Redesigned Site -

Hey Roo,
What a fun page, I think I qualify as an official "nerdette" . Personal pages are fun because you can experiment with different backgrounds, graphics, topics.... on each page.
I didn't look at all the pages but I got a good taste of your site. Very nice!! It was pretty slow though, you may want to move if the server doesn't improve.
Just a couple of things, some of your black text on the "borders" page overlapped the black border background image and wasn't readable. The title graphic "left border backgrounds" grey background also overlaps the border just a little bit (could be my small screen size). You can make the grey background of that title graphic transparent, ask me if you want directions on how to do that.
You can rename your title/index page so that when people bookmark you, or look on the top corner of their browser they will see "Haze Craze" instead of "index" keep the file name index and just rename the page.

Take care,

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Carolyn Jones

Thanks One question though, what is your screen resoulution set at. I design at 640X and check and tweak at 800X any higher and I just can't see well enough to work on it. The backgrounds have just all been done over hopefully to avoid that overlap.I am on a 17 in monitor I don't have a decent image editor yet that will let me make my gifs transparant, I hope to own Paint Shop Pro as soon as finances will allow.Yeah the serevr had a hard disk faliure over a week ago and the PHP server has been up and down and sooo slooooowwww for the past week. (Don't worry I've been on the phone complaining every day.) Hopefully they'll get thier act together soon!

my monitor is 640, if you want I can make that background transparent for you in a jiffy
What program do you use to make your graphics (backgrounds)? I think they're great!!!

take care,

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Carolyn Jones

I think if I just resize the table a tad I can avoid that overlap. The edge is a bit close to the border. Belive it or not I scanned a shirt my sweater a napkin etc. to make the backgrounds. The 'jewel' look was done by creating an image in PC Paitbrush and using the special effects to add noise and black hole effect, then I opened the image in my editor that came with my scanner a cheapy called Image In Color, I used the gamma, blur, and hue and saturation tools to edit the hell out of it to get that effect. I then make the image 92 pix long and paste it onto an image 1600 pix wide and just play with it from there. My main thing is that I want everything to be original!
My images have come a looonng way since I began. I'm dying to buy Paint Shop Pro the trial version ran out long ago.
Roo

Hey Roo,
wow your so inventive!!!
You'll have a blast when you get your paint shop pro up again.
I have about 200 background images on my hard drive and would like to get them onto my web site "new one" asap -- you could try out Adobe Photoshop, the trial version about 30mb's---HUGE is downloadable from the Adobe site. I don't know if there are any limitations on the demo. I tried pagemill and illustrator demos and they were fully functional for a time, but pagemaker had a "no saving" feature until unlocked. I also found a REALLY cool program called deep paint, it's also a time limited trial version http://www.righthemisphere.com
PSP is by far the most affordable, Corel photo paint is getting better and inexpensive too. I got the whole corel graphics suite version 4.0 (paint, draw, etc....) for about 50 bucks a couple of years ago. I'm sure you could find a newer version now for about the same price.

take care,

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Carolyn Jones

Hi,

1. I (and most of my visitors) don't like the select'n'go-things. How about an old-style navbar at the left ... there's free space anyway.
2. Kick the counters. You want to know how many hits you get. Your visitors don't.
3. Most of your images are aliased on white, but used on black. Change it or drop it.
4. Your mailto-links are not finished.
5. Some gfx/texts are almost unreadable.
e.g. the blue-bar on the (Commentary) special education page.

ciao
Anti

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Visit my work in progress at
http://webhome.nu/

Yeah the navigation has been an issue. See I insist on keeping all links on every page because most visitors come in on pages other than the homepage. At first I had a table with all text links, then changed it. I refuse to do lead in pages (you know breaking into catergory pages with the links to each catergory on that page, because I get irritated at 'click' spalsh page. 'click' homepage, 'click' catergory page then finally 'click' I'm where I wanted to be in the first place, personally I will leave a site rather than doing all that clicking. As for the left border links...well....I tried that and hated it, that's another thing that bugs me, page after, page, after page on the web with the links on the left all looking the same (boooorriinnggg) and making me scroll down to find them all. Tha's why i opted for the drop box, i originaly had a javacript jumpbox so there was no need to click 'go' but looking at my stats saw many 3X browsers soooo I ditched that. Hmmmm I have no black backgeounds, wonder where you're seeing that. Yeah some are white on the grey, one page is blue, one is pink. I'm sort of torn on that one I know it really shows, but it sort off adds some dimention too I think. Oh well that's one to think over. Could you tell me what page the borken e-mail link is on? gee I tested them all something must have slipped by me! And what;s your screen setting for the graphic text> I can see it fine and I have really bad eyes ! How do I 'kick the counter' and still be able to know hoiw many hits I have? I mean my purpose for it is to know if it's worth my while to put the time into maintaing this all or not.
Thanks,
Roo

