What is causing this prob?

[Hearie]

Greetings All, I put up a webpage for my Boss and I am having a few problems. The first problem is that on our NT machine at work, the bottom frame is not viewable. Well, its sorta viewable if you know its there, so far this is the only machine that has run into problems viewing the site. Figure this is probaly a no-brainer setting somewhere(at least I hope). The other problem is the font, it shows up different on different people machine. What is going on there? I am guessing that some fonts work better than others for designing sites? The address is www.duffyscomputers.com If you have time visit it and see how it loads in your computer. Don't post back here with it sucks, I already know that, and will change that as my skills improve. I am very receptive to constuctive criticism as long as you don't get to artsy fartsy wit me! I don't care about "lines" and "palettes", but I do want to know about basic site design knowledge. (ie...maybe frames shouldn't be used in the first place?)Ok well thnx for any info on the aforementioned probs!:t

Bryan

[Dark_Raver]

nice clean site, and everything seems to work fine.
i understand that it work in progress and design and content might be altered.

one suggestion i would have that you either raise the menu so it isn't sitting right at the bottome of the window cause it is a little bit hard to notice on big screen ( having big empty space between content and menu), or move the menu to the top of the page.

as to frames...
some say they are being used less and less but it is more of a personal preference i think. you can achieve the same look with tables and frames.
i prefer to do things with frames because the code is a bit easier to manage and site management is a bit easier. ie. if you have many pages with menus on all of them you only have to alter it in one place when using frames.

bottom line is, use what you are comftable with.
good job and good luck working on it.

DR

[Hearie]

DR- Thnx for the feedback, :) Is it feasible to detect display setting and then point to the appropriate site? I do not have the time to put into this project that I probaly need to do it right,(as it is I have done all the work from home! UNPAID!!!:mad: ) But it is fun and I can see where you could end up spending alot of time learning it all. I am working with NetObjects so it has been just a matter of me learning the program a little bit to do what has been done so far. When it comes to designing a site around a certain display size, do most people go with 800x600? Thnx for yer time!

Bryan

[Nini-Veh]

Hi, for your original questions re fonts:
It's usually best to go for foints that are generally available, such as arial and verdana. Also, you can specify in your css which fonts should be used in which order.

I usually design pages for 600x800, but make sure that all visible areas are covered with an (uncluttered) background colour, if the company profile allows this.

:t /Nini-Veh

[Dark_Raver]

I dont use any software to design sites, i tried it and didn't really like it, so i design all my sites by hand. mind you i don't do it too often and they are never huge corporate sites so i can get away with it. It means a little more work but the html is much cleaner and easier to maintain.

There is a to detect the screen resolution of the client, but i don't know how you would go about implementing it in the way you mention. Also that would seem like a lot of work, since you would need a different page for each resolution, and then there are the odd resolutions that you might not be able to forsee.

Even though it is possible to have someone with a resolution lower than 800x600, it is rather uncommon and shouldn't be an issue. More and more sites right now are designed for resolutions of 1024x768 and even higher, but they aren't all that common yet.

In order to have the site work well with many resolutions i like to use percentages when specifying sizes of tables and/or frames. that means the content will space itself out as the page is resized.

DR

[DocEvi1]

the use of frames isn't personal preference it's disliked because of several reasons:

1) Monitor size, on small monitors you are faced with half the screen taken over by a frame.
2) They are not usually well executed - when you click on exteriour links...
3) Spiders from search engines can never read the right pages.
4) Not all browsers support frames (well most do now but with varying levels of success)
5) You are loading 2+ pages at once, not the one you are looking at.

Much better alternatives is tables, and better again CSS.

As to the site:

1) put a frame around it, i.e. give your page something to work to. The worst sites usually are centered in the middle, anchor it to the left.
2) Where did you get that map from? Check copyrights.
3) Colours are ok but very bland. It needs something to umph it up I think.

A couple of things: If you try to detect monitor/screen res you will be running the risk of compatibility of the users machine, don't do it. 800*600 is the norm, but I design to 640*480 - that way everyone can see it! Never use % widths! The reason for this is simple. Imagine this site, you are viewing it at around 1024/max of 1280 ish yes? Imagine if I cranked mine monitor here to 1920*14xx all I would see is one long line of text. Not good.

For some ideas/examples goto www.plutonium2010.co.uk/bettal I'm not particulary proud of any of them, but then thats what the client wanted! his site is www.bettal.co.uk

Stefan

[Hearie]

Doc- Bland is almost to nice, hopefully when I learn more my Boss will give me some latitude for site design. I looked over MapQuests copyright page and I kinda read it a few different ways, I sent them an e-mail just to be sure and haven't heard back yet. I am not able to use the map they provide on their site because the location of the business shows up in the wrong spot on their map. You mention CSS, I think I know what that stands for(Cascading Style Sheets), but no idea what it is. *sighs* why can't anything ever be simple! Any thoughts as to why the bottom frame doesn't show up in NT? Although I don't know if that is NT or just that one boxs IE settings. Haven't had time to check, but I will tommorrow. I am looking into something to liven up the site, and was trying to put an animated gif on the Monitor screen on the home page, but in NetObjects it has a fit if you put things on top of each other. So something is in the works to put a little jazz into it, I'm just not sure what yet!:)

Nini-Veh- Am going to redo the fonts tonight, I am using a Cooper font right now so if you know of any font that is similar and works most the time please let me know. Thnx

DR- I thought I might get by without it, but it appears that I will have to know how to do some manual HTML editing. *goes out in search of tutorials* :t

Bryan