I put together a simple (primitive) site to show some of my bowls. I
would appreciate any and all comments. Please, be brutally honest.

On Jan 12, 8:47*am, ebd wrote:
I put together a simple (primitive) site to show some of my bowls. I
would appreciate any and all comments. Please, be brutally honest.

What is the web address of the site?

Randy
http://nokeswoodworks.com

What is the web address of the site?


Boy am I lost in space. the site is HTTP://www.exkimoblueday.com

Talk about senior moments!

On Jan 12, 10:48*am, ebd wrote:
What is the web address of the site?

Boy am I lost in space. the site is HTTP://www.exkimoblueday.com

Talk about senior moments!

And screwed up again. It's http://www.eskimoblueday.com

Hay !!!!! Damn good work !!!
Jerry


http://community.webtv.net/awoodbutc...oodWorkingPage


http://community.webtv.net/awoodbutcher/1974Tryke

On Mon, 12 Jan 2009 06:47:32 -0800 (PST), ebd
wrote:

I put together a simple (primitive) site to show some of my bowls. I
would appreciate any and all comments. Please, be brutally honest.

I like the bowls.

Feedback on the site:

Ditch frames. They're so '90s and problematic on a number of levels,
one of the main ones is it's hard to bookmark a subsidiary frame.
Better (in my opinion) to use popup windows for the images. See my
site to copy solid working code to make popups (almost all of my
images are thumbnails to popups). If you're unsure how to read the
code, let me know and I'll send you a sample.

Edit images for size. I didn't check all of them, but the zebrawood
bowl second from the bottom, for example, is 1200x1600 pixels. Almost
no one is going to be able to display that full size, so why make the
servers (yours and the user's) transfer all those bits and make the UA
(browser) work to resize them?. I generally size images to 500 or 550
pixels high (and then whatever width the aspect ratio makes). If you
don't have an image editor, check out Irfanview
(http://www.irfanview.com)--free download.

Make use of the "title" attribute in the coding for the images,
particularly the thumbnails. Merely repeating the image filename isn't
useful, but having the same material as the description under the
large image would be. I also use that same description for the "alt"
attribute, which is important to include so your page validates.
"title" and "alt" may have the same content, but they serve different
functions. Use both.

Don't bother to tell the user how the site looks best. There are so
many variables in the user's setup (UA, monitor size, desktop
resolution, full vs partial window, etc.) that the best practice is to
write code to a reasonable size (1024 x 768 is a good compromise) and
make it as scalable as you can. Then the user can select how he wants
to see the site. I don't try too hard for the 800 x 600 people
anymore, but user resolutions above 1024 x 768 should be happy with
your code if you use scalable units such as ems and %s for your
dimensions, rather than pixels. Excepting image size, of course, which
should be done in the actual pixel dimension of the images.

Good on you for using an external style sheet (and also for having a
DOCTYPE declaration). As stated above, setting dimensions for h1 and
h2 should be done in scalable values such as ems or %s. If the user
specifies a larger text type, his UA may not treat the heads the same
as the other text if you use hard pixel dimensions.

Do a search on "Jakob Nielsen" and see his essays on "Top Ten Design
Mistakes..." and the like for some good ideas on website usability and
how to design for it. Much of it is commerce oriented, but there's
valuable guidance there, nonetheless.



--
LRod

Master Woodbutcher and seasoned termite

Shamelessly whoring my website since 1999

http://www.woodbutcher.net
http://www.normstools.com

Proud participant of rec.woodworking since February, 1997

email addy de-spam-ified due to 1,000 spams per month.
If you can't figure out how to use it, I probably wouldn't
care to correspond with you anyway.

On Tue, 13 Jan 2009 19:48:49 +0000, LRod wrote:

On Mon, 12 Jan 2009 06:47:32 -0800 (PST), ebd
wrote:

I put together a simple (primitive) site to show some of my bowls. I
would appreciate any and all comments. Please, be brutally honest.

Feedback on the site:

Further::

I looked more closely at your source code. I see you're defining each
image as "class=image", which is good, but the class definition is
mainly a 1 pixel border. Then, when you code the image, you add a
border=0 command. WTF? It almost looks like the border=0 was an add on
or afterthought. In any event, the 0 should be enclosed in quotes.


I see you are using the "title" attribute in the a (anchor)
commands, which is great, but you still need the "alt" in the img
command. I would actually put both the "alt" and the "title" in the
img string.


In the head part of your code, you specify the title as "WRK".
WTF? The title should be a descriptive of you webpage (it's the
content that is displayed in the top bar of the UA).



Also in the head (and everywhere else), almost all arguments should
be enclosed in quotes. Your line:
link href="res/styles.css" rel=stylesheet

should be:
link href="res/styles.css" rel="stylesheet"



In your style sheet, you have defined class=index using three lines of
"margin" commands. Those can be combined for ease of coding and
rendering thusly: margin:0 2 0; " You can specify all four sides of
the object in the order: top, right, bottom, left. If you only specify
one parameter, it applies to the entire object. If you only specify
two parameters, it applies to the top and both left and right margins.
If you only specify three parameters, it applies to the top, both left
and right, and bottom margins. Quite a powerful capability.



