half is fully opaque, and less is fully transparent.
it is likely that some browsers have problems with PNG images in some peculiar bit depths, and using the gamma option and stuff
Okay, the WHOLE SITE is WC3 Validated apart from the same problem on three pages. I have decided only to put the WC3 validated button on the first page (http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~smerity/) as I really don’t want it to appear everywhere else and muck up the rest of the design…
Anyway, HTML coders, can you help me with this problem? It occurs on 2d.html, 3d.html and abme.html, and goes as such -
I am currently using two tags which are not WC3 validated, and they are to help me with linking. The tags are <base target="_blank"> and <base target="_self">
I use them to make the navigation buttons change the link on the current window, and then later on, use the _blank to make the 3D artwork create a new page. I know I can do this with Javascript, but it'd become a severe pain. Any other solutions?
An example of the usage is at
http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~smerity/3d.html
and the subsequent WC3 Validation error at
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fhomepages.ihug.com.au%2F%7Esmerity%2F3d.html
broken - Is centre aligned such an issue? That’s exactly what my English teacher at school tells me… I mean, I can understand it in a novel or something, but why not in a website? Any definitive answer, is it just the de facto.
You’ll also be happy to know I replaced the anim button with a kind of slashthru and it doesn’t link anywhere anymore (I’d prefer not to delete it off all the pages, as it’d take some work and I’m hoping to get some stuff in there soon)
I didn’t notice things were aligned center, but for larger regions of text having a distinct left edge is very helpful
[justified text isn’t that bad either… it just isn’t suited to everything]
oh, and javascript should be avoided wherever possible, please
[and personally I don’t like webpages opening things in new windows, or using javascript when I click on something to move me to another page rather than a link. these work around the options my browser has to do those things]
z3r0 d - Thanks for the quick reply.
I know about the use of the target tag inside of the <a> tag, but that was my main problem, it seems like a little too much work. Eh, screw it, I’ll go do it now, I’ll just use the <base target> tag legally at the start and then do it manually from there… If the person doesn’t have Javascript btw, it automatically reverts to automatic linking.
And about ‘oh, and javascript should be avoided wherever possible, please’, trust me, I have =P My friends were all like ‘make it so when the cursor rolls over the Smerity logo it explodes or something! And make snow fall, I saw the link for that one somewhere’… sigh lol
And about the left alignment, I’ve done it with the large section of text in About Me and also on the large(ish) section of text on home.html / News
I really see no need for it personally.
Well, the whole site is WC3 Validated now, Tim Berners Lee would be happy lol
It was essentially an error for redefining base outside of the head tags, and even though it worked in all the browsers I guess it isn’t proper HTML logic.
Yes It hurts readability a lot. When you’re reading text, the eye tracks from left to right along the line, then jumps back to the left side again to start the next line (like a typewriter). When there’s not a consistent left edge to return to, not only is it extra work scanning around to find exactly where to start reading from, but it also increases the chance that the eye will get mixed up and read the same line again, or skip a line by accident, etc. Just because its a website does by no means change the way that we read text in paragraphs - it’s the de facto for a reason.
Like I said, it matters more especially since you will probably be showing it to people who may have a design background, who this will jump out at immediately.
You’ll also be happy to know I replaced the anim button with a kind of slashthru and it doesn’t link anywhere anymore (I’d prefer not to delete it off all the pages, as it’d take some work and I’m hoping to get some stuff in there soon)
Eh, I don’t think that’s any better, but up to you! Like I said, if you want people to take you seriously as a professional (which I assume you are, since you mention you’re available for contract work), you need to display a sense of professionalism. Avoiding 15 minutes of the Anim link and image on the pages isn’t such a good indication…
Anyway, apologies if I’m sounding overly critical - I’m trying to help
broken, not overly critical at all, you’ve seen problems and are addressing them, I respect that.
About the centered text, I don’t think I have any of that left, apart from one or two headings, and one liner text, and thanks for explaining the logic behind that.
About the Anim slashtru thing, done, commented it all out now. The main reason I’m lazy about this project was I wanted to just make it all in one go (which I did pretty well I think, in a day or two) and then just update it when nessecary, and then I found out there was all these snags =P
Also, I really respect your opinion as you are in the same city and continent as myself, so your critiques are as valid as every other artist in my area. Also, I see your name lots on the DLF, especially the recent discussion about your use of email encryption or something where your name WAS the subject lol
Thanks for your continued critiques
Heh, isn’t it always the way Just when you think you’ve got 90% of the work done, you find out there’s another 90% left to do. It looks much better now, though. Well done!
(off-topic)
Also, I see your name lots on the DLF, especially the recent discussion about your use of email encryption or something where your name WAS the subject lol
Eh… didn’t that create a monster. I was at a progress-update meeting at Engine the other day and upon introducing, the 3D Technical Director goes “hey, aren’t you the guy that…”
it may be validated, but you really should update the code to xhtml 1.0, and switch to using css, and css-p if you are really tricky.
that way you could easily arrange a basic site like that.
and moving to xhtml is easy, and it is cleaner and better looking.
And change your email address to an image, bots can pick up the AT and change it.
SamAdam - Thank you, I was wondering about that lol
It’s now replaced with a PNG version (geez I love PNG for small images like that lol, and it’s only 1.025 Kb too =P)
About the XML and CSS, the CSS I plan to in the near future, as it will also make my HTML source pages smaller, but XHTML, I don’t know, what kind of advantages are there? You say moving to XHTML is easy, howso?
It hurts readability a lot. When you’re reading text, the eye tracks from left to right along the line, then jumps back to the left side again to start the next line (like a typewriter). When there’s not a consistent left edge to return to, not only is it extra work scanning around to find exactly where to start reading from, but it also increases the chance that the eye will get mixed up and read the same line again, or skip a line by accident, etc. Just because its a website does by no means change the way that we read text in paragraphs - it’s the de facto for a reason.