ChildrensFilms.org - Site critique...

[davidamarkley]

Hello!

I just finished making a website for a friend, and was wanting some professional opinions on it.

The first link :: ChildrensFilms.org - Home :: is the main page for the site. And that has one design theme, I used IFRAME and other things for that portion of the site, and then the second link :: The Soccer Story :: has a totally different look to go along with the soccer theme.

Also, just to put a shameless plug in here... OuT made the picture with the kid's faces in the different hexagons of the soccer ball. (Great job, OuT!!)

Any opinions are welcome! (That doesn't mean that I have to agree with them though... )

David

[Aaron_J]

Well here is my opinion on cf.org :

First, it's a good clean design.

Now, out of curiosity. Why did you use an image for the content text on the home page? On other pages you went with text. Seems odd unless you noticed that it has problems in Mozilla/Netscape and that was your workaround. *shrug*

Speaking of which. Have you looked at the site in Mozilla/Netscape? With the exception of the home page and the soccer link all other links simply show the content text. The rest of the site goes on a coffee break.

On to the Soccer site. It is a simple but nice layout and the faces in the soccer ball is kind of neat. (Good job with that Out)

Unfortunately it also has problems in Mozilla/Netscape. You lose the navagation graphics at the top left whenever you click on a link. (page 1, page 2, etc.)

For what it's worth this is somewhat indicative of what I would have done with the design for cf.org. (it's a 30 minute hackjob I put together as an example and it's not even close to being considered "done") The point is that it displays correctly in multiple browsers. If you want to play with it you can download a zip of the files here.

Oh, and in my opinion iframes are teh suck.

[davidamarkley]

Hey, Aaron...

Thanks alot for your work and your opinion/critique.

I tried it in Mozilla Firebird, and it works fine. Also, Opera works fine as well... THen I used Mozilla, and it did just what you said. So, I dug deeper into the Gecko rendering engine, and came to the conclusion that you'll read later on down in my post.

The reason I used IFRAMES is that I wanted it to be able to load up new content without the additional overhead of the same images loading up everytime.

If there is a better solution than IFRAMEs, I'm willing to try it, but for 85% of people that use IE, it is forgiving, and just allows more freedom with coding. Nothing against Mozilla/Netscape, but I believe there should be a balance between coding strictness, and leniency in the code. Especially when one codes the HTML to 4.0 Strict standards, and some browsers STILL don't interpret the code correctly. Ok, I submitted a bug report to Mozilla.org regarding the use of the underscore in an IFRAME NAME="" value. Every other browser accepts NAME values such as "_content" "_main" etc. But, no, not in Mozilla...

OK, enough rant...

Even though you may not like IFRAMEs, I am growing fond of them because of the fact that it can make it so your sites can have more content size(image size) and since it doesn't have to reload it, it makes the browsing much more enjoyable for the 28K-56K dialup crowd while not diminishing the browsing experience.

FYI, TechIMO uses several IFRAMEs on each page...

Thanks again for you comments, and I just have one request of you... Please try the site again, and see if your Mozilla/Netscape browser renders the pages correctly.

Also, the readon I used images for the links, and not text, was because with all the different resolutions, font size settings and what not that people look at the site with. I wanted the site to look the same on everyone's computer. So, since the table sizes are not dynamic(expandable) but static, I decided to use images.

Even though the entire site - minus the other content links - are pictures, the file size of all the images combined are a mere 36 KB. And, the fact that once the main page is loaded, only 1K or so of text is loaded. That is a small footprint. That is my reason for using IFRAMEs.

I never liked FRAMESETS, but IFRAMEs are a good and usefull idea.

David

Oh, I have another question... How could I make the entire page be centered, horizontally and vertically in the browser window on condition that the browser window was larger than the page width/height? I've tried using MARGINWIDTH, but I don't want a specific value, I just want it center top to bottom, and left to right. Thanks!

[Technoed]

Quote:

Especially when one codes the HTML to 4.0 Strict standards, and some browsers STILL don't interpret the code correctly.

If you stick to W3C's standards correctly then you'd have no problems at all. One thing to remember, though, is that when some browsers were launched (IE 4, Netscape Navigator etc) the HTML revision you're using wasn't around. But don't worry about those old browsers - the people who use those deserve to get a badly-rendered pages for not upgrading!

By the way, how can you expect your browser to know what to render when you don't even have a DTD on those pages?!

[Technoed]

Quote:

Originally posted by davidamarkley
Oh, I have another question... How could I make the entire page be centered, horizontally and vertically in the browser window on condition that the browser window was larger than the page width/height? I've tried using MARGINWIDTH, but I don't want a specific value, I just want it center top to bottom, and left to right. Thanks!

You'd need Javascript for that.

However, you could just center it by adding the whole page into one big table.