Sheila Computer Tutor - Rebuilt

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Dave Cooper on February 10, 2010 at 9:46

Whoops! I just took a quick glance (I'm meant to be working!). You should take a look at your home page in Opera, Firefox, Chrome or Safari - it only works in IE8. The nav items are on top of the main text. Possibly using 'center: center;' in the body css is responsible for this. I think I'd try dumping that: Something like margin: auto; (gives equal margins. Erm.... I think!) may be more like what you are looking for, and would allow the bullet points to align in the list, and I think the text would flow round the nav items (dunno if that's what you are looking for). I'll come back with a more considered response later. Dave Cooper

Permalink Reply by Dave Cooper on February 10, 2010 at 20:48

Hi Sheila,
I think I see the problem: the shockwave images that you're using for navigation are 105 pixels wide (set in the page html) but the div they're sitting in, leftnav, is only 55 pixels wide (set in css) so the images are sticking out of the div and going over the text. If you set it up so that leftnav is as wide or wider than the images it should fix the problem.
Apart from that, congratulations on the floated div: I use floats a lot and I think it's a great way to handle layout.
I wouldn't worry about the flash buttons having a lot of non-html-compliant stuff in them. I don't think you can fix that without massively complex workarounds.
I'd suggest downloading a copy of chrome or firefox so that you can take a look at your website in something that's not internet explorer - ie's mostly the odd one out these days.
Dave Cooper

Permalink Reply by Sheila Pritchard on February 11, 2010 at 19:14

Oh dear, thank you Dave for your advice. I have now downloaded Firefox and can see what you mean. I have changed the size of the leftnav and changed the center:center for margin:auto. This seems to have done the trick. BUT when I go into the sample wedding site from Wantu2 it just shows the code in Firefox! For some reason I seem to have saved the pages with .asp extension and I do not recall why I did this!

I think I am having a few senior moments. If I had a beard I think I would start stroking it!!!!

Thanks again for your help and I will continue to perservere.
Kind regards
Sheila

Permalink Reply by Gerald Hornsby on February 12, 2010 at 0:52

Hi Sheila

It still doesn't look quite right in Safari. I attach a screenshot.

Gerald

Attachments:

• Picture 54.png, 48 KB

Permalink Reply by Dave Cooper on February 12, 2010 at 9:45

Hmm.. Is it the effect of having a <list>
in centered text, do you think? If it were me, I think I'd do the centering by paragraph (that is: p.centered {text-align: center;} in the css and <p class="centered"></p>
in the html, so that the text is centered, then if you want the list centered give it the 'margin:auto;' value in css. There's a really good explanation of centering at http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/center.
Sheila, the other bit of your site that still looks a bit wonky is the 'contact me' page: the nav images are positioned much tighter than the other pages. I don't know if this is the reason, but there is a busted table in your html code :) :
If you're using a table for layout (good idea, it's what I'd use too) it should be in <table></table> tags, and the <tr> and <td>tags should have their matching</td> and </tr>tags.
. Dave

Permalink Reply by Chris Davis on February 12, 2010 at 20:41

Hi Sheila,

First of all, congratulations on the new-look website! Whilst I thought the old one looked OK and was perfectly workable, I think this one is much more pleasing to the eye and I think the overall design is absolutely excellent!

A couple of constructive comments if I may:

- Gerald is right about the front page, I'm using Safari for Windows and the bullet points in the front page text don't work for me at all, I've only been able to see one and it's miles away from the text, right by the navigation buttons down the side bar!

- Every time I go to a new page, I notice that the navigation buttons down the side reload and re-order themselves so that the button taking you to wherever you are in the site disappears once you're on that page. Personally, I think it would be more effective if the positioning and grouping of the buttons remained static, whatever page someone was on, although I'd say it's not a big deal in my opinion.

- When going to the contact page on your site, the buttons shift over away from their normal position on the other pages of your site. Again, I think it would be better if the buttons remained in a static position for this page, and I would say that in my opinion the positioning issue on this page is of much higher importance than the other issue relating to the buttons that I mentioned above.

