SITE REVIEW: zachdexter.com

hey,
i have a personal site at http://zachdexter.com. right now, it's just a general site - not much going on atm. any suggestions for it? and how can i reduce the size of the enormous, gigantic background picture?

also, please take a look at the forums i have set up.

general discussion forums: http://zachdexter.com/forum
outdoor adventure forums: http://zachdexter.com/adventure

right now, i'm trying to get members to join the extreme adventure forum. if you like sports such as whitewater rafting/kayaking, mountain biking, caving... etc... please join

i hope to create a drop-down box on the main page that allows you to choose which forum to login to - and also, when i get a chance, i'm planning to create a page where you select which forum to visit.

please offer suggestions etc.

thanks!

Your forum looks un-original and bland. Everyone seems to have a forum and I see nothing unique to make me want to join your forum than any others.

The site looks very amateurish. Photo backgrounds = no. Just make it 1 solid color. Also, the site is very small at 1280 X 1024, I'd recommend using percentages to postion and size elemnts.

Your site also doesn't validate, http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http% ... ter.com%2F

Hey that site looks pretty cool! I like how you went off on a tangent and tried something different with your background. It works pretty good with the theme, and the tables with a solid background color look great!

The forum could use a more outdoorish theme, maybe green and/or brown or something along those lines?

And don't worry about your site not being xhtml compatible.

NO!

Do NOT listen to this man.

Making standard complient webpages is important. It increases the chances it will correctly render in more than just 1 browser as well as helping to move internet technology farther.

You do realize that not using the standards has caused internet technology to slow down drastrically?

CSS was out in 1996 and we are just now coming up with CSS3? Hell IE has horrible support for CSS2 and doesn't even have complete CSS1 support.

Do you know why? Because no one cared enough to validate their webpages. Broken code resulted in programmers creating rendering engines which basically has to GUESS alot of code, which took alot of time and effort and for what? So people like you could tell others not to validate.

The trend will only continue if attitudes stay like this as new standards come out, more people will break them and more browser developers will have to guess.

There is absolutely no reason why webpages shouldn't be able to validate. No reason at all.

Please, stop slowing down progress. Allow him to learn it correctly the first time.

at least it's much different than the default phpBB. a different modified style, logo, new imageset even from the new template on the adventure forum... and the other one is about the same in terms of modifications. what would you like to see added/subtracted to/from it?


hmm... don't you think it'd look kinda bad with a solid background color? just wondering... most people seem to think the pic is just a little large. i'll try to fix the resolution thing, thx.

validation... please explain what line(s) i need to add/subtract/modify

green and brown would be great for the adventure forum, you're right, but i'm not good at styles and i haven't found any good green/brown ones. so i stuck to a barren north "icy" type of theme.

ok, thx for the suggestions. if you can tell me how to fix this stuff, i'll do it

Heh don't mind the other guys negative comments, he is banned now.

I think, with my ohnotsovast knowledge of javascript, that if you were to set the image on a div layer then scale it according to the screen resolution (using js), you could probably make it look good. On my resolution the image begins to repeat so something should be done to fix it.

.d

? ?

Why was he banned? he helped me and was nice.

its a nice site background does need work though besides that its an good site

i think i actually edited the image so that it would repeat - because i couldn't stretch it accurately, lol. i'll dig in my JS book for that if i can.

i don't exactly see why you banned him... he was just making a point... but i guess that's up to you.

I really never have been a fan of background images. Most Webmasters leave background images off their site but its always good to have something new The banner and background donut mix heh besides that the site rocks keep up the good work.

Have you read his other posts? He was completely ignorant, had good knowledge but didn't understand how to communicate it. Unfortunately the Ozzu community is not going to stand for anyone with a horrible attitude like that. Sad thing is I read all his posts and even the Mods. were replying nicely to him after he tried to rip them. He still didn't learn! Glad and sad to see him go.... Was pretty pc literate!

Now that i read the posts i see what you meant. He did know his stuff. To bad he had a bad attitude or else he could have been a great deal of help to us all

i seriously doubt that