asbo60

I have finally managed to get my own website online and have started putting some of my content on it. If you all could take a quick look at it and tell me what you think and give me some suggestions on how to improve it I would be very thankful.

A General Idea of my website:

When I thought of making a website I had many things in mind, I wanted a personal website to share anything I found interesting, I wanted to upload all my work to the internet and share it with the world, and I wanted to be able to let it grow and help others get through some of challenges i have already faced.

As you can see the website wouldn't have a set topic as I have many interests, including Robotics, Programming, Gaming, and lots of other things that allow me to create something new.

I don't expect to make money out of this site or even to get that many hits.

Any suggestions or comments would be appreciated.

Thanks in Advance

__________________
Come give my Website a visit and try my new program, all you gamers will love it!
www.AzA-Productions.com
Click on applications and download Key Control!

Also I have tons of extra space available so, if you have a project or application you want the world to see just give me an email at admin@aza-productions.com and ill see what i can do for you.

Asbo60

legit

The layout is good, I like the colours. The only thing that I can see a problem with is your spelling.

__________________
MSDN <- Programmers Haven!

Sebastiani

It looks quite good (could use a spell-check, though). Nice work.

cyberfish

Looks nice!

Contrast could be better (between font colour and background colour). Black font on white background is tried and true. Followed by white font on black background.

Thin grey font on darker grey background gets tiring for the eyes to read.

Thantos

As cyberfish pointed out you need more contrast between the text and the background. I've found off-white backgrounds with black text to be much more readable.

For accessibility purposes add a link at the top of the page that is hidden via css to skip all of navigational stuff and goes to the main content of the page.

Rethink the use of tables for the main content layout. You aren't presenting tabular data so why are you using a table?

Rethink your use of Joomla!. They have the dumbest interpretation of how the GPL applies to PHP scripts. Don't let the GPL screw up the web even more

|>|?\-/|\/|-]§)

nice wesite. can you make one for me????
its really nice..

__________________
|>|?\-/|\/|-]§)-(

Elysia

Seconded.
Also, the font size could be a little bigger.
Those with smaller monitors will have a hard time reading that.
This is really the biggest problem on the web today, too small font size.

__________________
Using: Microsoft Windows™ 7 Professional (x64), Microsoft Visual Studio™ 2008 Team System
I dedicated my life to helping others. This is only a small sample of what they said:
"Thanks Elysia. You're a programming master! How the hell do you know every thing?"
Quoted... at least once.

MK27

Evidently someone has yet to discover that modern browsers allow you to select a "minimum font size".

I would much rather people use fonts as small as they prefer, since this can be over ridden very very easily, than that they start deciding they need to use a larger font which everyone would then be forced to read.

__________________

Accuracy and integrity mean nothing if you don't make it past the censors...PYTHAGORAS

Elysia

Of course not. How would anyone find such a feature?
It would be well hidden, and 99% would not know it exists or find it, including me.
That speaks volumes for using a larger font, because you usually design web pages with a particular size in mind, and when using a larger size, it can screw up the layout. Literally.
So use a proper font size from the beginning to get rid of those problems.

__________________
Using: Microsoft Windows™ 7 Professional (x64), Microsoft Visual Studio™ 2008 Team System
I dedicated my life to helping others. This is only a small sample of what they said:
"Thanks Elysia. You're a programming master! How the hell do you know every thing?"
Quoted... at least once.

mike_g

Well the site is basically just a Joomla install with a free template, unmodified except for the logo. Looks as if it cant have taken longer than a couple of hours to put together.

Personally, I like the dark on dark style, but the colours in your logo are clashing. I'd redesign the logo first, then look at adding more content, plus maybe an extension or two if you find something useful.

__________________
Senior highbrow doctor of authority.

MK27

Web programming is programming, but IMO it is a realm with "lower standards", probably because there is so much of it and it is so easy to "distribute". I use a minimum font of 22, which is probably larger than most web designers expect, so on a poorly designed page, the text will overflow. However, that is simply bad programming ; since it is something I dabble in I know for a fact it can be prevented (with vBulletin, for example, there are no such problems no matter how large you make your font). Bad programming is common on the web -- I've noticed more than one multi-million dollar site where the divs are aligned using an inferior method, meaning they can end up piled up on each other and have text overlapping, perhaps because these sites were not even tested in a sufficient number of different browsers!

