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Development A lil advice here...

Discussion in 'Software' started by jwil, 28 Feb 2004.

  1. jwil

    jwil What's a Dremel?

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    I've been spending too many sleepless nights and consuming too much caffiene working on a project website and I need some fresh eyes to look at it and give me some feedback. It's a site about Euro cars (mostly VW Touareg and Passat, but all are welcome) and I've got news on cool personal electronics and kit.

    Let me know what you think, I'd appreciate it!

    www.t-region.com

    **edited to try and not sound like an ad (sorry)**
     
    Last edited: 28 Feb 2004
  2. a9on87

    a9on87 ...

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    Site looks nice but the link will probs be removed from your post by a mod as it is basically blatant advertising!
     
  3. SitraAchra

    SitraAchra Minimodder

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    hehe, how did i know that this thread would be a spam trap :cooldude: the title is like a red flag

    but nice site

    p.s. i own a a jetta so props to VW!
     
  4. jwil

    jwil What's a Dremel?

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    I'm not trying to advertise, I really am looking for feedback. :( I've been hacking away at this site for a while and I need suggestions on usability and whether it works with everyones browser/errors and that sort of thing. Just hoping the HTML types here will let me know if anything is fubar, and hopefully get a few suggestions for content.

    No harm meant.
     
  5. Ubermich

    Ubermich He did it!

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    Umm, a cars section? Gallery perhaps? Just a thought, seeing as it is supposed to be about cars...
     
  6. jwil

    jwil What's a Dremel?

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    I have one, but it's attached to the forums. That is one of the problems that I have, the forums are all in PHP and the rest of the site is HTML. I'd like to make things like the calendar and gallery more part of the main site, but I don't know how to integrate the PHP with HTML.
     
  7. penski

    penski BodMod

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    In which case, moving to Programming and Development...

    No spam, please.

    *n
     
  8. jwil

    jwil What's a Dremel?

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    I went through some of the code specific to the photo album pages and I think I have two problems. First, parts of the calendar and photo album require a login to create a session ID and permissions. I think I can get around that with an addition to my forums that will let me put a login box on any page. That leads to the second problem, if I have an HTML page and I need to insert some PHP code, what do I need to do to get the PHP to display properly.

    I've tried integrating PHP before for my banners, but it never worked (it just didn't show up when I loaded it in a browser) I'm guessing there needs to be some form of tag that tells a browser to process a given chunk as PHP?

    For example, if I insert this:

    (after I've included proper paths) nothing happens. Is something missing from the code?
     
  9. cjmUK

    cjmUK Old git.

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    Developed in Dreamweaver?

    The HTML is a mess, which is to be expected. There are numerous accessibility/usability issues.

    But before you tackle any of that, validate the page:
    http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.t-region.com/

    Oh, and the page-weight is way too high (150k).

    CJM
     
  10. NiHiLiST

    NiHiLiST New-born car whore

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    I agree with the HTML issues mentioned, and on the college computer I'm on now which is at 800x600 with IE6, the page is being made too wide for some reason. I have to horizontally scroll to see all the content anyway, but there's also a huge white space to the right, it's probably just a little CSS issue.
     
  11. Hepath

    Hepath Minimodder

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    would move the CSS to be a link; rather than inline.. ... or are they #includes??

    Some images I would htink are a tadge large for 56k users... e..g http://www.racewaypark.com/main/04events/vw04spring.jpg was 168431 bytes? Are these under your control to reduce in (physical) size?

    Seems to work fine in the few browsers I have (opera, nutscrape4.7)

    Stu
     
  12. jwil

    jwil What's a Dremel?

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    Thanks for the feedback, I've been working on the site over the weekend and I just noticed the whitespace/sizing issue about midnight last night. I didn't have the energy left to debug that. ;)

    The HTML is extremely ugly, I agree. I used GoLive to initially develop the page, and it smacked the code with an ugly stick...hard. Then I switched to Dreamweaver, but that just threw it into a blender and hit frappe. So I'm trying to clean it up as I go but that will take a while. I used the W3C validator for both HTML and CSS and was horrified by the results so I'll probably commit to code cleaning after this weekend when I should be able to get the last few interface/formatting things fixed.

