SITE REVIEW: The Weekly Canard

I'll preface this by acknowledging that I'm a total novice/hack!

This site is a weekly news satire site, obviously attempting a 'morning paper' appearance.

http://www.theweeklycanard.com

or direct:

http://www.theweeklycanard.osamabinrumsfeld.com

Thanks in advance,

Mac

Looks pretty good, plenty of information and well organized. One thing you could try to do for people with higher resolutions is to center the whole thing. On my computer it doens't fill the screen so it looked a little lopsided when it was just left justified. Other then that it looks like you did a great job fo a "total novice/hack"

Thank you very much. The centering idea is a good one; one that I've spent too much time trying to figure out how to do! Since you mention it I realize I need to keep trying.

Mac

yeesh you used all div tags for that?! novice my butt What happens if you put a table around all that and center the table? I would imagine that would have some pretty ghastly effects on the css though...

it's worth a try :-p

in my opinion you need to have to design a new logo, if you are going for a newspaper effect, why not photograph a newspaper's actual title. and edit it with your own style. then you can even take a photo of a page, edit it and cut the whole centre out, youre left with the sides of the page that you can use as sides for a table. i hope you understand. i do baffle a lot

Hrmm, I think it looks fine, even better then our school newspaper...
The drop shadows could probably go, since not to much on the page is 3d besides them and maybe the plates.

PS. deFaye you need to size down your signature please,(http://www.ozzu.com/viewtopic.php?t=697)

ok ill do that asap.

wow, man, Pretty cool site. I liked it. looks like a newspaper, and i lvoed the idea where it says links and it has saugage links good job. i give site a 7/10

Hehe, I was about to say your not much of a novice if you used DIV tags as noted earlier also (no newbie I know of using anything besides HTML and possibly some gay Javascript crap on their first websites), but that is some pretty ugly DIV/CSS usage. It makes the point of using DIV over tables pointless. Sorry, I didn't mean this at all to be rude. Umm, let me try another approach...

The DIV usage could use a little help. Try putting sections in noted DIV tags like the body, and the side menu, then use CSS classes assigned to each subsection of the body with common margins and properties (avoiding repeating code), then let the separate sections position themselves dynamically avoiding manually entering positions for every single object on the page.

Thanks for the input. The situation as it stands:

1. The 'newpaper' concept is a good idea and I thought of some variation of that. I worked on a couple of variants and people that I showed wound up liking the original version. It still fits with the theme since the aim, more accurately put, is to be "evocative" of a newspaper.

2. Drop shadows: again, trying with and without I had more votes for using them, though I'll try to be somewhat judicious.

3. "Ugly css." Of course, I know you're right! I know there must be a more efficient way and I certainly would like to work toward that. That will require a fairly major reworking in the way I learned how to do it (which is learning bad habits of course), but trying to balance the weekly updating of stories and images with work and family, well.... And I didn't find your approach rude at all.

Perhaps my biggest issue is that I found out the site doesn't display images on Apple computers!

Thanks a lot for the input. I'll be hanging around looking for design hints/tips and trying to find answers before asking questions.

Mac

I like the content alot but u should make a few changes to the leyout... I suggest not using images in the navigation menu and put it to the left instead of the right (It works better for people with different resolutions).

I'm glad to see a political site out there. Perhaps lose some of the large images and use text links. Keep it professional, and remember function comes before form.

it's alright... but the design needs a scheme or a theme... it doesn't have that..

well organised and informative. sorry i didnt have time to read it:-(

Having contributed articles to a similar site ( I don't know if I'm allowed to mention it ) I do have some comments about your site. I found the layout text a bit heavy on the eye, some white space in between paragraphs would break it up and make it a lot easier to read, the site that I mentioned I had worked on had the first 5 lines or so of the story on the front page with a 'read more' link that takes you to a page with the full story on making the home page look uncluttered and giving readers a taste of the article which hopefully will whet their appetite for more. I can't really comment on the technical side of the site as I am far from qualified in that area but I can say that the navigation section (Old News, Links and Contact) doesn't seem to work. Hope this helps