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Click to See Complete Forum and Search --> : Input on site design... making a website for school's literary/arts magazine

DuroSoft
11-02-2005, 08:05 PM
My school is having me do a website for their literary/arts magazine, Ex Multis. (Although I'm only 14, they are actually hiring me for a couple of their web design jobs because my stuff has been better then the professional people they have hired in the past... hooray for self-taught webdesigners!)

Ok, so here is the deal:

Basically, the site will be a community-based gallery and forum written in php... with comments, user accounts, a rating system, user groups, news articles... the works. Thus far, the web programming has gone fine, I just would like to get some feedback about the site design. I went for the ever-popular glassy look because thats basically all you can do with orange (the school colors are orange and black... ick). Because the site is not done, please ignore programming issues like the page generation time at the bottom and text repetitions and such... Also note that there are several typos in the text on the index page and that the only page with content at this point is the index

http://www.durosoft.com/ExMultis

Thanks in advance for your feedback!
ray326
11-02-2005, 09:34 PM
Nice design. Poor implimentation. Slice-n-dice table layout and no doctype, thus lots of HTML errors (http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A//durosoft.com/ExMultis/). You'll be very good if you get your HTML chops up to your design chops. Start reading up on 21st century web design.
DuroSoft
11-02-2005, 11:17 PM
i just noticed that a lot of people were saying that its bad to use tables in layout... how can you possibly make a layout without tables and css? I suppose div tags could to the job but whats wrong with tables?
DuroSoft
11-02-2005, 11:22 PM
hmm, i just looked at the errors and they were all because for some reason i never fill in the alt property in my image tags.... heh.

The other ones were just the php session id which i guess it thinks is an error but it isnt...
KDLA
11-03-2005, 08:15 AM
Why tables are not endorsed for web layout: http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/

You have multiple instances of tables, which is worse. Learn CSS positioning. Once learned, you'll love it.

Also, learn about CSS rollovers. They're supported by most browsers and don't require javascripting - javascripting isn't the best with regards to usability.

Getting back to your current design, you need to place your CSS into an external document and link to it in your <head> section.

One other thing: put metadata/metatags in your <head> section, to enable better indexing of your content by search engines.

KDLA
ray326
11-03-2005, 10:15 PM
KDLA has pointed you to a seminal article on the subject. My sig has a few more.
DuroSoft
11-06-2005, 04:08 PM
I am not using an external style sheet because php is generating the style sheet from a settings page.

also, I just read the article and they still used table tags at the end... just with margins and padding. I already use margins and padding. So I guess the only problems with my site are the 3 nested tables, the alt tags on images and not using an external stylesheet
ray326
11-06-2005, 06:01 PM
If your imbedded styles are included by PHP then they are equivalent to and better than and external sheet included on the browser side with link or import.