Hello. I thought I'd give a go at redesigning the court-records website. You can find my design here:

http://www.freewebs.com/court-records/

Discuss!

If you have any ideas for improvements, just say. ;)

Not bad, Mephiles. Is this for the contest...? I like how the links are all clear, right on top.

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Thata's pretty win, right there.

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Thanks But I'm new here on the forums, so I don't really know what contest you mean.

Well, there is some sort of contest for making a new design for the forums or something....I'm not too sure about its details, but if you go to the main page, which you do by clicking on the owl's speech bubble on top of this page, you can probably find something about it there. Like, in the Updates, which are posted right there.

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Croik's brought this to my attention. You've got a lot of cool things going on in there. =D

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Wooster, I know this is off-topic, but....What does it say on your avatar? I can't read it....

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Just right-click it and go to it's location. It's easier to read there.

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I just need the go-ahead and I'll start making parts for the rest of the site. I'll use a lot of modern website stuff to make it more interesting ;)

It's pretty good, excellent in fact. The pics in the banner don't fit all that well together, they were'nt designed to. Maybe a darker grey, more like the forum background would be good for the site background, and the text on the links could be standardised.
I am being critical, I know. It's better than I could do, so I can't really speak but with those adjustments, would be fantastic!
It beats the (I'm sorry to say) cluttered and unorderly layout the current site features. It always used to look very attractive though. I wouldn't lose the nav box we have at the moment. Just move it to the top again and decorate it like used to be done.

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Thanks for the suggestions, but I don't really want to change most of the things you've mentioned except the background, but I don't know which background you mean. There's a lot of them! Do you mean the that the general colour should change from blacks and greys to brown?

Oh right, yea, little vague on that. Sorry.
I think the box background and the one behind that could both do with darkening.

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Mephiles~ It's a neat design, but I can't really ask you to start making up new pages. If Wooster and I decide to use some of the elements you have here you'll certainly be credited for the design, but since I'm the one that does most of the updating to the main site, it has to be something I'll be able to recreate and manipulate myself. So I wouldn't want you to spend you time on a lot of new pages and things when I'd be remaking them myself anyway.

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I'm making it so that it can be edited quite simply.

PS: I've had a go at some of the info page to give you further example. ;)

http://www.freewebs.com/court-records/info.html

=D That's some AWESOME code you got there. Your CSS is surprisingly organized, are you having your code generated through something? It's snazzy regardless. The demo info page has some awesome razzle dazzle. Javascript has always been just outside of my league. I aught to take some classes in that.

Anyways, what Croik is trying to say in a more meaningful sense, is that the entire main site is made and generated in Frontpage. Now, on this server, that means that because Frontpage has a ton of stupid holes in it, that the only moderately exciting stuff Deamhost lets us run on the main domain are server side includes. (That's the 'only' reason we're able to have the updates auto-generated on the front page).

Now, with that established, what you're proposing would be superb except for some more details. Frontpage likes to correct errors of the user, regardless of if they're actually errors. So if we create a HTML file with a SSI in the header and footer, all Frontpage is going to see is something that looks like body content, and auto-generate that 'missing' code. Bad-Frontpage! Bad!

Now, lets go a bit farther...

You said it would be very easy to maintain. Lets take a look...



Beautiful code! BEAUTIFUL. And you're right that by looking at the code, it is simple to add on to it. (Add a new question, copy the template, and change all instances of 'q2' to whatever.) However, this is only simple, if you're in HTML mode.

To give you a better picture, Croik sucks at code. So she spends most of her time in the WYSIWYG mode of Frontpage, and only goes into HTML mode when I say, "Hey, let's add an RSS feed to the front page".

Here're some snippits from our IM conversation,





According to what she told me, whenever she makes a new page, she has a template file handy, and just adds the content to it and uploads. It's actually a surprisingly practical system. 'But', you say, 'you just add the header and footer to the template, bing bang boom no problem'. Indeed, no problem at all. If things were set in stone. But, once that file is uploaded it's it's own entity. We change the front page banner about as often as we do the forum banner. So if we wanted to swap out your awesome rotating banner with something OA inspired, we'd have to edit all the other pages. And considering there's no automated process to do that, that I'm aware of, it would become more work then it's worth.

