Website critique.

How do you decide on a good colour scheme? I thought that utilising horse colours could be appropriate for such a website.

Eg,
black
white
grulla
roan
grey
dun
chestnut
palomino
bay

Maybe an interesting coat pattern for background that isn't too busy?

Obviously contrast is important but well contrasting colours can still look horrible together. How do you figure out which colours from the palette to pick and use where?
 
PermaBanned said:
Yeah, we all know you should use frames for laying out pages ;)
Click to expand...
You mean there are other ways?! :eek::p

As part of my final year project at Uni I re-designed a website one of my lecturers had set up to supply first year students on the course with information. I don't know what was worse: the shocking colour scheme, that it used frames or perhaps even that, despite my explaining why frames were a bad feature to use, the lecturer took my website and instantly put it into a frame. :D:o
 
Urgh, i used them for ages because i was too lazy to learn CSS properly.

"Okay, this will be the one where i finally use CSS for layouts."
*several hours on W3Schools later*
"Oh **** it, this would be far easier with a frame."

Instead i just gave up :p
 
Haha. :D My first encounter with web design, proper, was at Uni, where my Web Dev module lecturer made it clear he hated frames with a passion. I think it was also made clear that using tables for layout was bad and outdated. It would have been some achievement for any of us to use either considering we had to do our project work with Plone. So I can honestly say I've never designed a website using either frames or tables for layout. :)

Ah, those were the days. :cool:
 
Well this has the main basic colours for a horsey palette I guess.

design.png
 
What layout have you gone for? How many columns? Is the menu laid out horizontally or vertically?

I think you need to create a container div that the rest of your page will fit into. Then you have perhaps a div each for a header, menu, content and footer. Something like:

Code: 
[container div]
    [header div]
    [menu div]
    [content div]
    [footer div]
[container div closed]
You could then use CSS to position each div as you need it. You could have all the divs on top of each other like a tower, or have the header on top of the menu and content div with the footer div underneath.

Below is some example code I've knocked up. It may or may not be what you need and some people might say there's no need for a div for the menu and that the menu div should be replaced by a menu ul instead.

However I've just entered the code below into the W3C's HTML validator and it passes the XHTML 1.0 Strict test. Feel free to use the code below and tailor it to your needs. The text in bold is code you can delete and use your own names for divs and other items such as unordered lists (ul) and tables. :)

Code: 
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
<head>
<title>Energize's horsey website</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="default.css" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8"/>
</head>
<body>
[b]<div id="container">
<div id="header">
</div>
<div id="menu">
</div>
<div id="content">
</div>
<div id="footer">
</div>
</div>[/b]
</body>
</html>
 
Sorry I wasn't quite clear, I already have the divs setup like that on the old site, just about. I mean about the graphical things like rounded corners, and if for example I had a colour gradient or other effect.
 
Ah I see. Also seems there is a rounded corner option in css, while I can get it to work fine in firefox it doesn't work in ie8. :mad:
 
Yep. Welcome to the world of web development. I quickly learned that hard coding a website site to appear exactly the same across Opera, Firefox and IE (the browsers around at the time) was pretty difficult. Nowadays you'd probably add Chrome into that mix of browsers to test out how a page looks.

There are ways to make IE8 render a page as Opera/Firefox do but this involves skulduggery! When I was doing my final year project at Uni I found a way to get my CSS file to apply code for a certain feature, say decoration of a menu's drop-down list, to Opera/Firefox/all browsers BUT to offer another line of CSS code just for IE. This was more often than not a bodge job so that IE had its own code, where the standard code wouldn't be interpreted correctly by IE.

I've got an interest in web development, and I firmly believe in hard-coding, so I often subscribe to threads on OcUK that discuss web development. I've seen lots of people say they design their sites in Firefox or Opera and don't bother optimising it for IE. However since IE8/9 its probably a bit easier to make your site look the same across the browsers, but still not perfect.

Some others say they spend some time optimising their site to IE but don't go for all out, 100% similarity of rendering in IE compared to Opera/Firefox. There are some whose clients computers' use IE, say in corporate environments, so they HAVE to ensure the site looks correct in IE.

A while ago, AFTER my project at Uni I must add, I found this (http://rafael.adm.br/css_browser_selector/). If you add the Javascript file by following the instructions below you can specify even more clearly in your CSS any selectors to be used for IE. You could even, if you're feeling cheeky, 'detect' IE7 and earlier and return a message advising the browser to update to IE8 (XP) or IE9 (Vista/7) or, even better, to install Firefox or Chrome!

USAGE
1. Copy and paste the line below, inside <head> and </head> tag

<script src="css_browser_selector.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
Click to expand...

Basically, you need to decide how important it is to you and/or the site owners that the site look exactly the same in IE compared to other browsers. Personally I would do my best to make the site appear how I designed it in IE but I wouldn't spend ages fussing with it. However I don't do web development professionally and you've got the site owners to keep happy. They may not use Firefox/Chrome etc and only know of IE and therefore would ask you to make the site work in IE.

Hope this all helps and I wouldn't say this is all fact I've written, but my own personal opinion. So please feel free to disagree. :)
 
You could say that. However for something like corner rounding you could get away with rounded corners in all browsers except for IE. Something like rounded corners in FF/Opera/Chrome etc would look nice and for IE just have normal corners. How would IE users know?

I think where, say, menu list decorations look perfect in FF/Opera but are noticeably wrong in IE, then it'd be obvious to IE users that something is wrong. I can't see why you shouldn't choose to have CSS code for rounded corners with FF/Opera and, using the idea I mentioned earlier (RafaelP CSS), force your CSS to use normal corners in IE.
 
CSS3 rounded corners are great, but as you've found out don't work in IE prior to 9. There are hundreds of ways to fix it, literally, but I tend to serve a different stylesheet to IE and go from there.Gradients are probably best done with CSS3 and then a workaround for IE. Like I said previously, I'd probably serve a different stylesheet for IE and they'd get non-rounded corners etc. Your webserver isn't config'd to serve outwards IP's (not on your internal ip) so we can't see the test page. You need to look at the .htaccess file to serve it and make sure that port forwarding is setup on your router correctly
 
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