The Official New Site Design Thread

[Glych]

Okay guys...thank you so much for helping me out...all of you!

Basically, here is the original e-mail I posted out to some of you (those who e-mailed me) about what I was thinking:

Hey all! I'm sorry it took so long, I've been closing almost every night this week, and school has been taking up a lot of my time.

Basically, all of you resonded to my plight ('cept Maili, who's friend Robert Howard responded for her), and all of you are welcome to help me. Thank you.

The website.

Basically, the major problems with the site right now, are missing pages, broken links, too many hidden "things" that don't belong there...etc...

It just needs a face lift.

None of the things that need to be done are "hard" persay, just tedius and time consuming, and time is really charished to me right now.

First off, the majority of my file sizes in http://glych.keenspace.com/comics are well larger than they should be, and with any kind of image altering program is more than you need to shrink the file sizes (for example, Photoshop 5.5 and higher allows you to "save for web").

Second, some of my archives are missing. Most of these can be found through Kane Lynch (I'll give the e-mail to you if you need it) for the Silence of the Spons guest week.

Third, most of the archives will either disappear, or have .html disclaimers attached to them. I'm willing to write a little note to most of them, but someone else, please attach them. I'm having trouble with the .html attachments to the comics (those who are already familiar with keenspace tagtorials will understand what I'm talking about).

Fourth, The site's just look thrown together. If anyone out there knows Fireworks or Dreamweaver and would like to make a streamlined look to the site, that'll be cool.

I basically need a webmaster. I know HTML and Java pretty well, but I don't really have the time to keep up on it like I want to. A little help is all I ask. I don't have much money, but -boy- of I did, I'd buy a big house where we both could live....oh, sorry...that's an Elton John song....um...I really don't have much money, but I can pay you in time and talent. I offer an original 11 1/2" X 17" pen and ink, and inkwash final drawing of whatever to the "winner"...meaning what I like best. This person (I hope) will become my full on webmaster when the onnicial face lift os over. If some of y'all choose to join forces, the winning party get's an original drawin of the same sized drawing for each of them...

Thanks!

-glych


Okay...Well, here are some quick sketches also of what I was thinking:









And a painting to make sure you guys were paying attention.



-glych

[ZOMBIE USER 11735]

http://www.mninter.net/~gallatin/workspace/

seeing as this is the official post I am moving my link here.

btw .. nice painting

[Siece]

http://www.mninter.net/~gallatin/workspace/

I don't know what you have on that site now, but it's taking forever to load. After more than 6 and a half minutes of aiting, it still wasn't finished!

I tried connected to a bunch of high traffic sites, and was able to get the pages fully loaded in under 15 seconds [cable modems are nice:)], so I'm reasonably sure it wasn't net lag.

This leaves three possibilities:

1). Your net server sucks/has more visitors than slashdot, Keen, and Joke A Day combined[1]

2). You REALLY need to trim some stuff down

3). You've used some proprietary tags, which my browser (Opera) doesn't recognise, causing it to choke and keep looping the page load. This would be a first for Opera, but I've seen the error happen on both M$ Internet Exploiter and Netscrape.

[1]As tested by pulling up all three sites, then telling my browser to reload all the pages, using only as much of my bandwidth as was available from the most busy site.

--

[ZOMBIE USER 11735]

I will look into why it was loading so slow butthere isn't much on the page at all ... its more likely that they were doing site mai8ntainence during the time you tried.

Its free webspace so I have no control over.

by your using opera I assume your a linux fan. I have notice that they choke on some java scripts but these I grabbed right off of Glych's site so if you saw them before they should work now.

I am curious though .. why opera and not mozilla? (or one of the others) I haven't noticed anything compelling about opera that made me want to use it over mozilla on my linux box.


-- one side note -- did you know that in IE your posts are pushed WAY over to the right. not sure if its the long location doing it or what.

[ZOMBIE USER 11735]

ack work sucks. we asked for help and they send us a new manager.

I should get a chance to ftp some things up tonight for your viewing.

[ErikZ]

I love the rough drafts, but all I could think was "Is she putting out some sort of yoga/arobics video?"

[Siece]

by your using opera I assume your a linux fan. I have notice that they choke on some java scripts but these I grabbed right off of Glych's site so if you saw them before they should work now.

Opera has a low fault tolerance, but if the programmer actually bothers to debug his/her code, it works just fine.

I am curious though .. why opera and not mozilla? (or one of the others) I haven't noticed anything compelling about opera that made me want to use it over mozilla on my linux box.

Two reasons: First, while I am a linux fan, my ISP only supports Windoze, and they are extremely persistent in annoying those who don't conform. Second, at the time I was arrange my setup, mozilla and its offspring were still proprietary code. As such, Opera was the only browser I could find that was both multimedia-enabled and available on both platforms for easy portability of downloads.