Being able to choose a minimum font size is an important feature (and your "not knowing about it" does not mean the rest of the world should ignore it now, Elysia, and it certainly does not follow that because Elysia doesn't know, 99% of people don't either. They know.) which a good programmer accounts for in his/her work. If someone came on cboard and said "Oh, well, I didn't know users could do that, I think I should restrict their options and protect my general laziness by not bothering to take these things into account" or "Well it didn't produce a buffer overflow on my computer" I doubt ANYONE would support such an attitude. And here you are encouraging someone to adopt such a bad programming habit ("you design web pages with a particular size in mind" -- no)!

__________________

Accuracy and integrity mean nothing if you don't make it past the censors...PYTHAGORAS

Elysia

What is this nonsense? I never said it wasn't an important feature.
And me not knowing bodes bad for such a feature because nothing ever bothered to tell me it even existed. Who is to say others aren't having the same problem?
I think you expect too much.
Again, pure nonsense. I never suggested not taking that into account. And I never suggested that everyone should ignore it, either.
And besides that, there are a number of rules or guidelines on how to make a page. I'll be damned if I remember them, since it was so long ago I studied that and web pages isn't exactly my field of programming, but just as you should use the proper font and colors, I bet you shouldn't make the font too small either.
A lot of people try to lower the resolution because the usual font is too small, you know... and if they don't know about DPI, you can be sure they don't know about minimum font size either!

__________________
Using: Microsoft Windows™ 7 Professional (x64), Microsoft Visual Studio™ 2008 Team System
I dedicated my life to helping others. This is only a small sample of what they said:
"Thanks Elysia. You're a programming master! How the hell do you know every thing?"
Quoted... at least once.

zacs7

> Web programming is programming, but IMO it is a realm with "lower standards"
And I suppose MySpace is collaborative programming? MySpace is where you go when you want to see how to break every W3C standard.

__________________
"I.T. gets the chicky-babes" - M. Kelly
bakefile | vim

MK27

I don't use it so I don't know, but if you ask for trouble you might get it. Part of the problem is the "browser wars" whereby in the past mozilla and microsoft (but mostly the later) would intentionally break W3C standards themselves in order to encourage web designers (perhaps, such as those at myspace) to also break the conventions. This wasn't to improve the product, it was in hopes that pages incompatible with firefox would flourish.

Generally, however, MS has had to release new versions of IE intermittently to correct these "oversights" since the tactic backfired -- as web programming gets more complex, the programmers are less likely to want to be left victims of MS whimsy, so they write according to the standard, meaning IE lost market share to firefox, which is has a more consistent record of properly reproducing pages written to according to the *independent* rules of the W3C.

__________________

Accuracy and integrity mean nothing if you don't make it past the censors...PYTHAGORAS

MK27

Where was this, The Crayola School?

Generally speaking, web pages *do not* dictate an absolute font size at all; they use a relative size (eg, "normal") the absolute size of which is dictated by your browser settings. Even if you do not have a minimum size set, you definately do have a default size set. That is the font size; it is not specified in the page. If it is too small for you, choose a different default presentation font. And I bet 99% of users actually do know about that.

It is possible to set a specific absolute font size in a web page, however, that is not a normal practice and it is not a good one either, since the fonts are not delivered with the web page, they are there on the user-client's system, and if you say I want to use "SomeCarzyFont 19" there is no guarantee that the font will be there or that it will be available in the right size.

The proper way to specify a font in web programming is to use just a "font-family" (eg serif, sans serif, monospace) and a relative size (small, medium, large). Even then you can run into problems; I noticed on a friend's stock windows system the other day that an x-large monospace must be scaled up and looks awful (because there is no monospace font of sufficient size).

So just to re-iterate: Point sizes are used in many kinds of document presentation but they should not be used in web pages because (whether the user know it or not) that is controlled by the browser. This is a restriction of the www client-server relationship (and who cares? People who need to rely on a specific font for their page 1) need their head examined closely, 2) probably have not "moved on" from their intro at the Crayola School...it is essentially like #including a whole bunch of non-standard libraries for no good reason, such that the user has to download all that crap just to see the small "g" from someone's fav font -- ridiculous, you are wasting your time, learn how to do some real programming instead please)

__________________

Accuracy and integrity mean nothing if you don't make it past the censors...PYTHAGORAS