Well, I have been working on a new SON website and I think it’s ready for
beta testing. I can test all I want myself but I really do need input from
the general SON public.
Seeing as how most of us use the message board primarily and hardly
ever see the main homepage, I’ve made the new page more integrated
with the message board.
Other items like “Ride of the Month” or wahtever will come shortly.
Please let me know if you find any problems. Feel free to post problems
in this thread.
It looks a bit better in subsilver since the new logo doesn’t work with subblack, but it still doesn’t match up very well at all visually. The boxes around the logo and banner ad don’t work well at all.
Horizontal scrollbar! 1024768 is the resolution used by the vast majority at the present, with a small but reasonable amount at 800600, a few stragglers at 640480 and all the rest above. It is understandable not to cater to the fools still at 640480, but it is unkind and unwise to make a website that scrolls horizontally at 800600. To make it so that it scrolls horizontally at 1024768… that’s just plain ignorant.
Furthermore:
-The pictures and text in the main section don’t go together very well. You have huge blank space underneath the pics that makes the site look unprofessional. If Microsoft released betas like this, the world would be a better place filled with Linux users.
-The new logo looks clumsier and less professional.
Otherwise the design seems pretty good, I like the concept of it. I would’ve gone a different direction with the navigation and placed it as a slim top bar, rather than a side bar (this would also get rid of the annoying horizontal scroll bar)
Finally, this is all just by looking at it, I’ve yet to load it to my hard drive and tear apart the table structure. More to follow.
Oh wow. I take back some of the criticism. The table layout is actually quite nice and the indenting is very clean and makes the code easy to read. If you actually wrote the table structure yourself rather than use Fireworks or something, I’m very impressed.
100% hand coded in EditPlus. I Don’t use WYSIWYG shit.
The point of the beta was to get something functional. Looks isn’t what
I was more concerned about; it was more about the underlying/backend
programming to see if it will break.
I have plans for a better design, with a different colour scheme.
Oh and the width is too wide because of the logo and the banner. I’ll
have to find a better place for the banner where it’s less of a problem.
Props on the code, too many people pussy out with using the visual web design tools and that always leads to sloppy innefficient code that loads like crap. I (before I got lazy and gave up on web design) used a program called HTML editor that colour coded for me and kept indents (I’d have to indent it myself, but I don’t have to tab over for EVERY line like I would in notepad when I’m writing somewhere nested) and I liked that a lot. It also had a preview window to save me from loading up a browser.
no need for a calender. most people have the date in the corner of their screen already. just makes it look stupid. also the forum stats are not needed. just more useless info to clutter the side bars. less it more.
