Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

mrfrost · Jul 10, 2001, 01:02 PM

I am not used to making websites at all so I thought I'd give it a try and ask some of you guys for some advice. I have begun work on a personal website now that really won't hold anything interesting but maybe it'll give me some practice. You can visit it here. I will also be starting work on this websitesoon.

I would really appreciate some words of advice on what it is I'm doing wrong. It feels as if I'm doing it all wrong

Xeo · Jul 10, 2001, 01:45 PM

If anything's wrong, it's the use of the center tag throughout the entire page. Now that I see the HTML, I notice it really is a bunch of p tags with align="center" in it. IMO, that's bad. Firstly, it can be done with only one center tag at the beginning. Secondly, it looks bad, to me anyways, to have the entire page centered.

You'd be better off making a few more columns on your table and lining things up. For example, left align all your words like "real name," "born," "occupation," "interests," etc, so they all line up. Then in a different column, left align all the words that go with each one. Then you can make the columns closer together. I think that would look better than all centered.

The only other thing I see right off hand is your "Mr_Frost" image at the top is bigger than you have it displayed. PhotoShop it down to the size you want it. It will look better than having the browser do it and it will be a smaller file for us to load.

The worst (or is it best) example of this EVER was kimt.com, one of my local TV stations, had their programming schedule. They had a picture for each show. Almost EVERY picture was bigger than they had it displayed. They had them all distorted and smaller than the actual file by using width and height to change the size. Many of them were bigger than the browser and bigger than my screen!

One in particular, a picture for "Frasier" was about 100 x 200 pixels displayed but the real file was actually several times larger than my 1024 x768 resolution. I don't know how big it actually was, but it was HUGE. The largest web image I've ever seen... and they shrunk it!

I don't know who made that website, but they must have been fired. That page no longer exists. They have a more sensicle way of showing "What's On." My friend and I e-mailed them last year when we saw it... maybe that's when they changed it. I haven't been there for a while, except just now to see if it was the same.

Anyway, good luck making your web site.

mrfrost · Jul 10, 2001, 02:29 PM

You are right about the image size...someone told me that I should size it down because he had to scroll to much. He uses 800x600 screen resolution and I use 1600x1200. I find it very hard not to make things to big. It all looks fine on my screen.

I did size that Mr_Frost image down in Dreamweaver. I thought that was ok but thanks for pointing that out to me. I will see what I can do with those tables and the centering you mentioned. I have only started yesterday evening with my DW book and 30 day trial so thanks for not being to hard on me..hehe

Guess I'd better stick with the programming

EDIT : I changed the Mr_Frost logo

[ 07-10-2001: Message edited by: Mr_Frost ]

pobodysnerfect · Jul 11, 2001, 02:57 PM

just curious, is there a reason you are using DHTML instead of just HTML? Not that it's wrong, just curious...

mrfrost · Jul 12, 2001, 06:28 AM

Originally posted by pobodysnerfect:
just curious, is there a reason you are using DHTML instead of just HTML? Not that it's wrong, just curious...

Could it be that Dreamweaver uses DHTML as standard ???? I dunno really ?

Xeo · Jul 12, 2001, 12:22 PM

If you can help it, learn HTML. It's fine if you let an app like DW do it for you, but look at the HTML it produces. Like I said above, the centering is being done with a p tag in front of every line with each one being aligned to center. This can be done with one center tag at the beginning. It's things like this that make me not use a WYSIWYG editor like DW. Too much extra crap.

I write all my HTML in BBEdit because I have more control of the code. It is clean and all the references are things I understand because I wrote them.

It's fine to use a WYSIWYG editor but learn from it as you go along so you can clean up the code. IMO, you can never make your pages exactly as you want it wiith a WYSIWYG editor. I feel the raw HTML to be much more powerful.

mrfrost · Jul 12, 2001, 05:41 PM

Originally posted by Xeo:
If you can help it, learn HTML. It's fine if you let an app like DW do it for you, but look at the HTML it produces. Like I said above, the centering is being done with a p tag in front of every line with each one being aligned to center. This can be done with one center tag at the beginning. It's things like this that make me not use a WYSIWYG editor like DW. Too much extra crap.

I write all my HTML in BBEdit because I have more control of the code. It is clean and all the references are things I understand because I wrote them.

It's fine to use a WYSIWYG editor but learn from it as you go along so you can clean up the code. IMO, you can never make your pages exactly as you want it wiith a WYSIWYG editor. I feel the raw HTML to be much more powerful.

I would love to just write raw HTML to make a website but the problem is , I'm just not good at it. I haven't really tried but I thought the WYSIWYG approach was easy and could get me a website fast. I am really interested in learning HTML and if I ever have some spare time I will definitely look into it. I try to learn as much now by looking at the code provided to me by DW. But I guess that if that code suck that I would be better of starting from scratch right? Are there any "good" HTML books for beginners you can recommend?

pobodysnerfect · Jul 12, 2001, 07:56 PM

Originally posted by Mr_Frost:


Could it be that Dreamweaver uses DHTML as standard ???? I dunno really ?

well sort of, if you use the draw layer tool, that is using DHTML, it uses absolute positioning. What you can do if you don't want to use DHTML is use the draw layer to position everything and then go to modify - convert - layers to tables. This can get a little tricky because it might put in a lot of tables to keep your items in place, but you can learn to break those tables down. Good luck.

mrfrost · Jul 15, 2001, 06:53 AM

Ok...here is what I did so far.
I took your advices (thx), I am now using CCS , I have converted the layers to tables. On most of my pages. And the centering should be much better now! Please check it again and lemme know.