an opinion on layout

[ennui]

Just would like an opinion on lay out and overall design.. the links do not work yet as I have just made the graphics for the page.. please give me your thoughts check out the old page <<<HERE>>>> (http://www.bspassoc.com) and this is the page I am doing for them <<HERE>> (http://www.bspassoc.com/test.htm) there is a brief page intro then it clicks to the main page .. thanks for your time and your thought

[tigrrboxer]

Okay, big improvement on previous wreck, but pleeeease, NO Flash intro - please!! After the intro, the main page took several minutes to load. Also, there is absolutely no visual clue that these are photographers. Anything - a lens, a strip of film, a flash, whatever. I'm also working on a photography site, and the guys are driving me nuts because they ONLY do digital, and keep grumbling about my insistence on attaching a little wriggle of film strip to the logo. Well, I played around with pixels and chips and stuff, and it just doesn't have the same visual associative effect... Oh, and I've found that all text is best kept as text, rather than JPEG/ GIF format. Not only for faster loading, but for crisper text, and to allow visitors the option of selecting and copying the text, especially informative text. Finally, a tiny bit of movement might help. It's a bit static and, um, dull. A baby-sized animated gif or a tiny Flash animation or scrolling text or something?
Did I just sound horrible?
:confused:

[ennui]

not at all thanks for the advise.. I would like to havethe text as text but i am exporting this from photoshop as a web page and when I try and take the pic thats in the space of the text and replace it with normal text the whole thing getts all thrown off.... If you have any ideas on how to prevent this please help:confused:

[tigrrboxer]

Don't let my beloved Photoshop hear this, but...
Photoshop is "only" an image editor. It may be the God of Pixels, and is doing its best to get a footing in vector art as well, but it is NOT a web publisher, or HTML editor, or web design program or whatever. Use Photoshop for all your graphics, sure. Animate your GIFs in Image Ready, fine. But THEN you need to go to a pro. If you're a genius, that's Notepad - just type in all the HTML there. If you're a *genius in all other fields but raw HTML* like me, use Front Page, which is child's play, or Dreamweaver, which offers a lot more fiddly and fun features, or CoffeeCup HTML editor, which is *free*...
Out for lunch!

[ennui]

I am using dream wearver mx as my editor :D
just need to figure out how to keep the table from shrinking once the pic is removed. oh and were do you go in the user cp to put up your avatar lol i cant find it

[tigrrboxer]

:D Yeah, took me ages to find it too... Not in Edit Profile but Edit Options, right at the bottom of the page, by the way.
Right. Have to re-install Dreamweaver *sigh*
...
Disaster! Left my Macromedia CD at home! Right, you'll have to do the legwork then. SOMEWHERE in the table editing panel there'll be something where you can choose between your table/ cell/ column being percentage-based or pixel-determined. In HTML this is either
width="100%" (or whatever %)
or
width="350" (or whatever value in pixels)
You want a fixed, pixel width to stop it collapsing.
Or forget Dreamweaver and try Front Page. I switched when I decided Dreamweaver was too limiting, and decided to learn HTML and Javascript to do exactly what I wanted, and not pick from their meagre menus.
That's what I'm doing here... Hoping some of the genius will rub off or osmotically emanate through my mouse...