Topic: Starting a new website need advice (VG related)

[ShyGuy]

Dang it, I may step in here and build you something better. I don't have a lot of free time though.

[segagamer12]

I won't comment on Piracy, but funding isn't a big issue, I have monetary backing for this so if there are better programs I would certainly consider them.

Publisher seams to be working better than page builder but I haven't figured out how to publish the pages to the site. So I did download site builder. That seams to work a lot better. I downloaded the entire site today using that and made some tweaks then re-uploaded it so the site is now coded using site builder instead of page builder. Am not sure if that makes a difference.


I do not know how to make tables, publisher and site builder have that option but I havent explored it much.

Site builder is NOT the same as pagebuilder. It seams to work a lot better.  What is dreamweaver and how do I get that? Is it all coding? I do not know that much html code, a little but not enough to do what I am doing. My friend who is also working on the site knows more about it than I do since he went to school for that.

To be honest I am not a real webdesginer, Ive always used page builder and frontpage and never even considered working on a *real* website until my freinds had this idea.

If you could check back and see if it looks better that would be greatly appreciated. I did convert everything into a , so far, better program so it should look better I think. I did download Opera and Netscape, firefox wont run for some reason, and so far they look the same as IE.

I don't want to alienate the MAC audience, however small they may be, so I DO want the site to look good on that. We have a copy of MAC osx something or other we have considered installing on one  of our spare pcs just to use it for testing, If we do that then I will have a better idea of how to fix the site.

Tables... that is going to drive me crazy trying to figure out how to make those. Every program I have uses boxes that you position on the screen.

Anyways I sincerely thank you for your comments 18days and I will continue to take yoru advice, I really do need this site to work and hopefully onces it gets going we can find someone else to help out and make it look stunning.  


>>Safari.<<

Will that run on a Windows pc? We have 95-vista on various PCs so if it works with any of those OSe we can run it.  

[18 Days]

Safari wont run on a windows PC. But as a rule of thumb, pages in Safari looks identical to pages in Opera.

And yeah, checked it then, the overlap is gone.

Dreamweaver is a webpage building program. You can get by with no knowledge of code on it. It's a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) program, so yeah, it's not hard to get by. I would strongly recomend it, I find it the easiest to use and most powerful program out there. But If you are more suited to Microsoft Frontpage, no worries, that's also good.

[wandering]

Quote
What is dreamweaver and how do I get that?

Dreamweaver is available at adobe's website, and wherever fine software is sold.

[segagamer12]

I asked the guy who egts me software and he says we have dreamweaver already if I want it. He just installed server 2003 on his spare pc and we might consider running it from there and getting rid if the Yahoo hosting if we need the extra storage and badnwidth etc. Or we might still buy actual servers we are undecided.


I did get opera to work and it looks ok there, Didnt notice any overlap or anything.


I still can't get firefox to work. It keeps telling me the files are corrumpt, but I get them from thier official website. I might have to try a different site or something.

[Shift Key]

Time to weigh in on this discussion again.

1. All web designers should have different browsers available to test how their page renders. Ideally the page should appear the same on all browsers (CSS, XHTML compliance is a good start point) but it seems that some browsers choose what to render correctly. The Acid2 test is a good indicator of a browser that can render standard code correctly (with minimal or no browser-specific code).
~ IE7 made a great improvement for standards compliance over its predecessor but it still has some huge issues with parts of CSS code (they don't care about it, so this won't change anytime soon).
~ Firefox 2 is not quite up there - version 3 is under development and the nightly builds have passed that test.
In short, if you're using Windows install IE, Firefox and Opera. They cover the three most common rendering engines out there (including Linux and Mac operating systems). This will make sure that you can test the website across as many possible situations as possible (if you were serious you'd run IE6 and IE7 alongside and ensure backwards compatibility).

2. Colour schemes are everything. A good colour scheme makes a good website better, and a bad colour scheme makes a good website bad. A general rule of thumb is that dark text and light background colours are the best setting for readability. Sure, the inverse may work, but just about all professional websites are dark-on-light, not the other way round.
Background graphics are fine, but there are two key issues here that you haven't addressed. Meshing and readability.
A good background should be seamless. That is, you have no clue where it starts and finishes. Remove that one and find something that you can blend. If you can't, then don't have one. Simple as that. Its very ugly to be able to see the point where the graphic ends because it makes the website look tacky.
The gradient background doesn't work well because it is neither black or white. I see that you've coloured the table cells black to make the text readable but that also makes the website tacky. Remove the bgcolor tags and it will become transparent, from there pick a good colour scheme and it will look a lot better.

