My New Site

[tazzmann]

I just got my bare bones site up. I have plans on changing a lot of things, but wanted to see what you guys thought so far. I am a web designer by trade, but not a graphics designer or photographer, so please be kind in that area. The site is no where near done, but wanted to get some ideas from you fine folk!

just click on the Night Owl Leather link in my signature area.

Thanks!

Edited March 27, 2008 by tazzmann

[TomSwede]

I like it! Black n white and shades in between is soo nice. Only thing I didn't like is the knife pic to the right, maybe it'll work better if the background was cut out completely so it was just the knife against the black page.

Gotta try to keep in mind to come back to it 'cuz it looks promising and has some similarities to the design I have in mind for creating a webgallery (I can reveal that black n reds are my essentials), oh BTW I really like the nightowl logo on the left.

Tom

[SCOUTER]

Hey Mike, Nice site... Lots of luck! I see that the owl is your signature pic, is there a special reason for the "night owl" logo? Thanks John

P.S. Owls are quite rare here in my neck of the woods.

[Beaverslayer]

I like the black and white look as well. The knife pic on the right side, if that was a black and white also maybe a bit more pronounced, I think that would look a bit better. Also, when you click the pictures, maybe have them pop up on a seperate page rather than the way you've done it, and have anexplanation that goes with it.

Good Luck

Ken

[tazzmann]

Thanks for the suggestions guys! I have a long way to go on this site, but wanted to get something up soon so I wasn't wasting money on hosting a blank site. LOL Keep checking back. It may take a little bit longer as I have a full time day job AND about 7 leather orders to get done, so my working on the site is when I can fit it in. <whew!>

[paris3200]

Mike,

Overall the designs looks very good and clean. I'm really a fan of classic lines and black and white. I think you've got a good start. That being said, I'd like to point out a few things. From what I gather you are writing your own code and not using a wysiwyg editor. Therefore I'll try and give you some specific fixes.

You've got your header sitting on top of your background which is fine. However there is a harsh change in color where your header ends. I'm a little rusty on using tables for layout, but I believe you can pull your background image down from your body tag and place it in your table tag. Then set your background color of your body to black.

Also your background image is only 600px wide. If your visitor's browser window is wider than 600px your background images becomes stretched and looses its smoothness. You might consider setting your table width to slightly less than 600px instead of 100%. If you set your background color to black in your body your overall look shouldn't change, you menu just won't be at the far right at larger resolutions, but will look the same at 600px.

I really like the idea of having your signature on your site. However as it is you can't read it. If you have any graphic skills what so every you could try tracing what you've scanned with an airbrush or pen tool. You might also trying writing your signiture with something that writes a little thicker, say a sharpie. That should scan a little better.

Well thats just my .02 cents. Take it for what its worth. Just so you understand where I'm coming from I've done quite a bit of web development and a little bit of designing. If you have any questions let me know.

Jason

[tazzmann]

Thanks Jason, I will take your ideas to heart. I really haven't totally decided what to do with the site, but I am getting it more and more down every day. I am kinda curious about the 600 pixel thing as I run 1024 X 768 at work and don't see a problem. Maybe it is my LCD monitors, but everything looks smooth to me. hmmmm. My plan is to sit down some time this weekend and work on the site, so check back Monday and see how things are going.

P.S. I write EVERYTHING by hand. No WYSIWYG editors. I don't even use the WYSIWYG in Visual Studios when writing code at work. Oh, I almost forgot, the signature was done with a brush tool in Adobe Photoshop using a WACOM pad. I didn't like the way it turned out either and will re-do it, but it is not high on my list right now.

Edited March 28, 2008 by tazzmann

[paris3200]

I am kinda curious about the 600 pixel thing as I run 1024 X 768 at work and don't see a problem.

To be honest I've got a wide screen at 1280 x 1024. I didn't take a look at it at 1025 x 768. A lot of people are using wide screens these days so I at least try to design so sites don't break bad. You don't loose a lot of smoothness on large screens, but you were asking for critque so I'd thought I'd mention it.

Oh, I almost forgot, the signature was done with a brush tool in Adobe Photoshop using a WACOM pad

I've never used a pad, but I would imagine a quick fix would be to just increase the tool size and rewrite it. I'd like to have the option to play around with a pad.

I'm glad to hear you write your own code. Makes me feel somewhat normal. I'll keep an eye on your site. I really like seeing a site come together and you really do have a good start.

Jason

[tazzmann]

Thanks. I don't have a wide screen to play with, so kind of have to design to fit screens I do have. I do table structures on most of my sites instead of CSS positioning because I am old school and no other reason. Plus I can knock out a site about five times faster using tables. The only draw back to using them is they can kind of limit you.

At work, I don't use tables at all. They want everything positioned via the code behind. Don't ask! grrrrr

Please keep the critique coming, I love hearing all the options and hearing about things I may have over looked. But please keep in mind, this is the bare bones beginning and I haven't had the time to really figure out what I want, so everything that is there today may be totally gone and re-arranged tomorrow. :D (But I doubt it. Probably just improved upon and some things re-done.) I really need to learn PHP as this site is hosted on Apache and not Windows.

Edit: WOW! I just looked at it in I.E. and man does I.E. butcher pictures. I was wondering as I don't use I.E. at home, I only use Fire Fox and it renders everything so much better than I.E. This will cause me to have to re-think things. Blah!

