Please review-(family website)

[TheLion]

Please take a look at my website and tell me what you think. It's a family website that I created to help keep our friends and relatives, (most who live over 500 miles away) up to date on what's happening in our lives. Alot of it is still under construction, and I designed the whole thing with notepad. You can find it at:

http://www.thelions-den.com

I am particularlly interested in learning how fast the pages load. I'm trying to keep the file sizes small on most pictures and graphics, but I can't tell how fast it loads since I'm on a cable modem and it's always fast for me. Also, I'm a little worried that my Fun & Games page may be a little slow because I have some java on it. There is a java clock that I put on there because my step-daughter likes it, but if it slows things down too much I will take it off.

I'm learning things as I go along, like today I learned how to use SSI to create a menu on the top of every one of my pages, instead of having to put the code for the menu on each and every page, which made it a nightmare if I had to change anything. I'm also looking forward to learning flash and more advanced forms of html, although with this site I'm try to stay away from using anything fancy like Flash and try to keep the Java at a minimum, except for the fun & games section of my site. I feel it's pointless to use fancy stuff like that for a personal homepage anyway.

Thanks,
Daren

[(jj)]

Looks pretty nice :)

Your main (index) page looks a little odd in 1024,768, with everything sitting in the middle and all that space to either side.

You are relying on the alt="" attribute to display the captions for your images, but that only works in IE, Netscape and Mozilla users will not see the caption. You can use a title="" attribute in your <a href> or <img> tags and that will display your caption in Netscape, Mozilla and IE.

[shenz]

I also think you can make use of the space a little more on the frontpage. Everything seems to be cramped up in the center and you have lots of space on the left and right.

The text on the main body would not resize but the menu did. Because you used small fonts, older folks may not find it easy to read.

Well, I really like that cute little animated clock - first time seeing something like this. Looks like an interesting site for your family. Good work!


Shenz
www.ebook88.com

[TheLion]

Thanks for the advice. I too have thought that my homepage looks a little empty. I'll have to do some brainstorming on how I can improve it without making it too busy. I originally had a really nice background image of some mountains and a lake, but when I checked out the page on a computer at work that had 1024x768 resolution, it looked terrible because the image was tiled.

Thanks for letting me know about the limitations of the alt tag. I had no idea it was only and IE tag, I figured it was a cross-browser thing. It's so frustrating trying to design a website and keep it all working correctly across all browsers. I guess I'll have to get to work putting in "title" tags for all my images, either that or put descriptions under the images which I really don't want to do. At least I found out about this before I got too many images online, otherwise it would have be a major undertaking to change all that. Funny thing is, I use Mozilla for alot of my web browsing, and hadn't even noticed that the "alt description" wasn't coming up. You guy's are really observant noticing things like that. Thanks again.

Daren

[shenz]

About the image being tiled, you can make use of CSS to position it and command it not to tile. Try reading up about style sheets - it's very useful.

If you look at the title banner at the top of this page and all the other pages of thi site (http://www.browsersite.com) - it's actually a background image made not to repeat.

Using an external style sheet will save you lots of time and effort and gives a consistent style to your site. It will also make the file size smaller and produce a much faster loading page.

Shenz
www.browsersite.com

[(jj)]

Alt tags have their use, they are for people who have images turned off (for whatever reason), those who use text only browsers and page readers for the visually impaired users.

Title tags are just that, for adding a title to an image or link.

[YvetteKuhns]

Instead of saying the site is under construction or using that animated clip art, you can at least say something. For example, "Please revisit Daren's page soon. We expect to include some photos and stories about his vacation at Disneyland.". Or say something about these people like "Dawn's birthday is coming soon so don't forget to wish her a happy birthday.".

Oh, I found some info in the journal. It seems that there is more info in the What's New section as well. Lots of info scattered about and separate pages for each person for where things will stay. Okay, maybe I just search in strange ways. I like to look at photos. :)

That Javascript trailing mouse effect on the Fun and Games page is very annoying. The music startled me since it was unexpected. Music should be optional. I had to physically turn down the speakers. Though the morphed images may be interesting, you should not use copyrighted images or images of celebrities. Morph your family, friends and pets instead.

The Java applets load slowly even on my cable modem. But these are just games and not important elements of the website such as your navigation menu. The website design itself has black and white graphics that remind me of those computer books (don't want to mention the name). But this is a personal website and the design does not compete with the contents, so that's fine. But a little color would be nice.

The pages get long when you post blogs, so be mindful of that. The text is small and cannot be enlarged in the browser, since it is specified in pixels in your CSS. Hopefully, no one in your family is visually impaired. ;) The blank space on both sides could be used to expand the text area and shorten the vertical space needed.

I was amused with the remark about the Petsmart store. I only have to look out my window to see a goat, cows and pigs. And rabbits, groundhogs, deer.... :D