Hello, all!

I'm new to this board and relatively new to web design in general. I'm currently designing my first publicly-viewable page for a friend of mine, and I'm kind of stuck.

I guess the layout is okay, but it's gonna get A LOT of attention here locally (Nashville), and I'd like it to have more OOMF! to it. Anyway, I'm here to ask you guys if you can offer me any suggestions, layout wise. I know the content is kind of sparse (We're working on that, trust me!!!); I'm more concerned with the structure of the page and making it look better. I'm not sure I like the plain old navbar at the top and "frame bar" (I have no idea what the technical term for it is) at the bottom. Plus, the lady I'm designing it for wants a side bar kind of thing in addition to the top navbar (or maybe instead of it)...

Anyway, any thoughts?!?! Help, please?!?! Here's the URL (NO, I DIDN'T come up with the name)

http://www.yuyusisterhood.com

I for one like it; it's very simple and extremely easy to find your way around.

However if you want to go nuts...do you have Photoshop and know how to use it? You could make some cool graphics (like I did for these forums )

In fact after looking at it for a few minutes straight I honestly can't find anything wrong with it. Now let me view it in different browsers and then we'll see just how bad it is

Looks good in Mozilla 1.0 RC3 (Windows XP), IE6 SP1 (Windows XP), and IE5.2.2 (Mac OS X).

Of course Netscape 4 screwed up something. Screenshot attached; notice the link colors are wrong for the nav bar:

One pet peeve: never use three exclaimation marks! One is considered to be correct punctuation.

Attached Thumbnails

 

Found the solution for the links: remove the quotes for the colors in your style sheet (quotes aren't supposed to be used in CSS often):

Great, thanks! I kind of like the simplicity of the site, but at the same time, there's too much white space in my opinion, and it's kind of boring. I really like the navbar you have here on the forums, which I'm guessing you did in Photoshop. I just recently got Paintshop Pro 7...my grandmother gave it to me. I'd imagine I could do that same thing with my navbar, but I don't know how to achieve that effect. I guess I'll have to go for some major tutorials somewhere!

And thanks for the tip on the stylesheets!

Anybody else have anything to add?

I have both Photoshop 7 and PSP 7, and personally I think Photoshop is much better as far as creating professional-looking graphics go.

I suggest you design it with .shtml extensions, so that you can have sections on each page (e.g. a navbar) that are shared by all of the pages. That way, if you make a navbar change you'll only have to update the code on one page and not every single page of the site. Let me know if you would like more info about shtml, that is my forte.

Perhaps you should add a bgcolor like this to take away some of the white space:

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Always interested in learning something new! I'm sure this is a stupid question, but is SHTML compatible with all browsers, or is it more of an IE thing, like DHTML is? How does the modular coding thing work in shtml?

I know Photoshop is probably WAY better than PSP, but I don't have the money to fork over for it, and I'm not into software piracy (though I agree that it's almost ALL WAY overpriced). I guess I could download The G.I.M.P., tho. I guess I could find some good tutorials for that online somewhere...

Any ideas for my layout?

Yeah, I thought about that. I was thinking about maybe doing the background in red like that but having the top line be angled to a point like a roof or something, but I think that'll push the content too far down on the page....

BTW, how'd you get that up so fast?! It'd take me forever to create those rounded corners!

shtml works on browsers as obscure as Opera, so I don't think you'll have any compatibility issues.

I'm not sure what modular coding is, to be honest.

SHTML is HTML with server-side directives, so it works on any browser.

But I'll let inthezone explain it since he says he's a guru with it

Modular coding: writing code that can be used on different pages without modfication. Sort of, at least that's what I call coding when I do that.

It won't push everything down the page as long as the rounded corner image heights aren't gargantuan. I did something similar on one of my pages and I can get a coding example if you would like.

I just took a screenshot of your page and edited it in Paint. I didn't do any coding or something of the sort.

For SHTML, you just create separate HTML files for components of the page.

For instance, you want a navbar to be shared among several pages. Create a file called "navbar.htm", and put the source code for just the navbar in it (no page headers, meta tags, etc are necessary.) Then, wherever you want the navbar to appear on your other pages, you type the following source code: <!--#include file="navbar.htm" -->

Keep in mind, whichever pages use this must have the ".shtml" extension.

If you have any further questions, let me know.

Sweet! So, I just put that include statement directly where I want the actual code to appear? That'd save me some major time! Thanks for the brief tutorial!

Oh, if I did the "rooftop" thing, I'd probably go with "sharp" corners....maybe I'll take a screenshot and play with it in paint like you did, or something. Easy way to visualize it, I guess.

One thing i would suggest is to use an arty font for the nav bar.

This depends of what type of site you want this to be.

It looks fine at the moment.

Fast loading, not too in your face yet eye catching at the same time.

Man, you guys rock! Thanks for the advice and compliments! I'll have to ask the lady I'm designing for if a more artsy font would be okay with her, but it sounds pretty good to me. I wonder which fonts would look good there, though! Hmmm...

Trebuchet MS all the way *points to the title of both style sets here and nods confidently*

(thread split; rest is at Dropdown menus)

I think you have done well. My pet hate is "non rounded corners" I always think they detract from the content. I prefer keeping things simple. I don't think your site would be any less attractive, or lose any of its style if you took away the round corners.

Not really a criticism just something I personally find annoying.

Thanks for the input! Am I understanding you right? You do or don't like rounded corners?

Check out my latest design...I had to have my friend Dax help me with the menu. I had another menu, but I couldn't get it centered, so Dax made one for me.

Here's the one I couldn't get centered, along with the old general design...

http://www.yuyusisterhood.com/menu2.html

Here's the current version of the design:

http://www.yuyusisterhood.com/dax

Yeah, there are TONS of broken links and things not implemented that are referred to, but it's still very much in development!

Just letting you guys know....

I've moved everything to the root of the site now.

http://www.yuyusisterhood.com

It sure has improved

Thanks! I've still got quite a bit to do on it, but I'm pretty happy with it overall, especially since it's my first website.

Thanks for all your help on it! Hey, is there any way you know of to validate that php e-mail script you showed me? I need a way for it to check to make sure that certain fields are filled in so that it doesn't just send crap e-mail when they're all blank.

It's pretty simple but I'll have to do it tomorrow

I spent of today working on the beautiful new postbit here