    The racewaypark .GIF is from another site, I'll move it local and resize it. but are there still people on 56k? :D

    If I'm working in DreamWeaver, is there an easier way to generate tidy code than just manually going through it after layout?
     
  13. cjmUK

    cjmUK Old git.

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    I'm not really familiar with the latest version of Dreamweaver. There may be some useful tool included but I doubt there is anything to do what we are talking about here...

    The only way you will ever get to the optimum code is to manually review your code, or better still, hand-code from the start.

    The first step would be to put as much styling (and positioning, if you can handle it) code into an external CSS file.

    Then clear all unnecessary crap out (eg. Font tags, BR/I/B tags etc).

    Add a DOCTYPE, eg:
    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

    [this is for HTML4.01 Strict - recommended]

    Then try to validate again... It will probably still bring up 200 errors, but just start at the top and eliminate them one by one...
     
  14. 3N1GM4

    3N1GM4 What's a Dremel?

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    yeah definatly go through and get all of those "Errors: 269 " fixed up... most are probably simple, but you never know... thats what i did ALL last night for about 5 hours, then decided to streamline it w/ all CSS and basically wasted those 5 houss :(... but its for the better now :D
     
  15. jwil

    jwil What's a Dremel?

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    Last edited: 2 Mar 2004
  16. Ardentfrost

    Ardentfrost What's a Dremel?

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    I agree with whomever said it is too wide. Even though I set my resolution at 1600x1200, I don't maximize my browswer window (I think that is so annoying). As a rule of thumb, I design and favor a site that is designed with 800x600 in mind. I am by no means a professional designer, I'm just saying what I find most aesthetically pleasing, and those that use the blind-person's resolutions will agree.

    It's really just the main page... that VW pic is making it maybe 1 or 200 pixels too wide. From what I've looked at, I like it otherwise :)
     
  17. jwil

    jwil What's a Dremel?

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    I've pretty much made a conscious decision to optimize for a 1024x768 space. Smaller than that and I just run out of comfortable real estate in the forums section. I'm debating on whether to alter that main page pic (it rotates randomly thanks to Javascript) and make it suitable for an 800x600 page, or to create a separate page set for 800x600. I could probably accomplish that pretty easily once I get everything tidied up.

    I have found and killed the bug that was creating an extra 400 pixels of white space off to the right. Now the right edge of the content ends at the edge of the largest picture on the page.
     
  18. cjmUK

    cjmUK Old git.

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    Never do this. Ideally you should aim for a liquid layout that bends to fit the available space. This should be optimised for 800x600 to 1024x768 obviously since it will be the most popular resolutions.

    A good liquid layout is tricky, so be all means aim for a fixed width.

    However, when you start providing alternative pages, where do you stop. I view in 1024x768 maximised. The next bloke uses 800x600 maximised. So you decide to cater for us both... but what do you do with all the other people with different resolutions or who dont have their browsers maximised?

    If you can do a liquid layout, great. If not, stick to an 800x600 fixed width, but dont go any further...

    CJM
     
  19. NiHiLiST

    NiHiLiST New-born car whore

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    Most of your HTML errors are just non-existant alt attributes for images, which should be there as a rule of thumb even if they're just an empty string, and non-closed tags which are bad. With the W3C validator it tells you the line number etc of where the tag is so just work through and close them. The best way to avoid unclosed tags is proper indenting, but also if you write both the start and end tags before you put anything inside them then you'll never forget.
     
  20. cjmUK

    cjmUK Old git.

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    Very true.

    I think most editors have an option to automatically add a closing tag, don't they?

    In addition, as with many programming languages, an error on line 1 causes errors to be registered against lines 2,3,4,5. Remove the error from line 1, and the others may also disappear....

    The 80+ errors will probably be the same error occuring maybe a dozen times....


    Regarding alt attributes, this is an accessibility issue. Text-only browsers & screen readers need these - the alt text is displayed where the graphic would otherwise have been. Bearing this in mind, makes it easy to figure what to put in an alt attribute. And I echo NiHiLiST, use an empty attribute if nothing else...
     

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