Re: Check Please...?

Okay, I'll bite...
Looked at your source. You have a couple of tags in your header section that
should be in the body. I played around with the page on my server, removed
FONT and BR from the header, and redirected the url to yours, and yup, there
was your background graphic. IE is pickier than Netscape on some things;
sometimes Netscape is picker - like with tables. Gotta watch out for both.
My next suggestion is this. Put your Doctype statement in the right spot
(very first line) and get rid of the duplicate charset specification (the
one outside the HTML tags). Then run your page through the W3C validator and
see what errors you get. While you're at it, you may as well up your Doctype
to one for HTML 4 Transitional, because many of the things we think of as
standard now, will not validate at 3.2. The doctype is put in to let
browsers know what to expect from the document. If you don't live up to it,
the doctype may as well not be there. BTW, you will have a million errors at
first. Just for starters, missing ALT attributes, commas outside quotes in
your image maps, colour codes which begin with # that have no quotes
enclosing them, CENTER elements inside FONT, and so on. It will look
overwhelming. But you probably have the same 10 or so mistakes repeated
quite a few number of times, so it's really not so bad as it looks. Once you
see it a few times, you get to know what to look for.
When you run it through the validator, if you have trouble deciphering, just
let me know; I'd be happy to help. Someone else once did the same for me!
:-)

That's it for the technical side now; now I shall put on my design hat.
Looking at it now in NN 4.04.
The pix and everything work. The colours are all fine together. The one
thing I would begin to change first is the all down the centre look. Wastes
too much space, and I don't like to scroll that far. Too much empty space.
I noticed that alot of your linking graphics are red. Why not put in a two
column table, and go for the traditional nav links along the left side look,
with those buttons. That would help for starters. Then when you start making
your own graphics, you can replace them with custom buttons that match your
site and are all uniform.
I would also recommend re-ordering your content. This is your site, so why
put the link counter first? Talk about you first? Then the things that
interest you, then the things that you feel are most important and so on.
The very first things you have on there are links to things like CNN and the
New Yorker. Once people leave your page, are they going to come back? Give
them the goods on yourself first, and then links to other pages on your
site. Only then, to links off your page. If appropriate, target those sites
to come up in windows of their own ( ...a href="whatever.com"
target="_blank"... ) so they don't lose your site.

Above all, try to develop some unique content... or a unique spin on old
content. Case in point... I finally came across the page of a friend of
mine. It's essentially all links, but all with the same theme: timelines. He
has links to timelines for movies, television shows, print media, etc, etc.
The common factor is that "every one of these links is to a history that
never happened. There are only references to actual historical events
insofar as they fit into the context of the timeline at hand." The site has
been featured and written about a whole bunch of times, not because it's in
itself anything hugely original, but because it's an original collection.
Plus, there's something distinctly surreal about studying a history that is
completely fictional. It's bizarre, sure, but it's unique. If you're
interested, it's at http://www.cyberspc.mb.ca/~arphaxad/history.html
(Edgar's also got some interesting pages there, talking about his friends
and interests and travels, etc, but I expect those are of more interest if
you actually know the guy. But he's well worth knowing!)

Anyway, keep going, you've got a good start here. Good luck!
--
Natalie Verge
Talk to me: nsv(at)mb.sympatico.ca
Visit me: http://members.tripod.com/~nsv
For professional web design: http://www.mts.net/~nsv/essential

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