Hi everyone! Intro Quick intro for those who don't know what this is going to be about. I'm the author of A Newbie's Hardware Guide. A guide aimed at educating new and intermediate level builders about what to look for when buying their hardware. What I'm doing now is turning the guide (which is a word/google document right now) into an interactive website. Relevant Personal History I've never built a website before, and I taught myself HTML, CSS, Javascript, and MySQL over the past 2 months in preparation for this project. Also in the past 2 months, I've been researching various web design/web programming techniques some of which I've decided to use in building this site. This initial site will be based on HTML5/CSS3/Javascript, but I eventually want to move some of it over to PHP once I've learned the language. I'm doing all the coding by hand, and I'm creating all the art myself (over the past 6 months or so I've gotten a good level of skill using GIMP, but I'm working on learning Inkscape). I'm a bit unhappy working with Inkscape, and I would love to work with Ai, but I don't have the money to afford such a thing right now -_-. Current Situation So the current situation with the project is this: I stupidly converted the guide mostly into markup first (I should've done a single page, styled, then did the rest...), but that's fairly minor. I'll just update all the pages with any major markup changes I make as I go along -_-. I'm working on styling the site and creating the graphics that will go into it. These things I don't need immediate advice on. If I can't find a solution to something online I'll ask it here, but my bigger questions are coming later in this post. I've got the site laid out in what I think is the way I want it right now, but I haven't done anything really cosmetic to it yet. Format of the Project The project as it stands is using HTML5 Boilerplate as its base since I want to have the widest possible browser compatibility while still using modern coding techniques (HTML5/CSS3). I've made a few custom modifications to the Boilerplate, but left most of it in there. I might take out modernizer in the future if the ActiveX thing bothers people. I'm using SASS and compass as my CSS frontend to do the styling nicely (plus compass has a lot of crossbrowser stuff so I don't need to worry about it). I'm also trying to design the site in a responsive manner as described in that article. SASS and Compass help out a lot with this because the frontend is able to handle calculations and variables that would've otherwise been messy numbers inserted directly into the CSS. I also plan to make use of the JQuery library to do some animations and add a bit of functionality which will be explained in the next section. Goals The eventual goal of this is to get a site up and running that will host my guide in an interactive and friendly way. One of the major things having the guide as a site will help me do is reduce the time I spend updating the guide with pricing each month and scouring the guide for dead product links. Each month I spend between 2 and 4 hours looking through the guide and updating products. This is both bad for me and bad for the readers. The information in the guide (especially prices) gets old quickly and I have to spend tons of time updating it for it to just go out of date again in a week. What I want to do about this is isolate all the products into one area and use a Javascript function that will systematically go through each link, parse the product page, retrieve the price, and put the price in where it needs to go every time a user loads the page. If a product can't be found I want it to somehow flag the link (strikethrough comes to mind) so I can look at it later and readers won't click dead links. Another goal for this project is to to have a platform where I can hopefully write more guides. I don't have anything specific laid out firmly in my mind yet, but I'd like to do guides about troubleshooting hardware, diving into different pieces of hardware and explaining how things work from a deep perspective (would require lots of research but would be fun for me ^^). I also might branch into software guides too since I like that area of computing also . In the extreme long term, if the site's actually moderately successful I'd like to have a way to let users generate their own guides or score guides that are currently up. Basically if everything goes 100% smoothly, I'd like to eventually have a site which stands at the nexus of hardware and software and offers guidance for people of any skill level looking to dive into a new subject. These goals are years and years off though and may never come to be if interest in the site isn't high enough. Questions So now it comes to my major questions. I've got some short term questions and some long term questions that I hope some of the more experienced web developers here will be able to answer for me. 1) This is a long term question that I struggled with quite a bit before starting the project. The first short term goal of the guide I stated had to do with link prices and automatically updating them. I *think* this would actually best be done in PHP rather than javascript. Would you agree? Do you think I should bother with a PHP implementation of the guide in the future? I don't know PHP very well so I'm having a hard time gauging how helpful it'll be for the guide. 