[MOTHERWELL]

So I am trying to put together a website with my editorial and director's reel. I have spent the past week crash coursing with dreamweaver and I have somewhat of a result. I just need some expertise to work out the kinks.

So can any designers suggest a good forum or care to take on the project themselves?

I don't think my site is total noob crap - I have built it using CSS div tags and overall it's a pretty simple site - select a video and watch it play. Thanks in advance.

[iMOTOR]

We used to have a web design forum here, but after the forum redesign, they sort of dumped it into the developer forum.

What kind of kinks are you having?

[MOTHERWELL]

www.themotherwell.com

I started with a photoshop layout this morning and I got this far in dreamweaver today.

[design219]

Just a quick look, but to center the site, put a "wrapper" div around everything and set the style for that div to have margins set to auto. The white bar could be accomplished with a top border in the style for that div.

[besson3c]

Yeah, you're definitely on the right track!

In addition to design219's suggestions, I would suggest installing the Prototype Javascript library so that you can initiate videos via simple AJAX calls. Prototype makes AJAX calls super easy, and the benefit you'll get is that visitors will be able to click on videos and have them start immediately without having to reload the entire page.

[iMOTOR]

What kind of player are you considering for the video? Flash?

Also, I’m not a 100% on what you mean by whole site centered, but one option is to create a parent container (you’ll want to decide on an absolute size for this container) and then set negative margins on the container.

For example, if your parent container 800x600px, you would use the following code:

Code:
#parent_container {
	margin-left: -400px; 
	margin-top: -300px;
	position: absolute;
	top: 50%;
	left: 50%;
	width: 800px;
	height: 600px; 
	z-index: ?; 
	overflow: hidden; 
	border: 1px none #000000;
}

[MOTHERWELL]

Yeah I can't get the white bar to work when putting a top border in the div. I also tried having a background image in the dive of the white bar from the photoshop file. Still didn't work.

As it stands I believe I have a main div wrapper that I can apply the margin settings to. Thanks for the info.

[MOTHERWELL]

I will mainly use quicktime, but I plan on adding several formats down the road. H.264 is awesome, but not everyone can view that.

[design219]

Originally Posted by MOTHERWELL 

I will be using quicktime video

Did you consider Flash video? Much more compatible with more Windows systems... that is, the Flash plug-in is almost universal as opposed to the Quicktime.

[MOTHERWELL]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

Yeah, you're definitely on the right track!

In addition to design219's suggestions, I would suggest installing the Prototype Javascript library so that you can initiate videos via simple AJAX calls. Prototype makes AJAX calls super easy, and the benefit you'll get is that visitors will be able to click on videos and have them start immediately without having to reload the entire page.

cool Ill check this out tomorrow and get back to you guys. Thanks for all the info already!

[iMOTOR]

Quicktime is actually pretty common for Directors reels.

[design219]

Originally Posted by iMOTOR 

Quicktime is actually pretty common for Directors reels.

Yeah, if the audience is not general, that's probably true enough.

[MOTHERWELL]

are there any website design forums you guys like to frequent?