REVIEW REQUEST: Newbie-developer.com

Well, it isn't over interesting. You could use some color to liven up the place.

Are you aware that you have your meta tags before the html, head tags?

Also, you need to go through your code and fix all of the errors. One big thing I saw was lots of tags out of order.

Lets say you want the word "hello" to be red, bold, italic and centered.
Do it like this:

HELLO

Not like this:
HELLO

A good way to remember this is to close all of your tags in the reverse order that you opened them. (if that makes sense)

If you open a tag, be sure and close it. And if you open a tag, say inside a table cell then it should be closed inside the same cell that you opened it in. Not outside of the cell.

You have several spelling errors as well. Run your text through spell check or have someone else look over it.

I think the site is great, although I guess it could use some extra color. But since you made the site from one of those portal scripts, you'd have to hack the script to really customize it, it looks very professional.

disaster-master: thanx for letting me know about the out of order tags. its not because i dont know how html formats itself but alot of times when i am 'programming,' my mind goes somewhere else!. As for the meta-tags, it doesn't make a difference if it is in the head tag or before the html tag.

Quote: Originally posted by Archbob
...But since you made the site from one of those portal scripts, you'd have to hack the script to really customize it, it looks very professional.

I didn't make the site from a portal script! i wrote all of the code for newbie-developer.com
the reason there aren't more colors, because it doesn't look professional with more than 4 colors. you should know about colors, being a webmaster.

thanx for the quick replies.

hey disaster-master, did you see any other places in my code where the tags were out of order other than where i openned inside the cell and didn't close them?

Quote: its not because i dont know how html formats itself but alot of times when i am 'programming,' my mind goes somewhere else!.

that is not a good excuse for writing invalid code IMO.

Quote: As for the meta-tags, it doesn't make a difference if it is in the head tag or before the html tag.

I don't think it would hurt anything to have your meta tags before your but it certaintly isn't going to help. Also, according to the big guys, that is not the correct structure for an HTML document.

BTW, here are the W3C validation results for your site

Quote: hey disaster-master, did you see any other places in my code where the tags were out of order other than where i openned inside the cell and didn't close them?

Here is an HTML check from Netmechanic.com that will help you find your errors.

that is not a good excuse for writing invalid code IMO.
I know its not a good excuse... but its the only one i got! lol

I moved the meta-tags to the "right" place

Thanx for your time. BTW: since you guys dont like the colors, i am working on making newbie-developer.com skin-able. that way you can choose how you want the colors to look

again, thanx

Not sure if you have changed the color yet or not but at first glance I like the color scheme.
You may need to change your link colors and/or font color, the link in your text part is hard to make out, the colors blend to much.

page wont display on NS4.7 and the td bgcolor change only works on IE. the table borders in opera6 ruin the bottom section, you can have the same effect with a nested table using black background and cellspacing and padding to suit on the outer table.
the web ring links on mouseover are white, add a seperate style sheet for those links. also the red text is to bright, maybe a yellow (darkish) or something.
your margins arent at zero in Opera or NS (guessing about NS as it wont load), fix this by adding marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" to your body tag
also a javascript error in opera6 when mousing over the php source image

Thanx busy, i also like the color scheme.
umm, thats one of the major problems i have, i have always coded for internet explorer. i cant stand netscape. their is ony what... not even 7% of the ppl in the world use netscape.(according to some stats i saw somewhere)
i will add the marginheight="0" marginwidth="0", thanx for letting me know about that.

dont believe the stats you read around the web.

You should get Opera6, code for that and it will usually work in all 3 (IE, NS and Opera)

Browser usage can really vary a lot depending on the type of site you're designing. I know that a lot of people in the government and education sectors use NS quite a bit still (in Canada anyway if not elsewhere). I have a site that consistently registers about 30-40% with Netscape. Best to check your stats before you stop coding for any particular browser.

The way I look at it is you never know who your 'potential' visitors are and just because you have always had low amounts of NS traffic doesn't mean that that wont change in the future, especially if the site suddenly gets picked up by a new SE or something!

the stats on my site show that over 90% of the visitors use MSIE.
plus i dont know how to code with tables for netscape...

It seems to me that you have your mind made up and plan to leave your site as is but one thing I would like to comment on is...I don't think anyone should "code" for any particular browser. If you write valid code for your tables, it should work fine in all browsers.

