REVIEW REQUEST: bigwebmaster.com

It looks like it's missing something, maybe, not sure. The black sections don't seem right (still on my first coffee of the day) thought of trying the black and white switched around? Maybe the white is making it look discontected, can't put my finger on it.
the layout works in IE5 and Mozilla but doesn't work to well in Opera6 or NS4.7
in Opera6 (as opera) all the navigation is over top of each other and the blue section up top is about 50mm (2 inchs) deep with the links (add, bookmark etc) cramed at the very right.
Ns4.7 half the images aren't showing and your CSS isn't working so looks real messy.

Yeah the site is only going to look right in the latest browsers IE 6 and Netscape 7 currently. The reason being is because it requires much of what has been introduces with the latest standards.

I know for sure that the site is going to look wrong in Netscape 4.7. Why are you using that browser? That is like from 1998? All the browsers you are using are outdated. Just curious to why? According to my logs the majority of my traffic has up to date browsers.

As far as black sections, haha, I wasn't even aware I had black sections. Maybe has something to do with what you are seeing in the old browser?

Here is what the site should look like, and does in the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape:

So I am curious if what you are seeing is nothing like that.

hey there, yeah the site is clean and pretty simple (a good thing) and effective, i like it, smooth easy lines and some good animations which are fairly simple and funky. Only thing is (i know it may seems obvious) but, who are you, what are your intentions for the site and what is your projected market? The front page is more like a book stand rather than something that will catch your eye and keep your visitors, the last thing they want is more junk and advertising. Lacking a little something to jazz it up a bit and keep you interested, but yeah great place, will be visiting later me thinks

good effort
henry

Hi Henry. Well right now I am just entering books into the database. The front page simply shows the newest 10 listings. The audience is for all webmasters and when they submit their site they will also be featured on the main page if they are within the 10 newest listings. Its simply a huge resource index like:

http://www.hotscripts.com/

I have to start building up listings somewhere, and right now I have just been filling it up with books, and anything else others submit, but eventually it will be listing tons of scripts, tutorials, programmers who need work, and many other things.

Bigwebmaster, people still use old browsers for many reasons, one reason I use older browsers is because, my computer is old and can't handle too much.

Your site looks too dark, you have black boxes everywhere and it doesn't look too good. It seems too cluttered, try using a lighter colour, a lighter grey or something.

The navigation BTW is all squashed up the top.

I'm using Mozilla.

Does it look anything like in that screenshot I posted above? and I am not saying people do not use old browsers, I am just saying the majority of my visitors use up to date browsers (At least according to my server logs)

As far as black boxes, I have no clue what you mean. Any chance you could post a screenshot of this?

According to a this page:

http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat_trends.htm

which I found listed in Yahoo's directory reports these findings:

IE 6.x = 56%
IE 5.x = 37%
AOL = 5-6%
Gecko (Mozilla, Netscape 6+) 2.2%
Netscape 4.x = 1.6%
IE 4.x = 1.4%
Opera = 0.65%
Netscape 3.x < 0.05%

You can also see browser stats at the popular sourceforge site:

http://awstats.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/awstats.pl?framename=mainright&output=browserdetail

I just talked to a few others about the black sections, and I think you are referring to the menu on the left, as I have just noticed that the #333333 color for the menu actually turns up on black on their monitors. On my monitor which is an LCD monitor it looks like an elephant grey color(which is my intentions), not black.

so your making a webmasters resource site for only 56% of your viewers? (according to your stats listed above) that's a sad attitude to have and one that wont get you very far on the net. especialy when your trying to make money from it. (books are linked to amazon)

As Renegade mentioned people use older browsers for many reasons, a lot of people wont use beta stuff (IE6 has so many bugs it should be a beta verson), I know heaps of people who upgraded to IE6 only to get rid of it because of the bugs/issues etc. I like NS4.7 as it's a solid browser but many other people/places still use in including internet cafe's, Govt. departments, libarys ... so you're only cutting off a lot of people, (my main browser is mozilla or IE5)

If your up with the latest standard stats etc you'd know that IE and NS are probably the worst browsers to support any of the latest standards.
If your only making the site to the newer browsers that support the latest browsers why aren't you using the latest standards?? XHTML was released in 2000 but your still using HTML.
XHTML, CSS, XML, HTML ... can all be used across the browser board with little or no effort to make it universal for newer and older browsers.
if you want your menu and center sections elephant grey try #666666 (more greyer would be #999999)

Haha, well 56% is wrong. It is 82.9% at sourceforge for browsers that support my site currently, and 95.85% at the other link I gave you. According to you it works in IE5. I haven't verified that yet and I am not to that point yet. Secondly I am going to look into making the site as compatible as possible, but I really want the critique in the up to date browsers right now. I already know I have issues with the old browsers. So continuing to talk about that does me no good.

