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SITE REVIEW: Sorcerer's Awards

  • sirussblack
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Post May 18th, 2004, 3:21 pm

I made a site a while ago and then closed it and I made it again. :) I'd love some feedback on it whether positive or negative. You can find it at http://sa.iwillspeak.us. :) Thanks in advance.
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Post May 18th, 2004, 3:21 pm

  • Rat
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Post May 18th, 2004, 5:09 pm

The layout isnt bad. Simple and easy. The /may/ be a little hard on some eyes. You might wanna make the header/banner blend in more/better. Loads fasts and all links work:

5/10
  • Black_Legon
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Post May 18th, 2004, 11:52 pm

it's clean :)

But...here's some comments on your code:

    * A close tag was found without a matching open. This is probably an extra tag that you should remove.

    * The close tag </BODY> was not found, though the open was. You should open and close the BODY tag in order to get consistent performance on all browsers.

    *An open tag was found without a matching close. This may be an extra tag you should remove, or there may be a missing close tag later in the page that you need to add.
    * The open tag <HEAD> was not found, though the close was. You should open and close the HEAD tag in order to get consistent performance on all browsers.

    * Did not find the required open and close HTML tags. You should open and close the HTML tag in order to get consistent performance on all browsers.


And i agree with Rat about your header...

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  • Gints Vitols
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Post May 19th, 2004, 1:18 am

I think it's a nice site with easy to use navigation and clear structure. The simplicity of layout and visual style allows the reader to concentrate on content rather than appearance.


Speaking of problems I could find only some insignificant ones:

Use of strikeout text for hovered links is a somewhat nonstandard practice.

In screen resolutions higher than 800x600, the page content is left aligned in Internet Explorer and centered in Mozilla browser (I think it's because in Internet Explorer page displays in quirks mode because of missing DOCTYPE - as far as I understand content must be centered since margin-left and margin-right are both set to auto).

I would expect that navigation box or content box (whichever of them is shorter) extends down towards the footer (so that their bottom edges are aligned - like in table-based layouts), but I guess it's impossible to do in CSS-based layout without the use of some ugly hacks.

You might want to change the page background from white to some light pastel color, as white, in my opinion, gives a "feel" of incompleteness.


P.S. The idea with "Monkey" question is fun. Now you can tell for sure who has read the rules :).
  • rtm223
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Post May 19th, 2004, 2:07 am

Gints Vitols wrote:
In screen resolutions higher than 800x600, the page content is left aligned in Internet Explorer and centered in Mozilla browser (I think it's because in Internet Explorer page displays in quirks mode because of missing DOCTYPE - as far as I understand content must be centered since margin-left and margin-right are both set to auto).


IE always displays in quirks mode lol. Nope, the problem is an IE glitch, to get centered layout using CSS and get IE to behave nice you have to add:
Code: [ Select ]
text-align:center;

to the body. This will then get inherited to other elements so you then add:
Code: [ Select ]
text-align:left;

to the #container.

That will give you cross browser conformance, there is no other way. dontcha just love CSS :D

I agree with Gints about the links - I really hate when people do stuff like this. My rule of thumb is that only background colour/image, text colour and underlines should be added to a link on hover. Thats just me though.

I would suggest using some "faux columns":
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fauxcolumns/
to get the nav column as long as the content and vice-versa.

I'm alos not keen on the urine-colour background. Sorry but that is what it makes me think of :lol:

Your code is pretty clean but as Black legon was saying - you really should be adding doctypes and making sure everything is properly nested and valid.

The following is the minimum requirement for a valid xhtml 1 doc:

Code: [ Select ]
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
  <head>
    <title>simple document</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>a simple paragraph</p>
  </body>
</html>
  1. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
  2. <html>
  3.   <head>
  4.     <title>simple document</title>
  5.   </head>
  6.   <body>
  7.     <p>a simple paragraph</p>
  8.   </body>
  9. </html>


If you are looking to do css layouts (Well done on that BTW :) ), you could clean up and strip down your markup by removing your center and font tags, and adding classes or id to elements. A good idea is to use as few types of tag as possible - I use:

div, p, a, img, span and ul/li for all of my formatting
I also use b, i, h* but I only use these for the purposes of seo.

