New Website, Need Ideas

[Tempest]

I'm in the middle of redoing my website, and I've got a bit of writers block (programmers block?). This is what I have right now:

http://www.msu.edu/user/reicher6/newpage/5200index.htm

 

The Atari 5200 at the top is just a place holder until I figure out what to call my page. One idea that I liked was calling it "The Atari Tempest" (as in the storm not the game). I thought it was catchy. Also note that the buttons should be flush against the left side of the screen (I don't know why they have a gap there).

 

I need to figure out what kind of scheme to use for the main frame. One idea was to make it a giant scan of a 5200 cart and replace the picutre with the page content. That seems like it would really limit the space I have for the page information and look a bit busy, but it's still a cool idea.

 

I'm also looking for ideas on how to make the sub menus (those buttons are just for the main topics). I was either going to make them appear right under the button (similar to what AtariAge does) or use Javascript and make them slide out to the right (like Windows does). Any suggestions?

 

Tempest

[Raccoon Lad]

The buttons are flush against the left when I view it. (internet explorer)

I suggest keeping the 5200, but shrinking it a little, then below that have the rainbow stripe with your "Tempest's Wacky 5200 Shack" (or whatever you want to call it) in a blue bar like a 5200 box, then have the main page contents in a colored box below that (possibly tiled 5200 type image)

-thus giving it a look more similar to a standard 5200 box.

[Raccoon Lad]

Hey, and at the bottom of the page, it could say "for 1 or 2 players"

[Tempest]

Hehe... I like that idea. I'll look into it.

 

So you don't see a little gap between the left side of the screen and the button? On my computer (Internet Explorer) I see a little gap there and the button get's cut off a bit on the right. Odd...

 

Tempest

[+Allan]

Very nice start. You need to make sure your page scales for window/monitor size. In a 15 inch monitor your "Atari 5200" reads "Atar" off to the right. You might want to use a swatch of gray for the upper frame background (if you aren't already;can't tell) and use the same gray for a fill around the "Atari 5200". That way you could center it so that no matter what size the page opens up to, it's still in the center of that frame. Hopefully that made sense.

 

Allan

[Tempest]

I changed all my picture links to my website address and now they won't show up in Dreamweaver (all I get are those broken image pictures). Is there a way to tell Dreamweaver to look at a local directory for the pictures withough having to change the image links?

 

Tempest

[Albert]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Tempest:

I changed all my picture links to my website address and now they won't show up in Dreamweaver (all I get are those broken image pictures). Is there a way to tell Dreamweaver to look at a local directory for the pictures withough having to change the image links?

---

 

You don't want to hardcode the URL of your website into your images. You should use relative URLs instead. For instance, if your directory structure looks like this:

 

/web/index.html

/web/images/image.jpg

 

and index.html references image.jpg, the img tag should look as follows:

 

 

Assuming you have the files in the correct place on your PC, image.jpg should then show up properly. Then when you upload everything to the server, it should work there as well.

 

..Al

[videotwit]

Tempest:

 

As a web designer, I can't help but adding my 2 cents...

 

This is what I would do to solve your navigation bar problem:

 

http://www.ultratwit.com/misc/test.html

 

It adds a few essential elements, and accounts for the Netscape bug that adds a border to the browser window. Feel free to use any of this code if you wish.

 

Also I agree 100% with Al about using relative filepaths. It'll save you tons of headache as the site evolves.

 

I think it looks great, it's a very nice idea, and well executed. The only thing I'd watch out for are large image sizes. The background image is particularly big, and really adds to the pages load time.

 

Anyhow, nicely done! As always, please take these comments for what they're worth. Everyone has their own way of designing websites, but these are just a few tricks I've learned along the way.

[Tempest]

Ok I toned down the background image detail a bit so it should be a quicker load. I'm looking into adding some form of menu navigation, either javascript or something else. The AtariAge menus are nice, but I like the look of the pop-out JS menus. Any ideas?

 

Tempest

[videotwit]

I have to admit, I am personally a huge fan of Dropdown menus. They are pretty easy to impliment, and really save on screen real-estate which is especially good for pages that have tons of textual content.

 

There's a great dropdown menu code generator if you don't want to code it yourself. It is here:

 

Dropdown Menu Generator

[Albert]

quote:

---

Originally posted by twit:

I have to admit, I am personally a huge fan of Dropdown menus. They are pretty easy to impliment, and really save on screen real-estate which is especially good for pages that have tons of textual content.

---

 

I think dropdown menus are nice as long as they're used sparingly. For major stops on a site, I think it's important to have those links always visible. Once I'm familiar with a site, I want to be able to move my mouse to the same place on the screen and get to a new page on the site with a single mouse click. It's also nice to be able to *see* all at once the major places you can visit on a site, without having to scroll through a dropdown. This is especially true for new users to your site.

 

Dropdown menus require more effort to navigate through, so they're better for pages visited less often. They're also useful for displaying choices where the list's contents may be dynamic. We don't use too many here on AtariAge right now, although I need to add some to a few other pages. For instance, on the Catalogs pages I'm going to add a dropdown that lists all the companies so you can jump immediately to an anchor for that company, since the page is pretty tall.

 

One of my pet peeves are sites that use dropdowns with a *ton* of items in the list. I'll get halfway down the list looking for an item and then miss-click and have to start scrolling through the list again from the top. Arrrgh!

 

..Al