Next as far as linking to amazon, that is not my primary income. With the books I will make a 2-15% commission on, but that is just one resource on the site. Believe it or not the books are going to be the smallest part of the site (that is why I am doing it first). If you dig into the site some and goto any of the script sections you will see over 100 categories that are going to be totally filled up with sites. The majority of the site will be free resources. If you look at any of the major players like http://www.hotscripts.com/ or http://www.scriptsearch.com/ you will see both also have books for which they use their Amazon ID. My main purpose for providing the books, is because its just a resource and people use books as resources. I might as well profit on it if I can. I was planning on putting books there even if I did not make a small profit.

Everyone I know uses IE 6 with no problems. I am not saying its not buggy for some people though. Again I am going to make it more compatible with the the old browsers, and I appreciate you guys responding on that, however I get the point and I do not need to be critiqued there anymore. I would like to be critiqued on just the design (as how it looks) in either IE 6 or Netscape 7+ or the latest version of Mozilla.

"If your only making the site to the newer browsers that support the latest browsers why aren't you using the latest standards?? XHTML was released in 2000 but your still using HTML"

I did not say my whole site requires the latest standards. I am saying there are parts that the old browsers simply do not support. Like for instance, in the old browsers I cannot make flash transparent to put a layer on top to play with. With the old browsers Flash stays on the topmost layer no matter what you do. Netscape finally supports this transparency in Netscape 7.3 which allows you to place layers on top of it. Also I use VML which Netscape or Mozilla doesn't support, at least by default.

Yes I know how colors work. I want it at #333333 which is not black. So if #333333 is showing up as #000000 on your monitor, seems like its not my issue. Some people it show up as black because I think there monitors are darker. For others it shows up how I want. There is no way I can match the color on every monitor. If I made the gray #999999 the grey on my computer would not be the same gray on your computer. However I do see what you mean with the white part of the site in the main section not fitting in for some reason. I had that impression too, and am tryin to figure out what to do there.

Finally I just want to note that I hope you guys aren't taking my comments personally. I appreciate all the input you guys are saying but its not doing me any good when you focus on the old browsers right now. Thanks.

Quote: Originally posted by Renegade
The navigation BTW is all squashed up the top. I'm using Mozilla.

Can you do me a favor Renegade and go here:

http://www.microsoft.com/

I am curious to if there menu is squashed up on the top. Thanks.

I'm afraid to tell you that not a single one of my modern browsers on my Mac showed your page the way it was supposed to look.

Looking at your source code, I really think you're making things more complicated than you need to.
You have 90% of your layout done with tables (which is probably why the basic outline is working cross-browser).
Your divisions are what's making things fall apart because your mixing absolute and relative positionining with Microsoft code (which is buggy even on their own machines)

If you're interested, I can give you some urls to tutorial pages that can show you haw to make your layout work even on NS 4.
The simplest way to make it work would be to do away with some of your divisions and put your nav bar in table cells.

I know you're not concerned with backward compatibility (even though you are a "webmaster" site... ?), but it should work the same in the latest browsers.

I used the most modern browsers available for my Mac to look at your site: Explorer 5.2, Netscape 7.2, Opera 6 and Safari (my favorite browser).

Here are the screeshots and problems I saw:

IE 5.2
(http://cardinalart.com/bigwebmaster/IE5.jpg)
First the background of your logo isn't actually transparent so it covers part of your design at the top.
Also your nav bar doesn't seperate into it's individual sections. The white background layer runs your sections together.
The nav bar is also pushed up slightly into the logo.
The bottom of the screen (http://cardinalart.com/bigwebmaster/IE5_bottom.jpg) also has a problem because your light grey layer is adding extra height that shouldn't be there.
The layout is usable, but not as tidy or pretty as you want it.

NS7.2
(http://cardinalart.com/bigwebmaster/NS7.jpg)
Your nav bar looks right, but your logo still isn't transparent.
I know you are doing your logo this way so it can move, but honestly logos shouldn't flash and move constantly... it's distracting.
You may want to think about making that a fixed gif. This could also solve your trasparent background problem, since it didn't work in IE or NS.

