Another effort from me. Your views please...

I find it a bit cluttered looking with all the coloured names down both sides. I would have them just going down the right side. This will also help show up the buttons on the left, they are a bit hidden at the moment.

One other thing is that where you have the tables set for pixel size on larger sizes it looks a bit odd with everything squashed into the middle part only. Pehaps set them as percentages instead. I would also change the buttons to the same colour blue as in the central part.

Other than that it looks good.

Yes the words are very distracting. Although, the ones behind the headings provide a nice effect.

The site reminds me of the hen and frog forums..

I noticed that on some of the pages the "talkie toaster" image was broken. From your source I can see the file name has a space in it, and Netscape doesn't like file names with spaces.

"TalkieToaster (reserved).gif"

Netscrape doesn't like @~**$@ anything.

Quote: Originally posted by Bookworm
Netscrape doesn't like @~**$@ anything.

Then my point is that if you want a site to work across various browsers, don't use spaces or odd characters in file names.

If you want to do a full-blown IE5+ only site and don't care about NS users, then go for it. My logs show that 25-30% of my visitors use a flavor of NS, and I *want* my sites to be accessible to them because I don't want to lose this percentage of my visitors. Visitors who've taken the time to find and come to my sites. I don't want to turn them away or give them broken images because I didn't bother to use naming conventions that would work in their browser.

If you *know* that NS hates spaces and odd characters, then don't use them if you care about those visitors. That's all I'm saying and that's just my $.02 worth.

I like the word things and the buttons, the rolloever effect is very nice. My only problem is (bug surprise) your color scheme. The layout fits together VERY nicely picture-wise, with the background graphics and all but you have two different schemes going on here; the rainbow-y on on the sides and the blur grey red on the inside. I suggest that you edit the word images on the sides so that they match the images that you used for background in the center better. I think it will look a little less crowded with less of a wide WIDE color range.

I like the design though

Actually, I didn't know about the spaces in filenames thing. I have another site which is fine in IE but the graphics are all broken and scrambled in NS. I have spent HOURS, days even, trying to work out why. Now you have solved the problem and I can go and rename the graphics and it will work.
I am VERY gratefull.

...And I have renamed my TalkieToaster image too.

Thanks.

I would like my sites to work cross-browser and make some considerable effort to make them work. However sometimes frustration gets the better of me and I say 'sod it' and give up.

Naughty BookWorm. *spank*

I just thought... The Talkie Toaster filename has parentesies ) i.e. TalkieToaster(reserved).gif
Can Netscape cope with these or should I remove them?
And what about the uppercase 'T's?

Quote: Originally posted by Fringey
I like the word things and the buttons, the rolloever effect is very nice. My only problem is (bug surprise) your color scheme. The layout fits together VERY nicely picture-wise, with the background graphics and all but you have two different schemes going on here; the rainbow-y on on the sides and the blur grey red on the inside. I suggest that you edit the word images on the sides so that they match the images that you used for background in the center better. I think it will look a little less crowded with less of a wide WIDE color range.

I like the design though

Thanks for your comments Fringey. You're not the first to comment on the use of colour and I think I will do something about it.

However, not a bad effort for a clour-blind guy I think!

Quote: Originally posted by Bookworm
I just thought... The Talkie Toaster filename has parentesies [b]) i.e. TalkieToaster(reserved).gif
Can Netscape cope with these or should I remove them?
And what about the uppercase 'T's? [/B]

I would take out the parens. I can't reach your site at the moment to check that image, but in general the only really "safe" characters for file names (other than letters and numbers) are the hyphen and underscore.

Capital letters are okay, however, I generally avoid them just for the sake of consistency. Much of the net runs on Unix servers, which are case sensitive. If I stick to all lower case, then I won't accidentally forget and reference them incorrectly.

The one time I use caps is to indicate thumbnails, as in:

image.jpg
imageTN.jpg

But that's just the way I do it so they appear next to each other in a directory.

I'll also name all my navigation buttons starting with but_index.gif, but_about.gif, etc. for the same reason.

Good luck with the renaming on your other site, I know what a tedious pain something like that can be. But it should all work fine with no spaces or odd characters in your file names (that goes for html files as well as images).

IE is quite forgiving in many ways. NS is not. One missed closing table tag and often a page will not display at all.