This is all the advice I can think of. There is nothing "wrong" with the site and everything looks fine really. I just thought I would pass on some advice in terms of css useage :)
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  • SharkShark
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Post May 19th, 2004, 7:54 am

not a bad site, some suggestions though, I am using a 1024x768 res and the site is sitting up in the upperleft corner of my screen. It looks kinda odd up there. Also, Damn but is that yellow on white necessary. geez Im still blinking. LOL i suggest you try and tone it down. Maybe you can change the rollover while your at it? I don't know, I dont like lines through my words when Im reading them. Maybe underline them on rollover or bold or change color. anything but the strikethrough. very basic site. but good content. keep working!
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  • rtm223
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Post May 19th, 2004, 8:07 am

SharkShark wrote:
I am using a 1024x768 res and the site is sitting up in the upperleft corner of my screen. It looks kinda odd up there.


suggestion: click <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox" target="_blank">here</a> :wink: that should solve the problem for you shark shark.
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Post May 19th, 2004, 8:39 am

rtm: is that what you use?
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Post May 19th, 2004, 8:56 am

rat: up until the point where I have to start fixing internet explorer bugs (like this one), yes. Although I'm getting quite good at internet explorer CSS hacks now and and can rattle off most of the common ones without having to open IE at all, which is nice :)

PS: do you think you could write a review in the review thread lol :wink:

//edit sorry rat I didn't see that post up there lol. Don't I look stupid now :roll: (editing this post so I don't clog up the review....)
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  • sirussblack
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Post May 19th, 2004, 12:36 pm

Heh, thanks for all your reviews. I do know about some of these errors but I think it looks okay with them until the next layout comes (that'll be much different). Er, I'll change the rollover links in a moment to an underline. The color is pretty bad but it's not horrible temporarily so I think I'll keep it for a while. And the banner was made by my friend for another layout similar to this and it looked okay with this one so I put it there. :) Other than that, thanks for the reviews.
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Post May 19th, 2004, 12:51 pm

rtm223 wrote:
PS: do you think you could write a review in the review thread lol :wink:


What do you mean? :roll: :?:
  • Gints Vitols
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Post May 20th, 2004, 1:17 am

rtm223 wrote:
suggestion: click <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox" target="_blank">here</a> :wink: that should solve the problem for you shark shark.


If there was a DOCTYPE declared for the site we are reviewing, it would show centered in Internet Explorer 6.0, too.
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Post May 20th, 2004, 1:56 am

nope, it IS NOT a doctype problem. It is an IE rendering glitch. As you haven't bothered to check before "correcting me", look at this:

check out this example:
http://www.service6.org.uk/richard/notcenter.htm

it validates and has a valid doctype, no hint of "quirks mode"

Then check out this:

http://www.service6.org.uk/richard/propercenter.htm

text-align:center on the body is how to make pages center in IE. It is the only sensible way of doing it, and with a valid doctype it <b>makes no difference</b>



here are the validation results:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http% ... &verbose=0
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http% ... &verbose=0

If that is not enough <a href="http://www.glish.com/css/3.asp" target="_blank">here</a> is the explanation from glish.com, and this is done with text-align:center; on the body.....


//siruss: if you stick the centering method I described you will get the same result in all browsers. It is best to have a valid doctype and a valid document though, and I would still advise you to add the neccesary code to make your file validate, as it <i>can</i> prevent browser incompatibilities. It just won't in this situation :wink:
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  • Liquescence
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Post May 20th, 2004, 2:13 am

Honestly, the yellow is kind of painful for me to look at for extended periods of time. The top graphic looks a bit lo-quality; I'm not sure whether that was intended. Good content. I would recommend adding colors; everything is either black or yellow. Another is, I think the yellow background the right side should stretch out at least as long as the menu (http://sa.iwillspeak.us/dates.php). It seems kind of odd with the little white area in the middle there.
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Post May 20th, 2004, 2:22 am

Liquescence wrote:
I think the yellow background the right side should stretch out at least as long as the menu (http://sa.iwillspeak.us/dates.php). It seems kind of odd with the little white area in the middle there.


To be fair, this is a little tricky with css, the divs aren't "locked" together as with tables, but the tutorial I posted above should help get this one sorted.
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Post May 20th, 2004, 2:22 am

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