/naturesforce

c'est bon! I went on 'cyclones' though and it just looked like a whole lot of stuff copied from the interweb.

Actually I was just reading the other day about some web designers saying how bad this competition was as they favour eyecandy over valid coding skills. Taking a look at previous winners can see why, frames, iframes, IE only sites, flash and other stuff. eww they recommend Frontpage even

Anyways, about your site, the copyright and 'best viewed with ...' needs to be another colour, very hard to read black on dark grey.
To many styles of links, on one page you have (top) no underline on active or hover, red on hover, (side) no underline, no colour change on hover, (bottom) underlined on active and hover red, on hover.
the 'water', 'wind', 'fire' and 'earth' have little arrows under the links, but the links don't work, nor does any drop down list appear in firebird. (3rd browser I try it works) In IE the drop downs work but now the background links are orange. the small arrows are also beside the links in IE

Your top left volcano image IMO should be turned around, so the smoke is drifting out of the page, or recolour your top section to blend in instead of sharp stop. Even changing the image for each section could work.
Your site actually crashed NS4.7 - your best viewed with says " Best viewed at 800X600 Screen Resolution, medium text size, for IE4+ Netscape 4+"

Your navigation doesn't always work in IE, in IE place the top links just under the tool bar and mouseover a link, the drop downs don't work, thin kits trying to display above instead of below (IE 6).
Your also missing a couple of pages, wind/tornado/shape and size and fire/volcanos/how they erupt

Very interesting stuff, learnt a bit browsing over it all
Good luck in the comp

Interweb? I didn't copy information, I reworded some of it and wrote most of it myself. Mid you, when I did the cyclones page, I was in a bit of a rush. It should be okay though.

Busy: Thanks for those tips. It's a shame I can't change the information, uploading closed on the 3rd of September!
I am aware that the navigation doesn't work with some browsers (namely Firefox, Opera) but that is all apart of the 'free' package that I decided to take. I am beggining to think I should maybe have purchased the Menu building program from Extreeme. If I did, the menu would work with all common browsers.

Oh well, I suppose you always learn from your mistakes.

plenty of free cross-browser navigation systems out there.

Shame you didn't post this before the upload date past, probably weren't allowed to huh.

Let us know how you got on,
Just thought of something, I didnt read the rules, but are you allowed to enter that competition?

They aren't allowed any professional help Busy and the competition is open to all primary, intermediate, secondary and home school students.

I remember taking the same competition two years in a row when I was still back at school

Nice site sumeiko BTW. You definatly got the eye-candy thing going on there
Unfortunatly, I only have Firefox so I can't surf the site fully.

Good Luck

Thanks, Renegade. It's actually surprising how many people use browsers other than IE and Netscape. When I discovered that the navigation wouldn't work with all browsers, I assumed it wouldn't matter as most people use Internet Explorer anyway. Oh well.

Busy: I wish I could have shown you the Web site before uploading closed. It was indeed against the rules!

heh, yes, you should've gone with another menu script. The one you use now detects document.layers (Netscape) and document.all (IE), neither of which are recommended DOM methods. The standard one is document.getElementById(), which, ironically, both IE and Netscape support now. It's only pre-IE5 and pre-NS6 for which you have to worry about when using getElementById.

Mozilla browsers support getElementById and other recommended methods extensively. I'm not up on my Netscape news since recently, but I think Netscape 6+ uses the Gecko rendering engine (same as Moz), so it would have the same support as Mozilla's.

Yes, I really wish Firefox worked with this site. But for what it's worth, if I came across this site, I would stay to look around. The navigation looks like it would be easy -- I did expect the pictures to be clickable, though.

Over 30% of my readers use Mozilla/ Firefox.

Just to let you know, I didn't get anywhere in the web Challenge.

Instead, 3 Web sites, each with those annoying introduction pages and flash animations, took the lead.

Maybe another time.

You can see the winners at: http://www.tvnzwebchallenge.co.nz/site/winners/secondary.htm#individual

Just goes to show you, it's not what you know, it's who you know.

I reckon this comp is a crock, should be based on web standards etc rather than eye candy. What is this teaching up and coming web designers?

From that list of winners, the first two links (from top) are 100% flash (can't view them), next one has flash navigation so can't view the site (none so far use text links to by pass flash), next one uses flash but has a skip intro link, the rest are ok (no flash).
The sponsors and teachers should be wrapped over the knuckles.

Ah well. 'Eye candy' is given that name for a reason.

There are some very good elements about the winners' sites, but I think they're generally evidential of a disappointing trend in web design.

