Might as well see what people think

[Batchman]

Just did some colorful upgrades to what was starting to feel like a little bit dull of a page, and figured I might as well get some ideas of what people think.

gordonkorman.com (http://gordonkorman.com)

One further (major) modification coming in another month, but that will only affect the home page, not the rest of the site.

[(jj)]

Although I'm not a big fan of frames, you've done a good job of keeping it simple and made good use of them.

Overall I like the look of the site, and find it easy to navigate through the pages. From an old duffers point of view, I'd like to see the menu a bit easier to read but other than that I think the site looks and works really nice.

Just my "For What It's Worth"

[Batchman]

I'd love to do the site entirely without frames, but it means either learning SSI (and paying for it's use) to keep the navigation up-to-date with changes, or redoing each and every page every time you add a new page. (And with 50+ pages, that just got to being too much work.)

The three separate navigation bars (replacing each other) also allowed me to keep things a lot shorter, so you didn't have to scroll so much to find things. I was trying to find a way to do the same thing with cascading style sheets, in which case I might have been willing to get rid of all the frames again, but was pretty much told it couldn't be done that way! <ggg>

Did the small text size really cause you problems? It was another recent addition to keep things more compact, but if a lot of people have problems with it, I'll change it to something a little larger. (With the style sheet I use on the navigation bar, such a change would be very easy to make.)

Thanks for the comments on usability ... site has been around for about three years now, and I've been continually tweaking it for better results ... the time has certainly helped. (And I think the new home page I'm adding next month will also be very nice, but it is set up to work with the next book release, so I have to wait for it!)

[(jj)]

The text is not "That" small, but one thing I did notice, was that after clicking on a link, the vlink color was easier to read than the original red color. Just a thought, you may consider swapping colors in your style.

As for SSI, it does not cost extra to use it on the Powweb servers. That is what I use for my pages, and I have over 75 seperate pages. SSI makes it easier, as you can create one menu, one header and one footer that will load for each page. Then anytime that you update one of them, it's updated across the total site.

But your frames are working good, and they are not a problem with the site. So I'd suggest that until you decide to do a total rebuild, just keep what's working. Like they say, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". :)

Just my "For What It's Worth"

[Batchman]

I thought I saw stuff in the documentation that indicated that SSI was an extra feature that you had to pay for ... maybe I'll have to look into this.

Not asking for a tutorial or anything, but how difficult is this stuff to set up? I'd really like to get rid of frames ... among other things, it would make things easier for the search engines.

Meanwhile, I assume it is ok if you only want to use a side thing, and not anything on the top and bottom!

(Great ... another new thing to learn! I'm still struggling with CSS ... but it has added a couple of nice new techniques to the current web site, and has even more to do with the next one in June ... and then I want to learn Perl to set up a nice self-grading, score-keeping quiz for the pages ... now I want to learn SSI, too ... I must be nuts!)

[(jj)]

SSI is not that hard to learn, it's basically just making your html files the same as you've been doing. Only difference is that you let the Server put the page together for you on the fly.

Yes, you can just have 2 sections or as many sections as you'd like. For what you want, I'd suggest a table with 2 cells, one for your menu and another for the content.

The only thing that you have to do different, is that any page that has an SSI command, has to have the shtml extension instead of a html one.

Your 2 main command calls are

<!--#include ="yourfile.extension"--> if the "included" file is in the same directory as the calling page

<!--#include virtual="yourfile.extension"--> if the "included" file resides within a different directory than the calling page.

There are many good tutorials around to help, Manninc has some good references available on his UPS page at

http://ups.manninc.com/


Just my "For What It's Worth"

[grimor]

just a thought, have you considered a DHTML menu on the side? Opencube.com has some nice ones, I use a slide tree one on my site. ( www.serendipitys.com ) It's an easy to use option and would reduce the need to scroll the menu portion of the frames.

[Batchman]

grimor,

Not at all familiar with that option right now, but I'll look into it a little bit, and see what I'm finding.

Thanks for the advice.

[muijefr]

before you exercise any advice check out jj's source code