With that said, you have to assume that most of the content in the pages are going to be devoid of span and div tags, and full of font and table tags. (eep). And that whatever content we put in the header and footer can't have content that could change at a moments notice. And if it does, it has to be really easy to fix.

Now, with that said, we can move on to my thoughts on the page design.
Your page has a peculiar width to it. I'm quite sure that it's comfortable on your monitor, but on mine it's 'just' outside that range. Now, I know how you got that width, between all the sections and the header, it's not quite forgiving. But there ARE cheats you can use! You've seen me do similar things with the header on the forum.

If you're proud of that particular logo, I have a few suggestions that might fix it. First, change the current width to max-with. Next, put the GS4 Court Art pic on it's own Div layer, above the Prosecutor and Defense Backgrounds, but behind the Desks and Characters. (Oh Z-index, you're a lovely cheat). Then make sure your items are properly aligned/positioned for a dynamic width page. And bing bang boom you're set!

Now, Your page is beautiful, but it is graphic intensive (And I'm on dialup). Having each tab have it's own image file is wasteful. Separate the left, right, and middle sides and let the text and end width be generated by the user, or predefine the width to something comfortable. A similar concept should be applied to the page's title grey bar you've installed. It spans the whoooooole page. That takes more time to load then it needs.

Also, if you know how tall an element is going to be before it is generated, you should specify it in the CSS file. Content keeps shaking around until the page loads completely. It can be frustrating.

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Now, I know I'm being critical, but your proto-types really are neat. Don't let what I've explained frustrate you. I'm actually fond of your design and somethings you've done I'd never have thought of. I particularly like how you incorporated the "Touch The Screen" message tab and the location tab. Those really blew my socks off. And as I said before, Javascript is out of my league. (Php, less so). So there's a ton of awesome stuff in there.

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JavaScript is actually out of my league too. I just get my scripts off http://www.dynamicdrive.com.

Since the site is edited in front page.... ummm... perhaps there's an easy way. I wonder if it's possible to have pages edited via the forums or a PHP application... ummm...


There's actually a simpler way where it's possible for one page containing the header and footer to be edited and when that one page is edited, it edits all the pages!

I'm interested in it, but...

Well, it loses some of the old pizzaz the currant layout has. It's a tad, generic. I'm not trying to put you down or anything, I do like it. It's just I don't think that the current layout needs changing.

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That's right, but this is FrontPage we're talking about, if the header and footer information are written into an include either by Javascript or SSI, then Frontpage isn't going to see important tags like HTML, Header, and Body and then write in the missing parts. Then when the page is loaded you'll have 2 HTML tags, 2 Header, and 2 Body tags. Then we can watch as people email in about how only IE loads the site correctly.

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Oh well. I might as well give up then.

Do you have an instant messenger? I really don't want you to get discouraged. Check my profile for my accounts.

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Oh Crapola. Did I put you off... Sorry :(

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Whoa! Those are some wicked designs, Mephilis!

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SPELL MY NAME RIGHT!!!!!


You didn't. It's just that if the page can't be edited easilly by Croik, then you can't use it.

FrontPage, huh... NVU (free), or Dreamweaver (not free), sure, but FRONTPAGE (__not__ free)!!!

*cough*

OK - Now that I'm done ranting...

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It looks great, very (Wright/AA)y. The tabs at the top are great - but image-intensive. JavaScript is potentially irritating, but I like the AJAX loader on the info page, as it also allows access using a text web-browser...


I'D WISH TO POINT OUT THAT I LIKE THE FACT THAT I CAN ACTUALLY ACCESS THE THING WITHOUT USING A STUPID/ANNOYING IMAGEMAP (as I do use links/lynx/DSOrganize on my DS to browse/dl SFX/GFX/etc.)!!! hint, hint, croik :) - without being malicious


Thankyou.

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You are right. Frontpage is an extremely poor editor, but its replacement, Microsoft Expression Web is fantastic!

If I had $300, I would look into it, but for now I'm just using what I know.

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By the way - I should point out (not NVU, that's old... since 2005, whereas Frontpage is old since 2006) KompoZer (30/8/2007 for the latest version) is great. Really. Like Frontpage, even. - but you can't upload using Frontpage's upload things. But you can via FTP. Yay.

Am I talking to myself here?...

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