- This is a very personal thing, but for myself I've never been a massive fan of scrolling text on websites unless the information contained within the scrolling text is very trivial. Scrolling text can be useful for making the eye go to a particular piece of text (for example, a "Newsflash" or something of that nature), but for regular information it's not something I personally thinks works very well. A lot of my background is in the field of music - I used to manage a folk rock band who listed all their upcoming gigs via a scrolling "news feed" such as the one you have for your testimonials - someone once asked me the address of where one of their gigs was taking place, and because the scroll was faster than I could read, write down, and then look back up again, I had to wait for it to go round again to obtain the rest of the information!

Whilst this could be just my eyesight, when I tried to read the scrolling testimonials on your site, I actually found it quite difficult. However, do bear in mind that I also hate the scrolling news feeds that you see at the bottom of the screen on TV channels like BBC News 24, Sky News and British Eurosport, so it may just be a personal thing on my part that others would disagree with! ;)

I would say though, please don't be discouraged by my comments, which are intended to be helpful - I think you have done an excellent job updating your site (and it sounds to me as though your CSS coding skills now far eclipse mine), and I definitely think it will help you continue to expand your business! :)

Best wishes,

Chris

Permalink Reply by Sheila Pritchard on February 14, 2010 at 15:04

Hello Chris, Gerald and Dave,

I really appreciate all the time you have spent giving me feedback and advice. Learning from you guys is so helpful. I really hadnt realised that MS Internet Explorer was now in a minority. So I shall download Safari and Opera as well as Firefox to test my sites in more browsers before I start before asking questions! Thanks again everyone I now need to go and start tweaking.

Bye for now Sheila

Chris Davis said:

Hi Sheila,

First of all, congratulations on the new-look website! Whilst I thought the old one looked OK and was perfectly workable, I think this one is much more pleasing to the eye and I think the overall design is absolutely excellent!

A couple of constructive comments if I may:

- Gerald is right about the front page, I'm using Safari for Windows and the bullet points in the front page text don't work for me at all, I've only been able to see one and it's miles away from the text, right by the navigation buttons down the side bar!

- Every time I go to a new page, I notice that the navigation buttons down the side reload and re-order themselves so that the button taking you to wherever you are in the site disappears once you're on that page. Personally, I think it would be more effective if the positioning and grouping of the buttons remained static, whatever page someone was on, although I'd say it's not a big deal in my opinion.

- When going to the contact page on your site, the buttons shift over away from their normal position on the other pages of your site. Again, I think it would be better if the buttons remained in a static position for this page, and I would say that in my opinion the positioning issue on this page is of much higher importance than the other issue relating to the buttons that I mentioned above.

- This is a very personal thing, but for myself I've never been a massive fan of scrolling text on websites unless the information contained within the scrolling text is very trivial. Scrolling text can be useful for making the eye go to a particular piece of text (for example, a "Newsflash" or something of that nature), but for regular information it's not something I personally thinks works very well. A lot of my background is in the field of music - I used to manage a folk rock band who listed all their upcoming gigs via a scrolling "news feed" such as the one you have for your testimonials - someone once asked me the address of where one of their gigs was taking place, and because the scroll was faster than I could read, write down, and then look back up again, I had to wait for it to go round again to obtain the rest of the information!

Whilst this could be just my eyesight, when I tried to read the scrolling testimonials on your site, I actually found it quite difficult. However, do bear in mind that I also hate the scrolling news feeds that you see at the bottom of the screen on TV channels like BBC News 24, Sky News and British Eurosport, so it may just be a personal thing on my part that others would disagree with! ;)

I would say though, please don't be discouraged by my comments, which are intended to be helpful - I think you have done an excellent job updating your site (and it sounds to me as though your CSS coding skills now far eclipse mine), and I definitely think it will help you continue to expand your business! :)

Best wishes,

Chris

Permalink Reply by Chris Davis on February 14, 2010 at 16:18

Hi Sheila,

Glad to know that our comments are helpful to you. :)

In terms of Internet Explorer, I wouldn't say that it's in a minority, in fact I believe it is still the Internet's #1 web browser by virtue of the fact that it comes installed as standard on most if not all Windows computers and many users don't bother to upgrade - for myself, when I first went online in 1997 I would switch between using IE and Netscape Navigator, then found that IE was better and so never used a different browser until last year!!