Opera6
(http://cardinalart.com/bigwebmaster/Opera6.jpg)
This had the worst compatibility of all the new browsers. You can see what happened from the picture, but as you can tell, your page is unusable in Opera.

Safari
(http://cardinalart.com/bigwebmaster/Safari.jpg)
This is the newest Mac browser and is the most standards compliant browser out there (at least for the Mac), so if you want newer Mac users with OSX to be able to see your page, they will probably be using this.
Your background on your logo is finally trasparent , but now there are a couple "pretty" problems with your layout (which I wouldn't worry about too much right now).
The biggest problem is your nav bar again. Now your white background is gone and all your layers are overlapping, making the navigation useless again.

What I've found is if you want to make your page work (even in only the latest browsers) it's best to begin your design for the oldest browsers first, then add goodies to it for the newer ones.
use the import rule for the css that doesn't work in older browsers (@import) and don't rely on browser specific code for anything important.

You have a great looking page... I hope you will take the small amount of time it would take to make it work for at least ALL the major browsers.

btw: I have been working on my own design to make a css layout without using tables that will work even in NS4. It's been an uphill battle, but I'm nearly there and it's really worth it to spend the effort to make it work.

Thanks for all the screenshots, I will look into it. As var as the divisions, that is really only used with the two cords (red and blue) in the top part of the browser. The problem there is that I need it to fit those around the flash Bigwebmaster logo and over the top of the upper table so that the cord looks like its going behind the site. That has been a buggy part of the site like you have mentioned, as I had to write Javascript to make corrections to the positioning in Netscape browsers (since its so buggy like you said). Very much a pain for me there.

Anyway if you have a better suggestion how to produce that same effect please let me know, I would be interested. Thanks

K,

There are only a couple of things I could add here

1) Just me maybe, but I absolutely loathe sites that play with the toolbar colour and/or change my cursor when I mouseOver stuff (e.g.the banner at the top) Natty CSS effect but why? Generally found on Tripod sites along with thos irritating javascripts that add "welcome to my home page" to the mouse trail.

2) TYou are displaying a lot of reults in each category. For example there are 33 ColdFusion books listed and it really stretches the page. Try breaking it down by adding a next page link or similar.

3) Are you running the site from a DB or is it static HTML? If you're not running it from a DB, I speak from experience that this would not be a good thing. As your directory grows so will your need to display things dynamically. Not to mention making it easier to update the site.

4) Seeeing a load of categories with no resources in it is not going to do you any favours. I found it slightly disconcerting. No problem with choice of categories but I would try and pad out the number of resources in eact cat before displaying a zero

5) The expanded directory aka site map is WAY scary. Hundreds of links on a page is not the most user friendly method to employ. Maybe just display the main categories and leave the subs for now?

6) Make the Big Webmaster logo in the top right a link back to your homepage. You would be surprised how many people click this expecting to go back to the home page.

7) If you are going to use just Amazon books then you may want to check out Amazon's web services. In a nutshell you will be able to pull ALL the books within a specific category in Amazon into your site. Complicated to set up but it could be worth the effort.

At any res of over 1024 x 768 the text on the left hand nav becomes uncomfortably small.

9) As per busy's post, design for a worst case scenario and that way you'll please everyone!

Quote: Originally posted by Karen Cardinal
I know you're not concerned with backward compatibility (even though you are a "webmaster" site... ?), but it should work the same in the latest browsers.

I think many have misunderstood me here, its probably my fault. I am concerned and the site will "eventually" support every single browser, however, it is not my focus right. My focus is developing a layout I am comfortable with. I know the way you mentioned is to start out by working with the old browsers first, and then working up to adding "extras" for the newer browser, which I do think is a great idea, however, I did not approach this project that way. The design is pretty much done, I am just trying to add the final touches and change things around so that I am happy with how it looks. Once that is complete, I plan to spend much time making it support the numerous browsers out there.

Anyway again the screenshots are nice, helps me alot, since its hard to grasp what things look like in this sense when you explain by words, I appreciate that.

Hi Flipper,

Very good critique, exactly what I am looking for.

"1) Just me maybe, but I absolutely loathe sites that play with the toolbar colour and/or change my cursor when I mouseOver stuff (e.g.the banner at the top) Natty CSS effect but why? Generally found on Tripod sites along with thos irritating javascripts that add "welcome to my home page" to the mouse trail."

Never realized that bugged anybody. Its an effect that can be changed in about 2 seconds. I may change it.

