Site review

[Sam]

Hey all, just revamped a photo album I made for a friend of mine, what are your thoughts?
http://www.samingle.com/donnie.php
A few things:

Everything should be valid xhtml 1.0 strict
Valid CSS
If you follow any of the links to his site (anything not in the samingle.com domain), it probably won't be valid anymore, I made him the template, but His html isn't exactly up to par, so pages under the idiofunctional.com domain will most likely not validate
I've tested in FF, IE6, IE5.5, IE5, Opera 7.23, and NS 7.1, any further browser testing is appricieated
Random background image (a choice of 3
Header alternates every 3 days

Known issues:

Centering in IE5/5.5 (frankly, i'm not gonna fix it since it functions perfectly fine without them centered)
Banner flicker in IE5 (Happens when you move the mouse quickly, not sure how to fix this, if anyone has ideas, let me know)

Beyond that, all comments are appreciated
edit:
and pardon the gratuotious alcoholism (they're college kids, give 'em a break)

[Conor]

i like the whole site but one thing i would do is display the images a bit differently. I mean righut now it just plain displays the image. I think it would be cool if you changed the background color where the images are being displayed to a light gray, and put the images in a div with like a 2 or 3 px border on the top,right,left, and like a 8-10 px on the bottom so it looks like a polarioid.

[Sam]

Interesting idea. I'll look into that. I've got captions built into the script (though i'm currently not displaying them, so the polaroid thing might look nice.
By the way Conor, you use a mac right? does it look alright in all your browsers? (I've got no way of testing Safari, IE/mac, Opera/mac, etc.)

[Conor]

it looks fine in safari for me, and opera, i guess i check in IE. Isn it funny that IE for Mac properly supports PNG whilst IE for Windows doesnt :p

Edit: Yeah looks fine in Mac

[Sam]

thanks, Anyone with some older IE's/NS's want to test it?

[Sam]

also, if some (http://forums.webdeveloper.com/member.php?s=&action=getinfo&userid=728) of (http://forums.webdeveloper.com/member.php?s=&action=getinfo&userid=61) the (http://forums.webdeveloper.com/member.php?s=&action=getinfo&userid=9134) gurus (http://forums.webdeveloper.com/member.php?s=&action=getinfo&userid=3581) want to take a look at it from an accesibility/usability standpoint and let me know your thoughts, that'd be great

[Paul Jr]

Maybe something to show the user what photo s/he's currently viewing. Like on these forums, if there are muliple pages in a thread, the current page you're on isn't a link, and it's bold. Something like that would be good, I think.

[Sam]

nice idea, maybe an outline?
I'm working on adding captions as Conor suggested (via the gd), which also should help

[fredmv]

As for general appearance, I think everything looks fine for a "photo album" kind of look. The first time I checked the site everything loaded somewhat slow, but I don't know if that was your fault or server traffic. In any case, it's working fine now. Further, I'd recommend using something other than white for your content background color because as Maddox — very correctly — puts it:I've chosen a black background for most of my text because it's easier on the eyes than staring at a white screen. Think about it: your monitor is not a piece of paper, no matter how hard you try to make it one. Staring at a white background while you read is like staring at a light bulb (don't believe me? Try turning off the lights next time you use a word processor). Would you stare at a light bulb for hours at a time? Not if you want to keep your vision.Moreover, I might recommend moving your CSS rules to an external file seeing you use them on every page (if that's even an option) — it'd just make maintenance and avoid redundant caching. Other than the aforementioned, I'd recommend setting up a redirect (http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/reback) instead of having the site in a frameset. I realize this might not have been your choice (as it only occured under the idiofunctional.com (http://idiofunctional.com/) domain) but for accessibility as well as usability reasons frames shouldn't be used like that. I also tested the site under KHTML. In this case, Konqueror 3.1, and the site looked fine. Nice work overall, and good luck with it.

[pyro]

Since Fred hit it programmatically, I'll hit it aesthetically. ;)

On the main page, the pictures could be a little larger, and perhaps you could display some information about the album (ie. number of pictures, date posted, etc).

On the actual album pages, I'd use a different format for displaying the links. It's easy enough to style the list up. In a day or two (hopefully) my new Infinity Web Design (http://www.infinitywebdesign.com/) site should be done, and you can see how I've chosen to handle it in my portfolio. Finally, I'd add borders around all the images.

[Sam]

Originally posted by fredmv
The first time I checked the site everything loaded somewhat slow, but I don't know if that was your fault or server traffic.
This is a little of both (probably more my fault). The php that is generating these pages is crawling the directories every time, thus its kinda slow. I'm redoing this via a mySQL database, which should make it load a lot quicker
Originally posted by fredmv

Further, I'd recommend using something other than white for your content background color

I'll try to talk my friend into this, he's a huge wdik (http://www.whatdoiknow.org) fan, and wanted his site to have that sort of color scheme, but I'll work on him.
Originally posted by fredmv

Moreover, I might recommend moving your CSS rules to an external file seeing you use them on every page (if that's even an option) — it'd just make maintenance and avoid redundant caching.

Good Point, It has to be internal on his site (since it's a blogspot account he has no hosting space), but there's no reason not to make them external on my site
Originally posted by fredmv

Other than the aforementioned, I'd recommend setting up a redirect (http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/reback) instead of having the site in a frameset. I realize this might not have been your choice (as it only occured under the idiofunctional.com (http://idiofunctional.com/) domain) but for accessibility as well as usability reasons frames shouldn't be used like that.