However, more and more "net-savvy" computer users are discovering the flaws with Internet Explorer and so in my opinion nowadays it's best to test how a website displays in some other browsers, not just IE.

Looking forward to seeing the updates / tweaks to your website, and once again, really glad to be able to help! :)

Best wishes,

Chris

Sheila Pritchard said:

Hello Chris, Gerald and Dave,

I really appreciate all the time you have spent giving me feedback and advice. Learning from you guys is so helpful. I really hadnt realised that MS Internet Explorer was now in a minority. So I shall download Safari and Opera as well as Firefox to test my sites in more browsers before I start before asking questions! Thanks again everyone I now need to go and start tweaking.

Bye for now Sheila

Permalink Reply by Sheila Pritchard on February 14, 2010 at 17:22

Hi Chris

Thanks for that. So far I have managed to tweak the code so that it looks OK in Firefox but its taking an age to refresh in Safari! I've still go a lot more tweaking to do but I wanted mainly to say that I have had a look at your website and listened to some of your music. Although I'm more of a rocker and roller I thought your site very professional and I was really surprised to see that the venue for your functions is the Arundel Football club which is not that many miles away from where I live. When you think that Compila must play host for many people all over the world it just shows what a small world we are in.

Bye for now
Sheila

Chris Davis said:

Hi Sheila,

Glad to know that our comments are helpful to you. :)

In terms of Internet Explorer, I wouldn't say that it's in a minority, in fact I believe it is still the Internet's #1 web browser by virtue of the fact that it comes installed as standard on most if not all Windows computers and many users don't bother to upgrade - for myself, when I first went online in 1997 I would switch between using IE and Netscape Navigator, then found that IE was better and so never used a different browser until last year!!

However, more and more "net-savvy" computer users are discovering the flaws with Internet Explorer and so in my opinion nowadays it's best to test how a website displays in some other browsers, not just IE.

Looking forward to seeing the updates / tweaks to your website, and once again, really glad to be able to help! :)

Best wishes,

Chris

Sheila Pritchard said:

Hello Chris, Gerald and Dave,

I really appreciate all the time you have spent giving me feedback and advice. Learning from you guys is so helpful. I really hadnt realised that MS Internet Explorer was now in a minority. So I shall download Safari and Opera as well as Firefox to test my sites in more browsers before I start before asking questions! Thanks again everyone I now need to go and start tweaking.

Bye for now Sheila

Permalink Reply by Tony Rolfe on February 15, 2010 at 11:28

Hi Shelia and all,

I have been reading through this discussion and am really pleased that everyone is using the Exchange Community as we intended.

I am going to give you a website now that well both help you and maybe annoy you as well :)

Whilst downloading the newest versions of all browsers is great, you still need to remember that many people do not upgrade their browsers as often as they should. Not because they are being difficult but just because they don't know how. You would be surprised how many people that still use IE6!
As you know, once you have installed a browser you can only view that version unless you have a few old computers with old browsers on that you can use which is not very practical.

A way round this is to use the following website:

http://spoon.net/browsers/

You install a little plug-in and then you can view any site in that browser and a few previous versions.

Although there are just some issues in previous browsers that you cannot fix as they do not support certain CSS aspects. This is where you would need to apply different CSS sheets for different browsers - it does start get to get a bit confusing now, so I have included a link below to help explain this further. It is an old link, but you can get the gist of what you need to do:

http://www.thesitewizard.com/css/excludecss.shtml

The only thing you need to ask yourself is that is the issue in a previous version of a browser really worth the hassle fixing? It could be a form field that isn't formatting correctly or a background colour that isn't showing correctly. If it doesn't affect the usability of the site, then ask yourself if it is necessary to make the changes for a browser that is 2 versions old.

I hope this has been of some benefit and has offered you some more food for thought and not confused you even more. But if you adopt these measures when you create a new site, then that should set you in good stead for creating a site that is viewable in almost any browser and version.

Regards

Tony

Permalink Reply by Harvey Raybould on February 16, 2010 at 4:38

Hi Sheila,

I have been reading this discussion over the last few days with interest and thought I would try and just give a little bit of different advice, as opposed to CSS and different browsers, as I think the advice you have been given on this is excellent already.

Firstly though congratulations on all of the improvements you have made, I think you are really moving forward well.