Hi,

1. look at http://pages.cthome.net/hayescraze/buttkick.htm to see one of your non-black backgrounds

2. "broken" eMail-Links. the links are not broken. but a send-to-link bringing up an empty "new mail"-window isn't what i expect. how about a cgi ?? or at least pre load the subject (and the text) ...

3. look at http://pages.cthome.net/hayescraze/opinion.htm . the blue banner "Special Education ..." ... need I say more ??
(My resolution is 1024x768x32bpp at 85Hz on an 17"-Monitor).

4. Counting visitors without a counter:
Do you have access to the Logs ???
If not keep the counter and make it invisible.

Just my personal opinion as usual
ciao
Anti

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Visit my work in progress at
http://webhome.nu/

oops, you're right the animation is on a white background, originally that page was white. Problem there is that the graphics are on a white background and I have only cheap image editing software for now. When I paste or expot a gif, I can't make the backrounds transparant. Now I know why you're having probs with seeing the text image. I design at 640X tweak at 800X take a peek at 1024X however at 1024X I cannot see well enough to do ANYTHING! Maybe I should put the "best viwed below 2400X screen resoultion" back on again. I know that at 640 X I'm in the minority but it's a vision problem thing for me and my son. Most people run 800 X 600 and actualluy the 1024X res, setting is not used by MOST people just browsing but more by webdesigners etc. It looks fine at the other 2 settings. I'm on a 17 in Sony Trinitron Monitor but again your average everyday home PC user is on a 15 in.
On the mail to links, I think it would be a bit presumptious to include a subject heading, how the heck do I know what someone wants to say? On the counter well I don't see the big deal on that, yes I have access but would need to enable cookies to get the info and I refuse to do that, it's pain enough to enable cookies to do an upgrade. By the way I was checking some things and came across a grammar error, that NOBODY has caught yet LOL Now I can't remeber where it was! A biggy lately has been that it takes two and a half min for the server to answere how was that for you? Today they said "we were told it was fixed" ya right
Roo

You page is good...
about the navigation you should make a table on the left for your navigation, i think that would make it better. Good website thought.
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Ken Prescott
http://www.21studios.com

geez, I thought I'd never find this place again, I had to go to the main page and do a new bookmark! Anyway, I tried the left border link thing and didn't like it. See the thing I don't want if for the site to follow that left border link pattern that everybody seems to have, I want ORIGINAL!!!!! Plus I INSIST on have ALL links on every page to avoid the ' click' syndrome that's why I haven'r divided the site in a page that contains humor links, another page with poetry links and so on. I HATE that! Let me see what I want to see with one click. I also wanted to avoid the need to scroll to see all the links which is why I opted for the dropbox. I REALLY like the javascrpit jumpbox BUT........gotta consider the older browsers out there too;). I'm glad you like it though, I've added a humor page now I need to get it linked from all of those pages*sigh*. You should have seen my very first page........I won't even go there, it;s too painful and humiliating LOL!
Here's the new (unlinked) page
http://pages.cthome.net/hayescraze/piddy.htm
WARNING-Server still is screwy But Slloooowwwwllyyy being worked on........so they say:(
Roo

It's copyright 1998 becuause that's when it was created, you'll notice the copyright under my poetry some are in the 80's becuase that's when they were created, and the copyright that's on my entire book of poetry as a completion is 1997. The copyright date has to be for when your original work was created and not changed every year. You can get copyright forms from the Library Of Congress, Copyright office, costs 20.00 to submit something.
Roo

Hi Roo,
Exactly what problems were you having with finding the problems?

NB: You have a copyright 1998 image on your site, change it to '99.

JP

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