Now we can get personal

Todd, you have a nice looking family except for that ugly old man in the picture. Oh that's you, sorry (just kidding).

• First thing that I would do is fix that picture. It appears that you are letting the browser do the resizing for you. That rarely works. I would go ahead and resize it yourself.
• Some of things (besides Frontpage) that I never like are guestbooks. They are quite unprofessional but you can always blame it on the kids.
• The mouseovers on your navbar are nice. I can't say the same for whatever kind of border that is around the links. It looks like a MS Word border. Me no likely that as well as the top border thingy. Nor do I like the backgound preferring solid colors myself.
• Another problem creeps up on the photo pages. The problem is that the pictures are all different sizes. This is made to look worse by the light background. I would try to set the pictures in some boxes in your table that are all the same size. Make these boxes with a border and make the color darker. I guess that I would look at it like the pictures at your house. You don't just tape the picture to the wall you put them in a frame and then put them on the wall. Right now they look like they are just stuck up there with tape. In addition to framing the pictures, you could make all the thumbnails the same size and have the regular size pictures their current size.

It is hard for me to judge sites by genre. I prefer to judge them by how close they come to achieving perfection. The main thing that I would do is to fix the picture pages. I would give it two snaps but no twist.

Love you mairving,
I'm beginning to count on you as the one who cuts through any and all BS and gets right to the point (that's good). All pictures are native sized. Resizing through the browser is a big no-no I've never been guilty of.

The picture album thumbs are all in tables, in fact every character I've ever put into a web page is in one. I used the built in auto-thumbnail feature of FP to create the thumbnail pages. Insert the full sized picture, select it, and hit the thumbnail tool button and you get a true size reduced thumbnail picture hyperlinked to the full-sized one. Basic, but a huge time saver. This feature is governed by the paramaters you set under page options. As I recall, I picked longest side=100pixels. Fact is you can't optimally crop each picture (my choice) and still get perfectly uniform thumbnail sized pictures.

Mouseoverers are compliments of, you guessed it, Front Page. I have no clue of how to do it myself.

All pages should be well designed, but I can't believe the same design style and tone is equally appropriate for widely divergent target audiences.

There is a huge, major problem with the photo albums that people should be hammering me about, but the fact is no one on four different forums has mentioned it. Who will discover the obvious first?

PS Yes I am old, but I make up for it by being obsessively out of shape. Thanks for the two snaps and for listening to my twist.

As personal sites go it's not bad. But I do agree with mairving that I would never judge a site by comparing it with others in the same genre but comparing it with what is generally a great site. Just because it's a family site doesn't mean that it can't be the best ever site on the internet!

Again like mairving, I don't like patterned/textured backgrounds and the buttons/logo borders do look a bit templatey. If you have even a basic graphics program I'm sure you can come up with something better.

The links down the side could also be a tad smaller if you want to list them all there as they make the page longer than the actual content. Space out the thumbnail images better as they look squashed up with loads of space at the bottom of the page. Again I would try to make them all a consistant size using a graphics program. I would also put a back button on the page containing the large image (although I prefer a pop-up window for enlargements of photos - ok someones gonna hate that idea!)

The advantage you have with a personal site is that you can keep messing about with it, trying out new ideas.

I've been wrestling with that whole idea of opening the selected photos in a new window as well. I'm leaning that way now. Novice question: How much, if any, control do I have over the size of the new window that opens? If the new window is just big enough for the picture. and appears on top of the larger album page, visitors are less likely to get confused. I had considered making the albums two frame pages (who screamed?), with a scroll of thumbs in one frame and the selected full-sized picture in the other. Would this be an advisable use of frames? Are frames ever acceptable?

Providing any kind of navigation, back button or otherwise, with the full-sized pictures is unlikely. The large photos have no .htm page and are simply image files viewed directly by the browser. There's not much point in going to the trouble to give them a page. This is consistent with 95% of sites out there that have you click a thumb for a full sized picture and what people are used to.

Great nav-buttons! They're different and cool and that's what I like. But I'd make them a bit smaller (height) so that the scrollbar on the right won't show up.

Oh yeah, another thing came up: Why doesn't the dog has it's own Photo page?

Well Todd I really like the start you've got here.
I've never been one to visit personal pages, vut you do have some funny and interesting stories that I actually read.
(next time you mow down a deer let me know, we could use the venison...lol)

I have always liked the idea of creating a new page for each picture with a story about the picture on the page.
(like you did with the picture of the nannies)
You may say that "The large photos have no .htm page... This is consistent with 95% of sites out there... and what people are used to."
Come on! You wouldn't be asking for advice here if you didn't want your site to be better than the average pages most people see on the net.

I may be the only one who does this, but I go to quite a few sites where every pop up is an ad for something I just HAVE to spend my money on, or somewhere I just HAVE to visit. When all these annoying ads get to be too much for me I surf with a couple extensions on my browser that kills pop ups...
so if your site has vital information, or really cool pictures in a pop up, I'm not going to see it.
(of course I'm probably in the minority on this, so you may not worry about it at all)

Now I won't pick on you about the elements that were created in Front Page. I don't even know how to use it.
(I usually write my code with notepad, or use Adobe GoLive if I have a particularly complicated layout to do)

I would like to see either the thumbnails enlarged and more information added to each page to fill in the dead space, or have the links made smaller.

