[der Kopf]

I constructed a site - it's getting finished, and it is now open for suggestions. Please be kind...
here's the site

[bluedog]

I really like the clean navigation. It looks like your photo pages haven't been translated to english (with the description to click on each thumbnail for an enlargement) and the pages about Brugge.

It would be nice to have a graphic image on the page with the pracital information.

The contact information isn't very prominent either I almost missed it until I went back to look at the details since it is only on the bottom of the home page.

The German pages didn't have the translations finished (which you may already know). If you are planning on having the translation sections I would make them complete, even if it doesn't seem necessary.

It is an overall great site. You have a focused topic without much clutter of information. It is straightforward and easy to navigate. Your front page might have a description of what you are presenting (is it a hotel, bed & breakfast, or apartment for rent). Overall, great work!

[Some friends of mine have a couple from Brugge who visited them this summer and borrowed their car for an American driving and flying vacation including US,Canada, Mexico and Brazil.]

Originally posted by der Kopf:
I constructed a site - it's getting finished, and it is now open for suggestions. Please be kind...
here's the site

[der Kopf]

You are too kind.

One thing though, the German translation you talked about, it is finished, but there was a bug in my code. If you click in the frame below ('Adresse'), you are actually referred to indexNL.html#adressen, being the DUTCH version of the page, at the point where the addresses are. This goes quite unnoticed, but as someone already told me the same about the french text, I checked, found and are about to repair the problem.
This of course is due to the crude copy-paste manner of coding my HTML (I still do it 'by hand'), and the fact that I don't have PHP available for easy and fast updating. (I have to make 5 versions of each page, you can imagine the explosion).

Anyway, thank you. Would you have a suggestion for where to put the contact information?

Is there a way to treat simple form-like GET behaviour with Javascript? I'm thinking of adding EN or FR or any other language to the URL and have JavaScript catch it and display another page based on that...

[derbs]

greetings

I like the site. Very clean and simple. I like the links that highlight in black (especially the language selection buttons).

A few points though to give it that 'polished' look.

1) i'd change the font you use for graphic navigation text (Asterix Practical, About Bruges etc...). Sort of spoils the classy look you are going for with the rest of the site.
12point helvetica neue roman would look nice there, with a slightly fainter drop shadow. Maybe Gill Sans if you dont like helvetica.

2) Change the body font. It seems to alternate between Times and Courier?! These fonts have never looked good on screen, and monospaced fonts look 'unfriendly'. My favourites are Verdana or Tahoma, and specify the size in pixels. 10px or 11px look best.

Apart from that the site looks good, handcoding is not a very easy thing to do. I use Dreamweaver when creating from scratch and then handcoding to clean the code up afterwards.

[bluedog]

I would suggest creating your master pages in the language of your choice, then copy the directory and rename it to the other language and make the changes in each directory.

Then all your links can be relative within each language section, and you won't have it moving to another language without selecting it as a different directory.

The structure would be like this:
/index.html
/en/index.html
/en/images/
/be/index.html
/fr/index.html
/de/index.html

Your language selection can then simply drop you into the correct directory. When you want to switch, its as simple as a link into the other directory tree. Using this method makes it easy to have a link generated by javascript to include the language portion of the path (although your site is simple enough you shouldn't need a script).

It is refreshing to see a site that is clean and has white space. Seeing your site and a few others I've come across makes me realize how 'polluted' the internet has become with advertising and cluttered designs.

Moving your email link: Could it be another heading like the others on the main page with a rollover? Otherwise include it on more than just the front page.

[der Kopf]

It's a good suggestion bluedog, I do have the impression my directories are getting kind of messy. Still the reason I ask is the following: I'm on a free geocities account with this site, and as such have only this thing called Easy Upload at my disposal (basically an HTML form with POST). For some reason or other however, this doesn't seem to work well at all for me, Each time, either some files don't get through and are incorporated into another file, or they have additional metadata in it that shouldn't show at all. So most of the time, after uploading, I have to correct each of the files, which is truly a hellish job. And that's why I would really like to, at least for the picture page, be able to do something with JavaScript. (for it is only one line).

derbs, the body font is actually a small story, I think it used to be Gill Sans or Verdana, but that didn't work at all with the small white/black css-language button-thingys. Courier did a beautiful job there. Of course, afterwards, some pages got this ransom-note kind of look, which is what anyone would get mixing incompatible fonts. So I changed all to Courier, and I am reasonably pleased. (I have to say that the Quartz text engine in Explorer 5.2 for X makes everything delish). Not 100%. Especially the remark about inserting some graphics, might really help. As to fonts, I'm hardly comfortable with them. I really don't know all the 'laws' concerning them, but, as the saying goes, I'd love to learn. And maybe, for the bigger labels, I'll try the same font as I used on top of the About Bruges page.

But thank you both in the meantime.

[derbs]

I've written a little bit of javascript for you. Basically it takes a querystring, and displays a block of text depending on what the querystring is.

try going to:

http://nottingham.headlandmultimedia...tm?language=UK

and then changing the language=UK to FR or DE , and a different piece of text will show up.

It's very simple. I use a premade javascript function that allows me to get a querystring using Request.QueryString, because i use ASP a lot. That is the file CSJSRequestObject.js in the head.

all i've done then is

var TheLanguage
TheLanguage=Request.QueryString("language")

and then some simple if statements to display different text.

Useful? Look in the source and steal my code

[bluedog]

Hey derbs, that's a great script. It may not be entirely useful for sites with *lots* of content on a page but would work great for the current task.

If a page had lots of text, then it would be loading all languages when you only really need one at a time (increasing the load time).

But that has a lot of implications for variable content and you could use this script as the one to redirect into each language directory structure by having each defined language change the path for URLs. Then that variable returned could be used in all links and path selections for the pages. (Instead of displaying the text it would return a portion of HTML).

Great script.

[der Kopf]

This is simply beautiful. Exactly what I have been wanting for a while now. Yet it's true what bluedog says, for long stretches of text it wouldn't be efficient. (that's what server-side scripting is so good for). But I will put it to very good use, in about an hour, you will see...

Thanks Derbs, and bluedog as well.

[derbs]

I've had a better idea with the code. Check out

http://nottingham.headlandmultimedia...tm?language=UK

Basically, i've defined a couple of variables called TheText1 and TheText2 to hold all the text you use on a page. This way, you just need one big IF statement at the top, and then just print out the TheText1 and TheText2 variables on the page, instead of having to have an IF statement every time you need to print the text to the page.

Good point about the big blocks of text Bluedog. You know, i'm sure you can load data from a text file using javascript. If that's possible, you could store your text in separate .txt files in different languages. Then you could load your relevant text file depending on querystring. A good way of keeping your content separate from code as well

Anyone know if this is possible?

[derbs]

I've discovered that it's not possible to load a text file with Javascript.

However, if you want to keep your content separate from your HTML, then you could include a .js file with the text variables in.

Eg
say you have an english and german version

You have 2 .js files
text_english.js
text_german.js

in each file you have
var text1="whatever"
var text2="something else"
etc....

then in the HTML you request the language querystring like before, and have an IF statement to load the correct .js file:

if TheLanguage="UK" {
document.write("[script language='javascript' src='text_english.js'][/script]")
}

if TheLanguage="DE" {
document.write("[script language='javascript' src='text_german.js'][/script]")
}

(i've changed the brackets to "[" because vbb wont let me use them)

Then to alter content you simply modify the js files. Nice content management system without using any server side code