1) In the browsers I am using IEv8 and Firefox 3.5.7 the site is not centered in the middle, it is more over to the left side, personally I think it would be better if the site were centered fully. Personally I just find sites easier to read if they are in the middle of the screen, especially with today’s large wide screen monitors.

2) There have been hundreds of web usability books written, surveys carried out and one of the main questions/conclusions asked. “ How do users read on the Web?” and the answer is "They don’t". This has been proved many times, we don’t read on the web, we scan.

So It is our aim as web designers to give people the information they need quickly and easily. This is a very complicated subject so I am just going to detail some expert recommendations regarding “legibility”

a) Font styles – use sans serif fonts such as Arial, Helvetica or Geneva
b) Font sizes – Use 10 – 12 point fonts for most body text.
c) Font consistency – do not use a wide range of font styles, colours or sizes.
d) Underlines – do not use underlines in regular text, only on hyperlinks.
e) Justification – do not justify paragraphs. Always use left-justified text. Do not center body text – especially bullet lists of varying line lengths.
f) All-caps – avoid using text in all capital letters
g) Line Length – blocks of text over 50 characters wide are harder to read
h) Contrast – high contrast between text and background increases legibility

There are many more, but I think these are the most important for you to worry about. I think on the whole your site handles these very well, but I would recommend that you have a think about point (e). You have all of your text centered, and this has been proven over many years to make the content harder to read.

3) So, I would try to make the left hand navigation a little wider, so the blue images are further away from the left border, may be try to put a border between the navigation and main text area, this could just be a slightly darker or lighter shade of the main background. Then have a look at the text, change it from center to left justify, and add some more spacing between the elements particularly on the contact form.

4) As Chris indicated, I also think it would be a good idea to keep all of the navigation elements on all pages, rather than them disappearing, as it makes the site look a little in consistent.

I hope these points help you and please do not hesitate to let me know if you need any help with anything.

Take care

Regards

Harvey

Permalink Reply by Chris Davis on February 16, 2010 at 16:24

Hi Sheila,

Just to say thanks for your kind comments re: my website, www.willowsfolkclub.org - yes, we are pretty close to each other, aren't we? :)

Thanks for the compliments about the design of the site - I'm very pleased with the way it looks, although I've learnt a lot more about HTML and CSS coding since I created it and can see a lot of coding errors within the site that display OK, but don't come up to W3C standards. One of my goals for 2010 is to rebuild the site (yet again!) to bring it into compliance with those standards.

Good luck with your site, and your business! :)

Best wishes,

Chris

Sheila Pritchard said:

Hi Chris

Thanks for that. So far I have managed to tweak the code so that it looks OK in Firefox but its taking an age to refresh in Safari! I've still go a lot more tweaking to do but I wanted mainly to say that I have had a look at your website and listened to some of your music. Although I'm more of a rocker and roller I thought your site very professional and I was really surprised to see that the venue for your functions is the Arundel Football club which is not that many miles away from where I live. When you think that Compila must play host for many people all over the world it just shows what a small world we are in.

Bye for now
Sheila

Chris Davis said:

Hi Sheila,

Glad to know that our comments are helpful to you. :)

In terms of Internet Explorer, I wouldn't say that it's in a minority, in fact I believe it is still the Internet's #1 web browser by virtue of the fact that it comes installed as standard on most if not all Windows computers and many users don't bother to upgrade - for myself, when I first went online in 1997 I would switch between using IE and Netscape Navigator, then found that IE was better and so never used a different browser until last year!!

However, more and more "net-savvy" computer users are discovering the flaws with Internet Explorer and so in my opinion nowadays it's best to test how a website displays in some other browsers, not just IE.

Looking forward to seeing the updates / tweaks to your website, and once again, really glad to be able to help! :)

Best wishes,

Chris

Sheila Pritchard said:

Hello Chris, Gerald and Dave,

I really appreciate all the time you have spent giving me feedback and advice. Learning from you guys is so helpful. I really hadnt realised that MS Internet Explorer was now in a minority. So I shall download Safari and Opera as well as Firefox to test my sites in more browsers before I start before asking questions! Thanks again everyone I now need to go and start tweaking.

Bye for now Sheila

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