"2) TYou are displaying a lot of reults in each category. For example there are 33 ColdFusion books listed and it really stretches the page. Try breaking it down by adding a next page link or similar."

Good idea, I may do that as well, since the page loads alot of thumbnail graphics for each entry. Would speed up load time.

"3) Are you running the site from a DB or is it static HTML? If you're not running it from a DB, I speak from experience that this would not be a good thing. As your directory grows so will your need to display things dynamically. Not to mention making it easier to update the site."

Yes the whole site is managed by a database which creates the static html pages from templates I have made. So when I need to fix something I simply edit the template, and then run the script to re-create all the pages. I would be nuts to do each and every page by hand. The site already has approximately 1000 pages, and the site really doesn't have much in its categories yet.

"4) Seeeing a load of categories with no resources in it is not going to do you any favours. I found it slightly disconcerting. No problem with choice of categories but I would try and pad out the number of resources in eact cat before displaying a zero"

Thought about that. My main reason for keeping all those categories, even if they are empty, is because any programmer can add their own cgi script or resource to the directory (using the add resource link at the top). I would prefer that they place it in the category that matches their resource the best. If I simply get rid of all those categories they will be placing it in a general category which I do not want.

"5) The expanded directory aka site map is WAY scary. Hundreds of links on a page is not the most user friendly method to employ. Maybe just display the main categories and leave the subs for now?"

Hehe, well those are all the categories on that whole site. There are no individual listings on that page. If I put the listings on that page too then you would really think its scary. It is simply a site map of every category on the site.

"6) Make the Big Webmaster logo in the top right a link back to your homepage. You would be surprised how many people click this expecting to go back to the home page."

Very good point. I will add that. I think you mean top left though (unless you are using an old browser which makes the logo on the wrong side haha).

"7) If you are going to use just Amazon books then you may want to check out Amazon's web services. In a nutshell you will be able to pull ALL the books within a specific category in Amazon into your site. Complicated to set up but it could be worth the effort."

Hmmm, may have to look into that. Not sure though if that will work do to the way each book has its own detailed page. (Click on details on any listing and you will see. For example what some detail pages look like:

http://www.bigwebmaster.com/170.html
http://www.bigwebmaster.com/4.html

Not sure I can do that with what you just mentioned, but I will look into it.

"8) At any res of over 1024 x 768 the text on the left hand nav becomes uncomfortably small."

I use 1280x1024. I suppose it just depends on how big your monitor is in this case. I am on a 17 inch screen. Anyway I see your point, but any idea how you might approach this issue?

"9) As per busy's post, design for a worst case scenario and that way you'll please everyone!"

Working towards that. Not immediate priority (will be eventually here though). Thanks.

Another point on this comment

"5) The expanded directory aka site map is WAY scary. Hundreds of links on a page is not the most user friendly method to employ. Maybe just display the main categories and leave the subs for now?"

I already display the main categories on the far left side bar on every page of the site. As you see I have them broken down by just the top most categories, instead of going down deep into each category on that side bar.

The purpose of the site map is to also have those top most categories as well as every sub category. It does not list actual category "listings" though. Its just giving an overall "map" of the site.

Just remember you're making the site for other people, not yourself. You shouldn't rely on flash, javascript or any other bells and whistles that can be turned off for anything important like layout etc.
Just a suggestion, recode your site to XHTML (trans) standards and you could be surprised how much more browser support you could get. The way your doing it is the long way (make your site nice then adjust to suit) and will make way more work for yourself.

Do it once, do it right.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
If it can be turned off, it will be turned off.
...

If you have lots of pages on your site then a site map, linked to from your index page, will also help the search engines crawl through the entire site.

Quote: Originally posted by The Webmistress
If you have lots of pages on your site then a site map, linked to from your index page, will also help the search engines crawl through the entire site.

Exactly, that was the other purpose of it, and actually one reason I am considering putting every listing in there too. However that page would be insanely big if I did that as eventually I will have over tens of thousands of listings (well thats the plan).

I've skimmed most of the other comments here so forgive me if I'm repeating stuff.

The site looks the same to me in Opera 7, Mozilla 1.? and IE6.

One of the things that bothers me is the variations in font sizes. THe page headers (on the blue bars) are way too big in comparison with the rest of the text. The navbar on the left is a little on the small side. There's a lot of horizontal space available there so you could certainly make those bigger without a problem.

Overall (and this is just a personal opinion) I find this site to be rather dark and dungeon-like. With so much black and dark grey, it isn't a site I want to spend a lot of time on. The colour scheme could use a lift Also incorporate more of those screw and pipe graphics - the whole design needs a bit more character and going further with those 3D effects would be an improvement.

