[thelist] Site ridicule

Sun Aug 20 23:28:43 CDT 2000

I agree about removing the purple strips and the small logo at the bottom of
the front page. Why not put the nav stuff across the top of the pages?

I'm still a newbie so I would appreciate any feedback about my comments
from veterans!

I think your style sheet has a few problems:

1. You have the style sheet inside an html doc, but this css is external,
not embedded or inline, so this is not necesarry, just present the css rules
without any html

2. You're using the same colors for active and visited links. This is sure
to confuse. you should use different colors. The advice i read somewhere was
that the unvisited links should be an attention-grabbing color, like red,
while visited links should almost melt into the document, ie they should be
a color similar to but still different from body text, maybe blue. many
people think that link colors should conform to the default ones that come
set with browsers.

3. for a:hover you specify "bg-color", but i dont think this is a valid
attribute. its background-color:

4. for heading1 you specify arial only for the font family. you should
specify more than one font as some users may not have arial. many people use
this for their font-family declaration

Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif, "MS sans serif"

some people throw in Geneva, instead of Arial (i think)

5. you are specifying font sizes without saying what units to use. eg

font-size: 36

i am pretty sure you have to say what unit you want to use, eg em (size of
letter m for that font i think) or pt (points) or px (pixles) or %. I
currently use %'s but I am curious to know others' opinions on this. I know
many people favor em or at least px. pt is frowned on as it is an absolute
measurement and will not flex when the page size, resolution etc changes

6. I think you should try to use h1 h2 etc wherever possible instead of just
making up new things, like heading1. this will make your code more correct
and i think will make it easier for people using non-visual browsers to use
your site.

7. I would get a few stylesheets and see what they look like, this is one
way that I learned/am learning. I found some interesting stuff at the bbc
site http://www.bbc.co.uk/.  These guys
<wrap>
 http://www.westciv.com/style_master/house/index_dynamic.html
</wrap>
rock. Definitely check them out.

About the code

1. The width of the top page is ok, but the other pages all run off the
right side of my 800x600 imac screen. setting margins in your stylesheet
should solve this. eg. here is my body style. see the margin and width
properties

body
{background-color: #006;
color: #FFFFFF;
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif, "MS sans serif";
font-size-adjust: .58;
font-size: 88%;
font-weight: normal;
letter-spacing: normal;
margin-bottom: 1%;
margin-left: 4%;
margin-right: .5%;
margin-top: 1.5%;
text-transform: none;
width: 99%;
word-spacing: normal}

2. I think your Doctype Declaration is too short. should be:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">

3. I would add some alt text to your images and put a / at the end of the
image tag to make it easier to move to xhtml/xml later

4.<p id="heading2" align="left">

You can put this align attribute into the sylesheet. i think most recent
browsers support it.

5. You put a lot of breaks inside your paragraphs. this will keep the text
from flowing well on different resolutions. let it flow! you can control the
width with your css.

hth!

Regards,
GEORGE DONNELLY
george at cyklotron.com
http://cyklotron.com/
Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what
nobody has thought. --Albert von Szent-Gyorgy

> http://www.bensons-print.co.uk