Aside from 18 Days' comments, some of which you've already looked into, the only other advice i can give you is to look at some HTML languages. Sure, WYSIWYG is fine on the whole, but there will be cases where you need to do render something a certain way and there seems to be no way to do it through the program. That's when you get down and dirty with the code. HTML and CSS are the ones that come to mind.

[segagamer12]

That background I have had a problem with all along. But the others like it and want it int he site. I have been tryind to find a way to stretch it to look right, When I was in publisher I could do that but I had to save it as an image and insert it and stretch it that way, which messes up the entire site because I cant put i int he BG so it covers the whole page and looks way bad.

We are very serious about this website so we do take *all* feedback to heart. Aside form the text block commentts all of which i agree with, we chose that dark bg light text for a reason, the major sites we are competing against use light backgrounds and dark text and we want to stand out, but if it looks bad we can will change it. We spend hours working on color scemes and to be honest I didnt like any of them, but we sttled, which I dont like doin, on this sceme because everyone else on the group only visits gamespot and that is what they think a videogame website *should* look like. So I am up against a wall on that side of things. I dont have total freedom here I have to get every thing approved by the guys funding the site. Its thier money. But I do mention everything you guys tell me to them so I have some leverage cuz I am the "one with the experience" according to them.

Since the majority of websites seam to go with lighter bg I might be able to persuade them to accept that but everyone likes the silver and black themes so I will see what I can come up with. Thanks everyone.  

[18 Days]

Don't listen to Shift-Key. Light on dark is actually easier to read.

[segagamer12]

Well I dont know, the people funding the site like it how it is, but we ALL agree the BG doesnt mesh well but i do not know how to fix it. I tried solid colors but they look terrible. I guess all I can do is see if I can find a better picture witht he colors they want.


Even still we are trying to compete with gamefaqs, cheaplanet and gamewinners and we have to stand out from them. Its hard because no matter what change I make, I have to make that chnage to every single page and that takes extra hours I should be using to uload videos and create more game profiles, which I haven't started yet.

18Days, you do alot of website desgin or something, you seem to have the most vocal opinions and I am just curious. Well we are all getting to gether latter today to discuss the site so maybe we can make some decisions one way or another. If they like the look and dont want to make changes, I can't make changes.  

[UltimatePartyBear]

If something should be the same across several pages, you can use server side includes, if your host supports it, to have that code come from a different master file.  I don't know if your WYSIWIG editor will work with that kind of thing.  There may be a better way to do it with CSS, but I don't know anything about that.

I wouldn't particularly like that background image even if it did repeat properly.  It's possible to have a background image that doesn't scroll with the page, but I don't think all browsers support that correctly yet.  It might be worth looking into.  I'm almost positive that's a CSS thing.

[Shift Key]

Quote
Originally posted by: segagamer12
Even still we are trying to compete with gamefaqs, cheaplanet and gamewinners and we have to stand out from them. Its hard because no matter what change I make, I have to make that chnage to every single page and that takes extra hours I should be using to uload videos and create more game profiles, which I haven't started yet.

Then you need to look at either

Designing the website so that it is more efficient. Like any other coding work, there is more than one way to achieve the goal. But there is a marked difference between the quick and dirty solution that requires more maintenance when changes are required, and the solution that took a bit longer, but is more modular and easier to maintain. What you've done is pretty much hand-coding each page, when you should be making use of languages and systems that make managing the website easier - CSS and even content management systems are things worth looking into if you want to automate and minimise the actual website work that you have to do.

OR

Finding someone who is willing to develop the website for you. Since you do have finances perhaps you should leave the web development to someone who can do it more quickly.

EDIT: Just realised you've been banned. Guess that won't stop you from viewing this, but take some time off to work on the website. Bits and pieces of time are fine, but if you can spare a good slab of a few hours without distraction you'd be surprised at how much progress you can make.