1 comment for me is that the page seems too long to scroll from a user perspective.

Maybe you could break pages into more subcategories?

You're really going to have to break up thos pages listing the books (for example). Im on cable and it took a full 2mins to load the Flash Books so a dial up would have keeled over by that point!

Yeah I will break it down to 10 listsing per page. I think that is a good number.

I did a quick edit in photoshop to give an idea what the site might look like with shades of light gray instead of black. I am curious to which you guys like better, the colors the current design found here:

http://www.bigwebmaster.com/

or

http://www.bigwebmaster.com/alternate.jpg

I prefer the grey with black text.

How about an off white for the resource directorys instead of the grey or black

What do you guys think of this maybe for the background? Better than the solid white? Click the thumb to see it enlarged.

Hello
I like the layout of the site, its differant,the colours are nice, i dont use an old browser so it looks as it should to me, but i think as you are expecting a large viewing audience then you should cator for the other browsers also, my site is small and just for friends, but ive optimised it for 3 screen sizes and 3 browsers.
( I think the grey background is a bit busy, maybe plain grey. i actually like the site the way you have it)(we are all differant)although you do need an intoduction type paragraph, telling people your purpose.
I will add your site to my list of links.
Good luck with the site.

Bigwebmaster, not too keen on that new background you've added in there, maybe just a very light shade of grey, not pure white? That would look awesome.

Nice site, and the greys are viewable on my screen.

Okay how bout some of these, what do you think is the best. The light grey's are near the problem. I just did a wide range so I can get good feedback on what people like best before I commit to one.

#000000

#222222

#444444

#666666

#888888

Or these

#aaaaaa

#cccccc

#eeeeee

Or any of these, I put a few gradient ones below:

#Gradient1

#Gradient2

#Gradient3

#Gradient4

i think i prefer the #eeeeee one mate.

#cccccc

I'm with Busy on this one

I agree with busy as well.

I took a look at your code and it really needs to be cleaned up, half the compatability problems you have are because of the junk code in the site; you have said that this will be dealt with later, but basic layout and code templates need to be created at the start of the develpoment life cycle...Not as an afterthought. I'm not trying to be rude, you will save a lot of time and effort getting these things right at the start

definitely a good point

I am not sure what junk code you are referring but it has been cleaned up a great deal since this post had started, and it is compatible for IE, Netscape and Opera. Still resolving compatibility problems with Netscape 4.7 and the like though, other than that its looking the same on all browsers for me. Tell mw which browser you are seeing problems on if its not Netscape 4.7 or earlier you are looking through. Also what junk code are you referring to? I am really curious to what you think is junk code. I write all the code myself. Thanks.

I personally like #EEEEEE the best. It just takes a shade off of
white without really taking away from your original desing idea.

I think the site is coming along nicely, btw.

Okay guys, the background has been changed to a darker color. More settle now?

Check it out: http://www.bigwebmaster.com/

definitely better for that change!

I like the website. It loaded fast on my computer and the directory is very organized. Only thing is that its lacking a lot of content in some of the categories but I assume the site is new and growing.

The site isn't new but the directory with all the content is. It is totally different than what it used to be and yes we are constantly trying to build the content up. It is very very time consuming as there are many places to fill

Thanks for the comment

To be honest, I'm just kind of clicking through links here and all since I just found the site. I know it's a common courtsey to 'review' someone elses site before you ask for input on your own site and all ... so that's how I came about finding your site. My first thought was .... too much all at one time. In fact, I clicked through the ez html site... and you know what. It's the "perfect" webpage. It tells you flat out what the site is about, it's clean, well laid out ... in fact, as soon as I get done here with a few posts, I'm gonna head over there.

But anyway, the bigwebmaster site - I'm not in any boat to cast stones and all, but what struck me was a kind of need to grab the beginners who are trying to do html. If the first part of the page has asp, jsp, cgi etc. then it kind of loses the folks who don't know what that is. Don't get me wrong, I bookmarked the site and I will visit it often, you have a ton of great resources.

But that's my 2 cents worth.

Nice site and lots of content.. i like the flashes at top and bottom.. nice work!
the site is kinda plain .. maybe a background picture?

your logo has to be way better Make it plain..but big and funny looking. None of those cracks or anything. Make it a "Big" logo

I can see everything just fine. Your main focus stands out and the colors you chose really fits with the site. Looks nice.