As I said before... you have a great start, and I'm glad you took care of that issue with the shape of the star.RPin wrote:Okay, peoples, I made a little preliminary version.
Could you please tell me how it looks on different browsers?
Linky
Forgive the geocities thing... yeah...
Also, as a few other people have said, use .gifs instead of jpegs, since your images don't have a ton of gradients or colors in them. A good rule of thumb is:
Cel-style coloring OR less than 3 colors: Use gif compression.
Photo-style shading OR cel-style coloring and shading with lots of colors: Use jpeg.
Now onto other, more subjective stuff...
Table borders are largely archaic-looking nowadays, and I don't think it's really ever a good idea to use them in something that isn't an extremely quick-and-dirty page. You'll notice on my comic's site that, while I have used tables (enough that it's going to be a logistical nightmare if I ever decide to make the site full CSS rather than partial CSS), and the big table that contains all the content has a border, it's a manually-made border.
Since the Keenspot site uses single-pixel wide borders, and it looks nice, I'd suggest that. There's a couple of different ways to go about doing it, but with a regular table, the easiest is probably to just make a big table containing other data that has 3 columns and 3 rows; 9 cells in all. Put all your content in the middle cell, set the top, bottom, left, right, and corner cells to have black backgrounds (you can do this with either bgcolor or CSS... either way is equally easy). This is a little more complicated than just using a table border, but it looks more professional.
If you want to make the border more complex than a single color, and give it a "frame" look like the one on my comic's site has, you'll have to make images and have them repeat in the background. Depending on the complexity of the border, you will need separate images for the top, bottom, left, right, and all the corners. If you're going to do this, do it with CSS instead of cell attributes, because the attribute that sets a repeating image for the background of a cell is not supported by HTML 4.0 and has a habit of not functioning properly or at all in some browsers. Anyway, I don't recommend this for your design.
The non-graphical text in the descriptive section and that black "The Guide!" section of your design is too flush with the cell borders. It shouldn't be up against them like that. The easiest (or at least, the most reliable) way to take care of this is to make a table to act as an invisible border or "cusion" around your text, sort of like cell padding and cell spacing but easier to control once you have it in there, especially if you use weird text settings like justified alignment (IMO). You'll want separate cells for each side you want to cusion from the border. In each cell, put a tiny, transparent .gif with its dimensions adjusted to provide the necessary cusioning (for instance, if you want the spaces between the left and the right of the text and the coorresponding sides of the edges you're cusioning them from to be 10 pixels wide, adjust the .gif so it's 10 pixels wide. You can make a single, 1-pixel transparent .gif for this and adjust the height and width attributes of the image in the HTML, so you don't really need more than one spacer image (though it might help you organize things in your head to have more than one, I don't know)).
The newsbox, like the big table containing the rest of the content, would also look better with something other than a generic table border.
The "Keenspot entertainment" little box ad thing looks WAY out of place in the design. The only suggestion I can really give is to do something with it so that it doesn't have the appearence of just floating in some vague location. It looks like you just put it there because you couldn't figure out where else to put it. Also, does it HAVE to be green? Who says it can't be red to match the rest of the 'space color scheme? Same goes for the accompanying copyright text. It looks out of place. You should probably figure out some other place to put it. Same goes for the banners, although in that case, I was going to suggest removing them entirely. After all, why would anyone need to link to keenspace using a keenspace banner?? This was a question I considered early on when I was sketching designs (for my presently vapourware design!) in my sketchbook, and since I couldn't come up with a sensible answer, I removed banners from consideration.
My last two suggestions have nothing to do with usability and design cleanliness, and are really absolutely subjective: First, have you tried out different sizes for the link text (join, login, forum, and help)? I think they look a little too big. Also, have you tried moving them vertically? I'd suggest placing them so the bottoms of the letters with tails (j, g, and p) contact with the white of the cell below them, with no border at all. Either that, or move them so the words look more vertically centered. Finally, I think you should change "space news" to "news space," because the similar news section on Keenspot is labelled "news spot."
Oh, and right now, your background looks to be just a generic HTML grey. Might want to change that.
I also have a question for Kisai that's also kind of a suggestion for everyone: Is there some reason why the main page and the guide page can't be more closely tied to each other? I was thinking it would be neat to have a "general" version of the guide on www, and have a more specific, expanded version on guide (meaning, I don't see why we can't have a section on the www front page with the heading, "sort comics by..." and then have links for title, genre, frequency, etc that go to the respective sort methods on guide, but without any of the specific sublinks, like A, B, C under title or the genre sublinks... at the bottom of the list, you could have a link to go to the guide front page... the best analogy I can come up with for this is Google: There's the basic query box, but you have the option of clicking a link to do a more "advanced" search). Maybe I'm just nuts, but I think that would be an added usability bonus. In RPin's specific case, that black section you have that says "The Guide!" looks nice, but it wastes a lot of space and I think something like this would use that space more effectively.
I realize it's a tad arrogant of me to have as much to say about other people's designs and designs in general without having my own up yet, but I doubt mine's going to be anywhere near as creative as RPin's (probably going to just look like a repurposing of the 'Spot design scheme, where the most work done by me will be in the design/setup of internal content, rather than the design as a whole).
