Review new webmaster resource site

Please watch your language!

(SWD was upset because he got an error message)

that sucks

Your code is a mess (how many repetitions of the same font tag do you need?) and doesn't validate.

I use dreamweaver can one of you clean it up for me please?

Welcome to TWF webchest! Interesting concept for a site - the chest idea could work well. I like the way you've done your logo - it might be a neat idea to have a pile of code spilling out of the chest. I also prefer the text you have on the newsletter and search buttons - maybe replace the logo text with something more like that. And put something in that blank space there beside it.

Unfortunately I don't think it's likely that you'll find someone here to clean up that mess you've got with the code. What you need to do is learn how to do it yourself. Get an HTML editor that does search/replace so you can get rid of all those font tags. THen learn how to use cascading style sheets so you can define your fonts in a global stylsheet instead. Wait.. I notice that you do have some css in there - do all your fonts with CSS, it's just much easier.

I find your basic layout to be quite good but it seems like it wasn't implemented the way it should have been. Everything under the "featured site of the week" header seems like it was just thrown in there with no consideration of visual layout. The search box should definitely be further up the page... why do you have two search forms on there anyway?

Now I'm trying to figure out what that stuff is in the main content area. It's all just confusing me. I would get rid of all the little details about what was moved or renamed or changed (because nobody cares) and just keep a list there of new listings, most popular links, your free template, and stuff like that.

Wow, Dreamweaver has overdone itself on the code this time. The code didn't much look like DW since I saw no MM_tags anywhere.

• The code is probably one of the worst things about the site. You have to understand that each time it sees a font tag, it has to process that tag, making for much slower page loads.
• Logo - the logo works for me.
• Navbar - oops, shouldn't all of our links be inside the navbar, not hanging out in the open there. Also the top bar has a light blue streak in it but the botton doesn't. I don't get it.
• >> I always hate to see those used as bullets.
• Text - hey, it's black at least but a little too small. Also the links would be better with a little hover color change on mouseover.
• Page length - the page is a bit too long
• Page layout - it looks like that you took all of your links and graphics and mixed them up and then slung them at the screen. The page layout lacks precision.

We will be glad to help but you have to do the work. Here is what to do to remove the font tags. First you will use .css. This can be either internal or external. An internal stylesheet would go between the <style></style> tags. The problem with using an internal stylesheet you have to change it on every page that you have. An external stylesheet is better since you can link to one stylesheet and make global changes very quickly. Dreamweaver will let you edit stylesheets. Bradbury has a free version of a stylesheet editor that is pretty good.

So if you create a stylesheet called style.css, you will link to it in the head section of your pages like such: <LINK REL="STYLESHEET" TYPE="text/css" HREF="style.css">

Now in that stylesheet, you can control how different tags render text. You could have something like this:
P { font-family:verdana, helvetica, arial, geneva, lucida, sans-serif; color:#000000; font-size:13.4px }
This means that everything that there is a <P> tag it will be formatted as such. You can use pt, px for your size.
You can also have some kind of rollover links like this:
A { text-decoration:none; font-weight:bold}
A:link { color:#}
A:visited { text-decoration:none; color:# }
A:active { text-decoration:none; color:# }
A:hover { text-decoration:underline; color:# }

Another thing that you can do with stylesheets is create classes. Classes start with a .(period) and look something like this:
.big { font-family:verdana, helvetica, arial, geneva, lucida, sans-serif; color:#000000; font-size:15px; font-weight:bold }
You can call the class in a tag like so:
<td class="big">Big Text</td>

To get rid of your font tags, you would replace the :
<font color="#000000"><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"><font size="5" color="#FFFFFF" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"<>font color="#000000"<>font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#0033CC" size="2"<

with this in your stylesheet:

P { font-family:Arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
color:#000000; font-size:13.4px }

and this is your code:

<P>

That is it. So simple and works pretty well. You can do other stuff in stylesheets like messing with your scroll bar or bgcolors. I kind of like using this one some:

P.opener:first-letter { font-size: 300%; color:#CCCCFF; float:left; font-weight:bold }

Which creates a large first letter for paragraphs. You can also use:
P { text-indent:5px} to indent paragraphs.

I agree with all that's been said and css is definitely the way to go. I too use DW4 and I opened your first page in it and in DW4 there is a command to Clean up HTML and I did this on your page and it bought up the following:
- 147 empty tags to be removed
- 241 redundant tags to be removed
- 24 font tags to be combined