This part isn't really under my control, it has something to do with how he set up his godaddy account
Originally posted by pyro

On the main page, the pictures could be a little larger, and perhaps you could display some information about the album (ie. number of pictures, date posted, etc).

This will all be available once I finish the mySQL version of the album
Originally posted by pyro
On the actual album pages, I'd use a different format for displaying the links. It's easy enough to style the list up. In a day or two (hopefully) my new Infinity Web Design site should be done, and you can see how I've chosen to handle it in my portfolio. Finally, I'd add borders around all the images.

The link format will be changing to thumbnails in the new version, and i'm going with the polaroid look that Conor suggested (Which should take care of the border aspect). Good to hear on the Infinty Web Design, I'm quite excited for that)

[Sam]

Alright, I've added borders/captions to the album (http://www.samingle.com/showpics.php?dir=/don/Radiohead_Trip/) view pages (the main page still needs some work). I realize that the captions are quite inaccesible to non-css people at the moment, but inspired by Vladdy (http://www.klproductions.com/klslideshow.html), I'm reworking (http://www.samingle.com/showpics2.php?dir=/don/Radiohead_Trip/) the page (the new version is using Shea image replacement), and will be up at some point later today (once I get some javascript issues worked out)
EDIT:
apparently one of the changes (on the reworking link) I made caused it to stop validating... Its saying
it looks like i don't have a tag closed somewhere, but I can't find it yet. If anyone sees where i messed up, let me know
RE-EDIT:
I found it, I forgot the > at the end of my CDATA block
RE-RE-EDIT:
Also, what are your thoughts on the caption font? I realize it is a little hard to read, but It does go a long way to achieve the polariod effect. Perhaps I could offer a disable button to hide that span and give the user plain text... Let me know your thoughts on this

[tonyh]

It looks good :) .

I only have one complaint: use a different seamless background tile. It's dizzying to look at and draws too much attention away from your content. One: there seems to be more background than site, so maybe making the center column wider. Two: the pattern looks like some odd maze like cheap carpet seen in restaurants. Three: it's blue. Technically, the third isn't really a complaint about it being blue, but since the majority of your site is black and white you may consider using a light grey or pastel blue or other colour.

fredmv,

I wasn't aware that using white text on a black background would be considered accessible as well as aesthetically pleasing. I always believed this was frowned upon... but, it never stopped me from doing it :p .

[fredmv]

Well you don't necessarily have to do it exactly like Maddox does. I was more trying to imply that it is better to have a darker background (even slightly darker) because white isn't very easy on the eyes, as Maddox correctly points out.

[Sam]

Originally posted by tonyh
One: there seems to be more background than site, so maybe making the center column wider.
Currently it's designed to fit at 640x480 without horizontal scrolling.
Originally posted by tonyh

Two: the pattern looks like some odd maze like cheap carpet seen in restaurants.
Refresh. there are 2 more backgrounds if you don't like that one.

[tonyh]

Originally posted by samij586
Currently it's designed to fit at 640x480 without horizontal scrolling.
I suppose each client may have a different width depending on screensize, browser, ect. But it seems to me that you could increase the width by atleast 2em on both left and right.

BTW, the text is unreadable at smaller and smallest text sizes in IE6.

Refresh. there are 2 more backgrounds if you don't like that one.
The lime green is fairly nice, I don't know, maybe it's just me and patterns :rolleyes: .

Have you tried it with a simple solid colour or gradient?

If you do use a particular colour, you should try to integrate that colour, even at different shade(s) into the site colour scheme. So, if you were to integrate the green, then maybe apply some, even if only a light wash, to the logo banner (which is why I suggested a shade of grey, but this may make the site appear too mundane) or into the text. This will help unify the page and create more eye movement.

[Sam]

as I mentioned before, the guy i built it for is a huge wdik (http://www.whatdoiknow.org) fan, and wanted that sort of feel, which meant blacks/grey's in the body. The backgrounds were initially a lot more muted, (thus working in with that color schemes), but his users requested more color, so I provided.

[tonyh]

Originally posted by samij586
as I mentioned before, the guy i built it for is a huge wdik (http://www.whatdoiknow.org) fan, and wanted that sort of feel, which meant blacks/grey's in the body.
Sorry, I should have checked out that link earlier. But, even wdik applies blue to its links. And his background works partly because the pattern is larger and the light grey, thus it doesn't cause as much strain on the eyes. Although, I still don't care for patterns in general. I also understand that you don't want to make an exact copy of the wdik site. So maybe you can just apply the same background colour to the guy's links and mute the colours another notch or two, still enough for the colour to be apparent, but just not in your face.

[Sam]

Thanks for the input, I'll try to talk him in to muting the backgrounds a bit, but he's a pretty opinionated guy, so i guess we'll see. Still wondering on everyone's thoughts on the caption font...

[HansonIsTheBest]

The site was pretty good, i liked it! It's kinda like www.dahboo.com except not quite as good..

[Sam]

Originally posted by HansonIsTheBest
The site was pretty good, i liked it! It's kinda like www.dahboo.com except not quite as good..
If by "kinda like" you mean that they are both webpages, then I would definately have to agree with you. Otherwise, I'd prefer you not associate my work (http://www.samingle.com/don.jpg) with the author of dahboo's (http://www.samingle.com/crapoo.jpg) (pardon my annotation)