A quick design

[Howard]

OK I decided to make a website template/design thing, and here's my efforts from playing with Dreamweaver and Photoshop for about 2 hours solid tonight:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tony.canning/Site/

It's obsviously not finished yet, but it's my first effort in proper site design!

[kaillum]

nice colours, and a trippy font in the header!!

but you've created your header for 1024 users... and if like others your on 1280 or more, then your header repeats itself and looks kinda strange... apart from that good effort m8e..

[Howard]

Yeah I probably should extend the banner length a bit to about 1300 wide or something. Any other suggestions to improve the layout?

[TiG]

Don't use frames?.

There are some much better methods to do what your doing without having to use frames, personally i'm trying to code to html 4 transistional code at present and trying to avoid using some of the deprecated tags, of which a lot of the frame tags are.

Maybe considure using good old div's, i've found using div's make the actual process of designing for multiple screen res's so much easier by using div's.

Hope that helps give you some food for thought
TiG

[Howard]

Please realise that I'm a newbie to web design and all this fancy CSS/DIV stuff is way over my head!

I'd love to know how to make "frames" like other sites do without using actual frames, though.

[kaillum]

Sorry TiG, gotta disagree with you there a little....

imho frames although not HTML 4 compatible, are still useful, and work fine for most applications... there quick, easy, and in most designs dont bloat the code as much as other ways of producing 'framed style'..

[Howard]

Do any of you have any decent experience with Dreamweaver MX? I'm having a couple of slight problems.

[kaillum]

erm.. decent experiece? i've got it installed on my machine at work.. used DW4 a lot, but not had the 'chance' to fire up MX...
whats your probs?

[Howard]

Ok don't worry I've managed to overcome the problem.
I have spent this morning tweaking and playing about. Take a look now.
Although I've kinda optimised it for quick loading on 128k and above connections, what are the loading times?

Also I need ideas as to what sort of content to actually put on it!

[kaillum]

all I get is

the page cannot be found
The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.

but as for content.. thats the all important question... what do you want the site to act as? i've just go mine setup for my personal use, bookmarks and other stuff I might want access to from other pc's...

[Howard]

Oops..I changed the link so it doesn't have to be caps...Stupid case sensitive NTL.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tony.canning/site

Yeah I could use it for downloads and hosting stuff as well, like people's sigs for Hexus

[kaillum]

you prolly wanna change your home page link, just to make your main frame go back to the 'home page'.. and not link to your index.htm.. as that refreshes the whole page, kinda eliminating one of the bonuses of frames not having to reload the entire page content every time...

[kaillum]

and re-reading what I've just put, if you understand that then your mind works the same way as mine!! freeky!

[Howard]

I understand. I'll do that sometime

[TiG]

Originally posted by kaillum
Sorry TiG, gotta disagree with you there a little....

imho frames although not HTML 4 compatible, are still useful, and work fine for most applications... there quick, easy, and in most designs dont bloat the code as much as other ways of producing 'framed style'..

I can do a site with CSS and Div's that uses less code than frames would, It also makes the site a lot easier to maintain that a one with frames does.

Keeps things a lot tidier, you can update the whole look and feel of the site virtually instantly. Don't get me wrong frames aren't bad things for beginners, but i've got well past that stage now and like to write structured code by hand and its so much easier to do that with divs

TiG

[kaillum]

Originally posted by TiG
Don't get me wrong frames aren't bad things for beginners

exactamundo my friend..

and its a good place to develop your skills... all that walking before running thing.. get your head around what the code does first, then play about with how the code works, then worry about how the code looks

I agree with your note about making CSS & Divs = less code, but for a learner, better to not worry about the back end to much, and think more about the layout....