Wed, 2003-03-26 08:31
I'm pretty reluctant to put this up here, knowing that this site is FAR from being done with. Anyway, I'm starting a web usability/information architecture firm and this is to be the site for it:
Currently, I'm working on the site as much as I can, considering I'm a full-time student trying to work on his own personal site (phark.net), and also i'm the head of web development for an office equipment company in central ny.
i figure if people can charge exhorbitant amounts of money for poorly-designed sites, i can charge about half that, and make their site work for their clients.
anyway, if you want to check out my progress, go to http://www.realusability.net/test/
feel free to comment on anything, i'm in the very beginning stages and am open for any ideas 
-mike
Wed, 2003-03-26 10:21
#1
real usability
Hi DJSdotcom,
Sounds like a great plan, I hope it goes well for you.
Being a usability expert your going to have to cross your tees and dot your eyes.
Here's a little tool that you may find useful if you use Mozilla or Netscape
http://checky.mozdev.org/
Once installed it allows you to right click and validate CSS, HTML etc.
Now back to your site.
Looking at the site there's nothing there that needs to be in a table. With out too much effort I'm sure you could have the same layout with divs and spans and css.
It's a fairly simple layout and it will be good experience for you to try. If you have any trouble someone here will surely help out.
Add width and height to your images, it's meant to speed up browser rendering.
You shouldn't need to wrap the <a name="top"></a> in <p> tags as there is nothing else in the paragraph.
Hope this helps a little.
Wed, 2003-03-26 17:29
#2
usability
Tony,
Thanks for the input, my original goal was to use all CSS positioning and have the site be completely void of table layout, however my original design was really complicated and even though I do know a lot about CSS, it was tough for me to get everything to line up exactly how I wanted.
That being said, now that I simplified the layout from my previous versions, I am going to change the layout to CSS without the use of tables.
The reason I had to put the anchor tag "top" in <p> tags was that for some reason, when I was trying to validate using XHTML 1.0 STRICT, it wouldn't let me just put an anchor tag in the BODY without having an href attribute or some type of <div> or <p> encapsulating it... weird huh?
Also, thanks for reminding me to put the width and height attributes in my images, while killing myself over content and design it slipped my mind