I think you were on the right track. Keep at it as you were.

It's interesting to hear about your different thoughts on Eye candy. Personally, I agree that the Web Challenge is rather unfair. In my opinion, the web site that got third was much better than the others.

Busy: Are you saying the Web Challenge is a kind of scam!? (Just goes to show you, it's not what you know, it's who you know.)

Are you suprised that they're all built in FrontPage? The bloomin competition is sponsored by Microsoft! Beyond that I wouldn't like to comment - don't particularly want a court summons for libel landing on the doormat!

Teaching kids how to do non-standard inaccessible web design is definately a bad idea, although I get the impression the exercise is a way to keep children entertained, barraging them with technical information and insisting they follow the standards set by W3C and section 508 could jeapordise the activity somewhat. So the creators of the competition can be forgiven, I don't imagine they are web designers themselves and are therefore as uniformly ignorant of standards based design as the contendees!

I would also hope that any participant in this competition seriously wishing to take-up web design as a career will find the W3C in their own time, and with good guidance from such people as those found on this forum they will find their way to the Zen Garden of XHTML and CSS (arf arf).

Finally (honest!) this is a double-edged sword, if the up-and-coming generation are really this ignorant about web design then our generation of designers are safe... Feelings on this are mixed, it's the difference between everyone doing things correctly (to standards) - which would make me happy - and our ability to stay one step ahead by offering a quantifiably better service - which makes me a rather immoral individual.

I guess the blame should go to todays schools (education system), they are the ones that should be teaching valid web design/development.
XHTML was released in 2000, I know schools are behind the times but this far behind ?

JeevesBond. I believe your hope they would venture into the right direction is misguided. Life is about taking the easy way, if you win a competition using frontpage or a template then you'd continue to use them as they are what won you the prize. The "experts" (judges) have commended you for taking the easy way out.

Note: the easy way in this case is not easy for the future, one day web strandards will rule the web and web designer/developers not following them will be left behind or will need to relearn their style. Look how many HTML books/tutorials teach people to write the code in uppercase, people learning this method have a hard time changing to XHTML (all lower case) already.

I agree. A lot of people, just looking at their Web sites (mainly the flash ones) have probably used templates. In fact, in the rules, templates are allowed.

The prizes for my category were really good, that was one of the reasons why I wanted to enter. First and second place were a Microsoft Office Specialist - Master Certification (MOS) which is valued at $6500 each. It's rather sickening to think that a prize like that is going to someone who didn't really earn it 100%

Abhishek told me that he didn't get anywhere in the same competition when he was at school, which in my opinion is rediculous because Abhishek has his own Web Design business!

Quote: I guess the blame should go to todays schools (education system), they are the ones that should be teaching valid web design/development.
XHTML was released in 2000, I know schools are behind the times but this far behind ?

It's far, far, far worse than you think.

Quote: The prizes for my category were really good, that was one of the reasons why I wanted to enter. First and second place were a Microsoft Office Specialist - Master Certification (MOS) which is valued at $6500 each. It's rather sickening to think that a prize like that is going to someone who didn't really earn it 100%

I'd personally advise you to reconsider the value of an MS Office suite. Programs like Word and Excel churn out non-standard code even when it comes to office documents -- they use proprietary standards that don't even work with older versions of the same software. They're only able to get away with this because of the ubiquity of MS Office as status quo, unlike the diversity of software and users on the internet. Whole new can of worms, so I won't open it here.

I wouldn't say the winners didn't earn it. Given the parameters of the contest, they've all won it legitimately. I think the general message here is that the organisers and the broader educational system is at fault for lagging behind technology so poorly, for whatever reason. The contestants may well have poured their heart and soul into their works; it's unfortunate that they might have been misdirected by the greater powers.

Quote: Abhishek told me that he didn't get anywhere in the same competition when he was at school, which in my opinion is rediculous because Abhishek has his own Web Design business!

Well, that's not entirely relevant, imo. It is possible for bad designers to go into business and even be successful (not saying anything particular about anyone), so that doesn't say much.

I agree that the schools and institutes of today do not focus much on standards of the web. All they are really looking for is eye candy as already mentioned. If it looks good then it will pass. Just this year, I have experienced this first hand. The web design course that I took didn't focus much on web standards. The closest thing that would probably come close would be that your site had to work across all major browsers.

*sign*

sumeiko, you still writing?
Maybe this would make a good story topic - eye candy vs standards

If you are, I also have another topic you may be interested in, wont mention it on the boards but if your interested PM or email me