2) Looking at different techniques, I fell upon the idea of CSS sprites which actually came from the same place as the responsive web design article did. I'd love to use these, but one thing bothers me. How do I implement CSS sprites in a responsive web page where I want things to scale somewhat smoothly in as many browsers as possible? Also, what do I do about things like the site's top banner? I don't want the logo or text to be squished by resizing the window. What would be really helpful would be to have someone who's designed responsive web pages before be willing to be my guide through this thread and help me design this. It seems like responsive web design isn't a very popular topic to make tutorials about (perhaps I'll make one after I've done this xD). 3) Right now I'm planning to use jquery to both update my page links with prices and parse retailer pages for the price. I can figure out the parsing myself, but is this a good idea? Are there better ways to extract the price than going $("#price")? Maybe another library would be better than jquery for this? Since I'm planning to put all the links on 1 page jquery's going to need to go through a LOT of web pages looking for prices when it's loaded. I don't want things to be laggy. Perhaps I should split up the processing some how? 4) What tips do you have for making sure that a domain name does not get me in trouble with any trademarks or previously existing sites? I don't want to make a site only to have some little unknown company come out of the woodwork demanding my domain be changed since it's too similar to theirs =/. I'll no doubt come up with more questions along the way. I probably forgot some that I had already >.>. Thanks So I'd like to thank anyone willing to help me with this up front (and I will thank you afterwards, and if you're a big contributor I'm planning to make an acknowledgements or credit page into the site and you will be in there if you want to be). I've already received help from many people while working on the current version of this guide and while working on this website. So thank you for helping to make this project a success. This is both a personal project for myself (to learn to make and design a website from scratch without a WYSIWYG editor) and a community project (to design a website which will hopefully benefit any people who drop by it). So by helping me you're not just helping me, but also helping any future people who benefit from the eventual site. Last but not least, thanks for reading this massive wall of text. Dae314
Requesting Reviews for the Colors on My MAL Heyo! So I'm still working on the color scheme for my guide website. I was looking for a way to experiment with colors in an area that I could show to people, and I found out that MAL gives users the ability to directly edit the CSS for the list. I designed an implemented a custom theme for the anime list part (I used a background generated at pattern cooler) to test out some of the colors I was thinking of. I did also theme the manga list part of my profile, but that was done just for fun. I don't think I'm going to be using the colors in there as part of the final website theme since I'm pretty set on using a light theme. I'd like to ask you guys to tell me what you think of the color scheme (the background probably isn't what I'll be using so if you can refrain from commenting about the pattern that would be appreciated). My Anime List Here If you'd like you can go look at what I did to the manga list also. Just posting your overall view is fine, but I'd also like to know more details if you have the time. Specifically, what I want to know is how did the colors feel to you (like warm/cold/boring/vibrant/meh/etc.). Was there a color that really stuck out as bad? Are the links visible even when you hover your mouse over them? Is it clear that the stuff that are supposed to be links are links? Is the text in all areas easily readable? Is the outline color just right, too light, or too dark? What about the text color? You don't have to answer all the questions if you reply, but that's the kind of stuff I'm looking to know.
Build update: Design was turning out to be a real tripping point for me -_-. I can make designs, but they aren't very good. I just don't have the experience to be able to make a very elegant and effective design. Thus, I've brought on a friend who has agreed to do free work for me (in return for me not pressuring deadlines) and help work on the design of the site. Now that I can take my mind off the design aspect for a while, I'm going to focus on getting the logic in that'll allow me to scrape the newegg product pages for prices. I'm either going to scrape each page manually or use the newegg JSON interface (don't know which yet). If anyone has suggestions on this it would be appreciated. Questions 1, 2, and 4 from the OP are still relevant. #3 has been replaced by the question in this post. Development speed will probably be slow for August and part of September because I'll be transitioning from summer break back into my last year of college. But hopefully having a third party working on the design will mean that the look of the site will at least evolve during this time.