I have really enjoyed seeing your sites and think you are doing a good job with trying to create a site with your page editor.
The only other thing I may suggest is to go to some of the sites (like Quadzilla) to begin learning how to write your own HTML. It really isn't as scary and complicated as you may think and it can become addictive once you get into it.

Thanks for the look. I hope you keep creating your sites.
Enjoy
Karen

Jack,
I did a search for "HTML for canines" and came up empty. I guess she won't write her own page anytime soon.

I can't take any credit for the cool nav buttons. The page banners, nav buttons, page background, heading styles, and color schemes are part of the single pre-packaged theme that I chose from the many that Front Page offers. My getcleaned.com site used to have these swirly arcs for nav buttons, but everyone convinced me to dump them for text links because they were even bigger and more cumbersome.

You can create your own themes or modify any part of an existing one. That means I could probably resize the nav button gif in PShop and substitute it in the theme. I just don't know how that will impact the rollover effect (which is also part of the theme).

Front Page does save you a ton of time. I had the home page done in my first five minutes of work. I finished the entire site in a day and a half, and was only left with the fine tuning and tweaking till now. The pros (particularly the elitists) can spot a FP site in a heartbeat, because they recognize the more popular themes and their left and top navigation borders.

Karen,
(Your site is very pretty, BTW) I'm not "afraid" of HTML and I occaisionally edit the FP generated code or insert stuff into it. I was a hell of a software jock, back in the 70's and I love programming. However nowadays I need big results in a short time frame.

I wasn't considering having the photos "pop-up" uninvited. I was just going to open them in a new window, instead of the next frame" when you click on the thumbnail.

Enlarging the thumbnails would have a real negative impact on load times, meaning many more people would "back out" and not view the albums. As it is, I had to break things down into multiple albums to keep load times where they are.

Doing a story page for every picture is certainly doable, but for the most part, they're just the cutest snaps I came across while rummaging through the shoeboxes in the closet. My best story for these is in the caption on the thumbnail page. If I concocted a laimo story for every one of those pictures, the true worthy gems, like the nanny reunion picture would get lost in a sea of duller stuff. I can't imagine any visitor other than grandma wants to read "Here's Paige picking out a pumpkin on Oct 17, 1998." I figure they just want to look at the pictures.

How come nobody has yet discovered the big unfixed mistake I made with the pictures?

My biggest current hobby is digital video. Recording on a mini-DV tape, firewire to the PC, edit with Studio DV software, then pipe it back out to mini-DV, mpeg-2 for DVD or SVCD burning, mpeg-1 for VCD burning and of course real video files for the web. I only have one test video on the site now (it's on Cathie's page), but I plan to add a video album in the near future. Question for the forum is should I stick with real player format, and hope people have or install the plug-in, or should I go with Windows Media Player format? Some sites do both, but that would be time consuming if not necessary. Opinions on this?

Quote: My biggest current hobby is digital video. Recording on a mini-DV tape, firewire to the PC, edit with Studio DV software, then pipe it back out to mini-DV, mpeg-2 for DVD or SVCD burning, mpeg-1 for VCD burning and of course real video files for the web.

. Yeah, I got the same setup a Canon DV camera and the Pinnacle Studio DV. I have a new Firewire scanner coming in today. Hopefully it will work with the Pinnacle card. But I digress. I actually hate both formats but I hate Realplayer the least. It will work on more systems. The Windows Media Player probably won't work on other systems. You should also consider quicktime even though Pinnacle doesn't really have a port for it. The quality is better IMHO.

Incidently I have a bro-in-law that is from Sparta, NJ. He is a nice guy even though he is a Yankees/Giants fan.

Quote: I did a search for "HTML for canines" and came up empty.

Check http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~bobhay/malamute.htm
Maybe they can help your dog

(To be honest: I found that page by searching at good old Altavista on 'HTML for canines' )

I confess. I lied. I never did do a search for Html for canines. You guys don't let anything get by you. Unfortunately Kelsey is not a malamute. She is half Wheaten Terrier and half reindeer. If you think I'm fibbing look here: http://muncyfamily.com/images/KelseyReindeer-Big.jpg

Thanks for keeping me honest Jack.

I think you need to get rid of FP, I personaly think its holding you back. HTML isnt hard to learn, you say you already edit your pages so wouldnt take much to make complete ones.
FP (like the others) adds so extra poop, this site cries out Frontpage, so it joins the rest of them, You have put some time in content wise so thin kyou'd be better off doing it all yourself - properly.
Graphics are easy to make as well, or there are millions of free graphics sites out there. If you use a template from FP, be asured someone else out there has the same layout, graphics, look as you.

You have two pages for everyone, ...'s page, then photos of ...'s. shouldnt the photos or at least links of the photos be on the persons page?

If you do keep the guestbook, place the link (button) at the end of links, people usually work from the top down, how can they comment if the guestbook is up top, let them look then sign.

As said before, you cant compare personal pages as they as or should be a reflection of the person/s. But in saying that you are way above most out there, I am sooooo glad you dont have midi's playing on entering, you give the option, you dont have the lake applet, you dont have the animated background, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Btw you have a very talented daughter there

I like you "little" house out in the country

:jester: LOL!

Great pic!