Quote: Originally posted by Bookworm
I would like my sites to work cross-browser and make some considerable effort to make them work. However sometimes frustration gets the better of me and I say 'sod it' and give up.

Naughty BookWorm. *spank*

I think that anyone who uses IE themselves feels like this at times, it just always seems daft to me that they can be used for the same thing but work completely differently!!

Ok, I've been fiddling a bit.

I've toned down the side borders so that they're not so bright and I've changed the buttons and rollovers to blue to fit in with the colour scheme better.

I've removed the parenthesis too.

I'll keep the capitals on the avatar name though because the filenames are seen by the user when choosing their avatar and I think DrWho looks better than drwho.

Howzat?

I don't know what it looked like before, but those words on the side are still too much - it just makes the site look too cluttered. Since people are going to be dong a lot of reading here, you'll probably want to go with a more simplistic design. Another thing is that the forum itself is really narrow - you should probably make that wider which would probably make things easier to read.

The only other thing I don't like is the maroon text you've used for some of the forum headings - it doesn't go with the blue-ish scheme of the rest of the design.

I like the logo though, and the overall look is very nice. Good luck!

I dunno.. I kinda like the periwinkle burgandy idea. It hit me as weird at first but I think it's nice now, very original. I still thing that the side bars have TOO much color. I still suggest that you make them the same colors as the ones behind the headings.

Maroon? burgandy? where?
I'm gonna have to get my missus to help me with this. I'm working blind here.

And the borders are the same colour as the one's behind the headings, it's just that the headings have been ovelayed with a blue gradient.

I agree with the problem of it being rather narrow. The three tables add up to 700 wide. The idea is that it fits comfortably into 800*600 and is passable at 640*480. I could widen it to a total of 800 and sod the 640*480 viewers I suppose...

okay, i think that you should overlay the borders with the same color blue than...

Eep... I changed my resolution to 640x480 and yes, it is passable, but i see that expanding the table and getting rid of the right background bar thingy wouldn't help all that much for this res. Perhaps you SHOULD just screw the 640x480 viewers. Not many people use it anyways. If you really want it to work you could get a web tracker - if you don't already have one, and see how many people tht visit your site use that res.. if it's quite a few then start worrying about making it work, but if it's like 5% than don't bother.

Or you could do that automatic redirect thing depending on the browser, or give a choice on the splash page. Do yuou really need a splash page anyways?

...640x480 is really scary, my IM box takes up a good half the screen... these forums don't work very well on it either...

Better, much better. I like all the colours but I would still get rid of the left side & leave that just for the navigation.

The only real way around the table width is to do it in percentages. That way it will fit to the screen no matter what & it will certainly look better in larger ones, thus making it easier to read.

Ok, now I've removed the right hand table as suggested, 'blue filtered' the border and widened the whole thing to 750.
I can't really do much with percentages because of the way the table background images fit together. I tried it and it looked pants.
The board itself is now 620 wide which is ample I think.
So...
Howzat?

Cool! Yeah, much better

Definately, it fits together nicely that way. Good job

Quote: Originally posted by Bookworm
I can't really do much with percentages because of the way the table background images fit together. I tried it and it looked pants.

As The Webmistress stated, percentages really are the best way to go.

Sounds like you have a background image you really want to use and you are putting precedence on this over site functionality. 800x600 is the most commonly used resolution, but there are many who use 1024x768 or even higher. Percentage widths help make your site function reasonably the same in various resolutions.

Did you know that you can mix and match percentage widths with pixel widths? Say you have a column you want to accommodate a 150 pixel wide background. Go ahead and make that column 150 pixels. The browser will set aside that width and then everything else that's left over = 100%.

So in a 3-column layout you could have the left-hand column be 150 pixels and the right-hand column be 100 pixels and the center column be 90% (to allow a little breathing room on the sides). This will then "scale" according to the user's resolution settings and monitor size.

Just a thought.

Yes, I'm still working on it. I've got to re-think how the tables are layed out...
Mmmmph my brain hurts!

Well summarised TheGizmoid!
My brain hurts all the time! LOL

Yes, the links on the side are definetely too distracting.

I like the navigation implementation (the part that tells you what path you are in on the site with the little images).

~Chris