Edited March 28, 2008 by tazzmann

[paris3200]

Mike,

I hope you don't mind, but I had some free time this afternoon so I did a little playing around with your code. Mainly all I did was the suggestions I talked about previously. Overall I think I've managed to keep the same look, it just looks a little cleaner on higher resolutions. I didn't get a chance to look at it on lower resolutions so I might have missed something there. If I did I'm sure it would be an easy fix.

You really should take a look at learning some PHP if you have the slightest interest. I'm sure within an hour or two you could come up with some code that would really help you out. I know you said you wanted to use tables, but even with tables its really easy to have your header, footer, and menu's all pulled from separate files. That way when you add a page, you only have to change your menu in one file, instead of all of them.

Jason

nightowl.html

nightowl.html

[tazzmann]

Thanks Jason, I took a look at what you did in the styles and it looks good, but...

Maybe I am missing something, but it looks the same in 1024x768 as it does in 1280x720 with the exception that there is now a black line between the logo and the main body (which I actually like) and the menu is adjusted to the left. So not sure what other differences your changes made. I have a dual monitor set up here at work so had one set to the 1024 setting and the other at the 1280 settings so I could see them side by side. Can you get a screen shot of what it looks like on your monitor? Both my page and yours?

Yeah, I thought about including header and footer include files, but that requires some PHP coding and the PHP extension, which I am not ready to do....yet. I went and got a PHP book during lunch today, so may play with it some more this weekend if time allows.

Thanks for the help!

Mike

[paris3200]

Mike,

I don't know what I was thinking earlier, but I was all wrong about the 600 px causing the stretch. So just ignore all the previous comments concerning that. Your background images is actually 800px wide not 600px. I think the lack of smoothness is probably coming from the background image itself and not due to any stretching. I noticed that you've have it saved as a jpeg instead of a gif. Any reason for that? If not redo your gradient and save it as a gif.

Maybe I am missing something, but it looks the same in 1024x768 as it does in 1280x720 with the exception that there is now a black line between the logo and the main body (which I actually like) and the menu is adjusted to the left.

It should look the same. The only time it should look any different is on a wide monitor. Since you don't have access to anything wide then I would just leave your table width at 100% instead of setting it to 1024 or 1280. Thats also the most fluid layout anyway. I went ahead and edited my file for 100%. I'll reattach it to this post. The only problem with that is that it puts your menu all the way over on the right on wide screens, which is just a minor annoyance.

Oh and the black line comes from using IE. I believe I have eliminated it.

Yeah, I thought about including header and footer include files, but that requires some PHP coding and the PHP extension, which I am not ready to do....yet. I went and got a PHP book during lunch today, so may play with it some more this weekend if time allows.

Not sure what your are referring to when you say PHP extension. If your host has php installed the include would only require <?php include '/path/to/menu.html' ?>.

I guess to make a long story short, all my rework did was eliminate the line between your header and your body. If you do getting to messing with PHP and run into any problems let me know. I might be able to help.

Jason

Edit: I didn't eliminate the black line. I'm sure its just padding or margin that needs to be set to 0, probably top and bottom.

nightowl.html

nightowl.html

Edited March 28, 2008 by paris32000

[paris3200]

Mike,

I'm going to disagree with Ken and say not to have your large images show up as a popup in a new window. I'd suggest using CSS to do an image popup on the page. Check it out:

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/style/csslibra...p-image-viewer/

Jason

Edited March 28, 2008 by paris32000

[tazzmann]

kewl, thanks. I was debating how I wanted to do the images, the reason I was having it come up on it's own was because I was eventually going to put some longer descriptions and have each on it's own page. Though it might still be cool to do the hover enlarger now that I think about it.

Yes, IE is flaky at best, which is why I don't generally use it other than work.

I didn't know about the php include trick. Can I use that in straight html without renaming "sompage.htm" to "somepage.php"? I know what I can do with C# and ASP.net 2.0, but this unix stuff is still a mystery to me. I am sure I will find out a lot more when I get into this book. Hey, if I can learn Perl in a week, I should be able to learn PHP in a week, right?

Thanks again, I will keep working on it.

[paris3200]

Can I use that in straight html without renaming "sompage.htm" to "somepage.php"?

Sure, just leave out all header information and body tag. So for a menu your file would contain something like this:

<ul>

<li><a href="">Home</a></li>

<li><a href="">Gallery</a></li>

<li><a href="">Contact</a></li>

<li><a href="">About</a></li>

</ul>

Eventually you can write a few lines to determine what page your own based upon the url and change your menu accordingly.

Yes, IE is flaky at best, which is why I don't generally use it other than work.

Easiest way I've found for using IE is to set your doctype to strict. However to do this I believe you have to use css instead of inline styling.

Jason

[Beaverslayer]

That's the kind of pop-up I was refering to, just couldn't remember the name type. You do have to be careful on the size of picture that pops up though, it tends to screw up on smaller screen sizes.

Ken

[paris3200]

Mike,

Just wanted to say that the gallery looks great. I really like that. I think I'll give that a go on the next site I do.

Jason

[tazzmann]

Thanks, I did a little playing with it today as well. I think I like it better and I got the words to quit qrapping in IE. I still have more playing to do though.