-- one side note -- did you know that in IE your posts are pushed WAY over to the right. not sure if its the long location doing it or what.

I wasn't aware of it doing this to my posts specfically, but yes, I was aware that IE had this problem. It happens because M$ doesn't like java, CSS, and basically anything else that they don't own, and so they try to make your life more difficult if you insist on using them anyway. Feel free to insert your favroite 100,000 word anti-Micro$oft rant here.

--

[ZOMBIE USER 11735]

Feel free to insert your favroite 100,000 word anti-Micro$oft rant here

No, no rants here. I guess I am one of the few who couldn't care less what OS people use. I try to just be familiar with as many as I can (well I do that for work anyhow).

--edit-- I will check Opera out. I am curious now.

[Wodan]

--edit-- I will check Opera out. I am curious now.

Opera is my main brower now (I use it for everything except when I go through my comics, Opera doesnt like Backflip and I like being able to arrow through my 38 or so bookmarks.).
It seems to load pages faster then IE and I've pretty much given up on netscape.

[BanditAngel]

http://www.geocities.com/html_gremlin/N ... index.html - This is to demonstrate apperances. It also has a fully functional archive system written in javascript, because I'm an idiot and didn't realize keenspace would obviously handle this (Oh well, the archive script is useful for job hunting it seems, yay

I've got versions written in Keen-tag, but those look ugly, and it would be pointless to publish them except to debug the tags

[Glych]

Wow! I really like it! It loads fast, and it looks clean... Aside from the bottom links (I'd want both smaller buttons and no borders on the table...both easily fixed with some code tweakage) you've been pushed into the lead. I hope you like dragons, Bandit (da' drawerin' I'ma' doin').

Contest is still open though...don't fret to join forces!

-glych

[BanditAngel]

Gah, my GEOCITIES site is loading quickly? I'm shocked

Anyways, I removed the table border and created nice miniature versions of the buttons - They wouln't get any smaller without a serious drop in quality, unless I make new ones using a smaller font. I also resized the No Stereotypes button to be exactly the same as the others. Personally, I prefered it with borders - I'm thinking maybe a little border around each button?

And I'm quite fond of dragons =)

[Captain Mike]

I can redo those buttons if you want.

What size do you want them?

When I did them up i sized them 250 x 150 pixels.

maybe I should redo them 150 x 60?

[BanditAngel]

I've currently got them resized around 150x60 and they still look pretty good, but I think redoing them with a smaller font would make them look a bit cleaner. I'm happy to leave them as is, but if you want to remake them it would be appriciated And I've added you to the credits for the site now - sorry about forgetting it Captain Mike It'd be neat to have a No Stereotypes button seperate from the title graphic too. And if you want, I can make your name in the credits link to your email or website if you want - just tell me where to link it

[Captain Mike]

Ok I'll redo the graphics.

you can put a link to my site:
http://captainmike.keenspace.com

I'll have the buttons redune by tomorrow!

[Captain Mike]

Ok I've got the new buttons done up:

<img src="http://captainmike.keenspace.com/images/experiment2.jpg">

http://captainmike.keenspace.com/images/experiment2.jpg

<img src="http://captainmike.keenspace.com/images/nonpersons2.jpg">

http://captainmike.keenspace.com/images/nonpersons2.jpg


I tried doing up a No Stereotypes buttons but I hated the ones I came up with.

[BanditAngel]

Thanks! Those look a lot cleaner than the shrinking I did on the other ones.

The No Stereotypes button shrunk the best, so don't worry about it if you can't come up with anything there

[Glych]

No Stereotypes unofficial font was Impact. So a simple black background with white Imapact font would be fine methinks...looks great!

-glych

[BanditAngel]

A plain white-text button feels a bit jarring to me, compared to the other two buttons. The problem is, Button 2 is a bit fancy, and button 3 is a bit fancier than 2, so if Button 1 is plain it looks unbalanced - It gets fancier as you go to the right. I dunno, just doesn't look right to me. Tried playing around with some simple paintshop effects on purple text "No Stereotypes", but I couldn't get anything that was nice looking AND easily readable :\ Oh well, I'll give it a try tommorow, probably just too tired for this stuff

[Captain Mike]

I've come up with a No Stereotypes button that I like.
I was having trouble because I kept trying to have the No and the Stereotypes on the same line. It made the button either too long or the text to small if I kept the 150x60 format. So I broke thetwo words apart onto different lines.

<img src ="http://capatainmike.keenspace.com/image ... otypes.jpg">

http://capatainmike.keenspace.com/image ... otypes.jpg



I like this one much better this way.
What do you think?