--
LRod

Master Woodbutcher and seasoned termite

Shamelessly whoring my website since 1999

http://www.woodbutcher.net
http://www.normstools.com

Proud participant of rec.woodworking since February, 1997

email addy de-spam-ified due to 1,000 spams per month.
If you can't figure out how to use it, I probably wouldn't
care to correspond with you anyway.

Some great stuff there. I'm envious of your skill. Thanks for sharing them
with us.

The site worked well for me but it would have been nice if the main photos
had fitted themselves to the available screen so that I could see the whole
of each piece at once instead of having to scroll left - right to see it.
(I'm sure it can be done and that someone else here will be able to suggest
how to do it!)

Thanks again.

Ian


"ebd" wrote in message
...
On Jan 12, 10:48 am, ebd wrote:
What is the web address of the site?

Boy am I lost in space. the site is HTTP://www.exkimoblueday.com

Talk about senior moments!

And screwed up again. It's http://www.eskimoblueday.com

Ian,

Thanks for the kind words. I've changed the text on Home a bit to
explain what to do. The easiest is to change the zoom on your browser
from 100% to about 75%. That shrinks everything down so you should be
able to see everything at once. If it's still to big try 50%. Hope it
works for you.

Thanks for your critique of my code. But, after 35+ years of
programming in Assembly Language, COBOL, Pascal, and a few others, AND
more importantly after retireing, I've got not the least inclination
of getting deeply into HTML. I used a program to generate the skeleton
code then modified it some. I'm working on sizing the pictures better
and getting them to load faster. Other than that I'm not interested in
spending hours and hours studying the fine points of HTML so that I
can spend hours to optimize the code for pages that will get very few
hits.

The layout seems to be agreeable to most people that replied or
emailed me. The page seems to serve the purpose of showing my work and
telling something about me. I'm going to be producing a special
limited edition (custom turned handles) of a product and will have a
link to my site from that companies site. We just wanted to give
people who were interested some idea of who was signing, dating, and
numbering the limited edition.

Thanks for your input.

On Fri, 16 Jan 2009 06:51:23 -0800 (PST), ebd
wrote:

Thanks for your critique of my code. But, after 35+ years of
programming in Assembly Language, COBOL, Pascal, and a few others, AND
more importantly after retireing, I've got not the least inclination
of getting deeply into HTML. I used a program to generate the skeleton
code then modified it some. I'm working on sizing the pictures better
and getting them to load faster. Other than that I'm not interested in
spending hours and hours studying the fine points of HTML so that I
can spend hours to optimize the code for pages that will get very few
hits.

The layout seems to be agreeable to most people that replied or
emailed me. The page seems to serve the purpose of showing my work and
telling something about me. I'm going to be producing a special
limited edition (custom turned handles) of a product and will have a
link to my site from that companies site. We just wanted to give
people who were interested some idea of who was signing, dating, and
numbering the limited edition.

Thanks for your input.

Wow. I totally misinterpreted the "I would appreciate any and all
comments. Please, be brutally honest," part of the original post.



--
LRod

Master Woodbutcher and seasoned termite

Shamelessly whoring my website since 1999

http://www.woodbutcher.net
http://www.normstools.com

Proud participant of rec.woodworking since February, 1997

email addy de-spam-ified due to 1,000 spams per month.
If you can't figure out how to use it, I probably wouldn't
care to correspond with you anyway.

Actually, you didn't. It's just that at this stage of my life I'm not
into learning another computer "language" in depth to use on a single
project. If I were going to use HTML extensively I would find your
comments about the intricacies (sp?) of coding HTML useful. In this
case, since I'm not going to be creating even one more site, not so
much. The stuff about sizing was helpful though.

Edit images for size. I didn't check all of them, but the zebrawood
bowl second from the bottom, for example, is 1200x1600 pixels.

Where are you getting this from? I'm going nuts trying to follow your
ideas on size but I'm missing something. When I look at the properties
of the Zebrawood bowl it is 973x730 pixels. What am I missing?

In article
ebd writes:
Edit images for size. I didn't check all of them, but the zebrawood
bowl second from the bottom, for example, is 1200x1600 pixels.

Where are you getting this from? I'm going nuts trying to follow your
ideas on size but I'm missing something. When I look at the properties
of the Zebrawood bowl it is 973x730 pixels. What am I missing?

I see it too. (BTW, cool bowl.)

Clicking that thumbnail gets http://www.eskimoblueday.com/slides/IMG_0510.html .
That page (in the HTML) gives a *display* size of 973x730.

But if I select "view image" (right click in Firefox), it shows me
that the image file is 1600x1200 (and 625,603 bytes).

If you scale down the image file, to the size you are displaying,
then things load faster. In this case, you should end up with a
file ~36% the size you have now.

It isn't causing me a problem. I just can't resist the occasional
tech-support question that I know how to answer.

--
Drew Lawson | What is an "Oprah"?
| -- Teal'c
|

Drew,

Thanks for the help in clearing that up.

Larry