If you have mistakes in your code, IE is much more forgiving and will make your mistakes look at least half way decent. If you are serious about what your site will look like in other browsers you should make sure that you have no mistakes.

i have heard about this conflict for a long time, but really paid no attention to it. But now it is acually making a difference it seems, so i am gonna' go "re-learn" html and javascript. not really re-learn, but sharpen my skills. does anyone know where some good tutorials/arcticles are about coding tables with netscape? any special attributes that you dont use in IE?

thnx,
korndragon

Korndragon, I usually just test stuff in NS 4.7. If it works there it works most everywhere. It's not difficult to code for NS. Some of the main things to remember are:

• Make sure that your empty cells aren't. Put a &nbsp in them to keep them from collapsing.
• Make sure to close your tags. IE doesn't care all that much but NS is much more compassionate.
• Turn off your margins with marginwidth=0, marginheight=0.
• Some things like changing the color on hyperlink rollovers, colored scrollbars, etc. will not work in NS. But they are only eye candy anyway. The links will work they just want change color.
• Stay away from stuff like Iframe, bordercolor, etc as they mostly work in IE.
• Don't get too carried away with CSS and NS or you could have problems.
• Be careful of forms with textboxes as NS makes them 2-3 wider than IE.

That is enough to get you started.

Korndragon,

Here is a pretty good ARITCLE ON TABLES that brings up several compatability issues that may be of some help. There are three parts to it. Make sure you read all of them.

I would also like to add. Instead of trying to center tables or things inside your tables by using the tag it would be better to use align="center". Like this:

Hello

Hello

useless imformation - NS actually started tables among other things

If you use Opera or NS to write your code you'll end up doing less work, if you use Opera it has a built in validation link (right click - validate) which uses W3C's site. but a warning, just because it validates doesnt been it will display the same in all browsers.

some things NS doesnt like (tables mostly), NS4.7 a:hover doesnt work so use a opposite background color for a:link colors)
nested tables: NS wont do color-background-color, it will appear as color-background-background, way around this is to make a 20x20 (or anysize) image of the color you want and use that as background image.
Mairvings first comment was to always use a  , but his didnt display.
always add your td cell content after the td (same as you should do links) content is the right way, or if its a big group of text leave the first word or tag next to the td tag.
NS's default cellpadding and cellspacing are different to IE, (same as margins) if you want 0 padding and spacing, add cellspacing="0" and cellpadding="0" or you'll get unexpected results
font tag wont work in tables, each td has to have its own font tag (better off using css instead)
border color, borderstyle, frame style (table frames) etc dont work if you want a border around the table use nested tables using cellpadding and spacing to suit,
mouseover bgcolor doesnt work
also a nested table with 2 widths of 100% (table and td) can have weird effects, usually removing one of the widths fixs this.
thats about all off the top of my head.

basically its how tables were made to be used, no gimmicks like IE has included, use good coding (no nested tags, open and close each tag etc) and you wont go far wrong.

Here's an article on NS & CSS http://www.mako4css.com/Issues.htm

Quote: Originally posted by Busy

nested tables: NS wont do color-background-color, it will appear as color-background-background, way around this is to make a 20x20 (or anysize) image of the color you want and use that as background image.
Mairvings first comment was to always use a  , but his didnt display.

Weird I didn't see the non-breaking space not display. I assumed that since I left off the ; that it would. As far as the color-background-color, I assume that you mean something like this:

Why is this table bgcolor not white

I usually fix that by adding another table:

Hey it's white now.

Works like a charm.

Haven't reviewed this yet so I thought I'd add a few comments. I agree about the colours being a little uninteresting. They look okay, just not too exciting. I also think that you shoudl consider changing the font on the logo - I think that font has a very distinctive character to it (kind of reminds me to 'I Dream of Jeannie' for some reason) and I don't think it coordinates well with the rest of the design.

Now, the problem with all these popular boxy layouts is that they don't look so good if you don't get the layout exactly right. Things really need to line up with each other better, you should try to get the spacing consistent between boxes, try to keep a strong alignment etc. Move those two "latest threads" and "latest tutorials" up towards the top of the page - try to make room for them on the right side. Also get rid of that webring, it's just ugly. Close the gaps between the boxes on the left sidebar as well.

Your navigation menu should definitely be improved - I think those links should stand out more, and put a space between the arrow and the word. I would also consider dividing that into two smaller menus, keeping your administrative type stuff (home, contact, about) separate from the real content.

Okay, I clicked on "tutorials" and now I see a list of software/technologies to pick from. I choose Photoshop and now I see a big long list. So I pick one. Then I see a list of information about the tutorial - so where is it? Oh, I'm supposed to click another link here. Point being, too many steps here - just get rid of that last page and send the user directly to the tutorial. Also make it more clear that these are not yours - give some credit to the site you're linking from. A good idea would be to add a column on that long table for the host site.

sorry, the color-background-color is 3 nested tables (the triple background layouts ...)
bgcolor - background image - bgcolor wont work, has to be bgcolor - background image - background image

these arent being used much these days so doesnt matter, just something I found out years ago the hard way and thougt I'd pass on. sometimes knowing the older stuff helps in new stuff