Site Revamp
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Category: General Discussion
Forum Name: Web Design Discussion
Forum Description: Discussion on web design and development subjects.
URL: https://forums.webwiz.net/forum_posts.asp?TID=10283
Printed Date: 28 March 2026 at 6:02am Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.08 - https://www.webwizforums.com
Topic: Site Revamp
Posted By: sarab
Subject: Site Revamp
Date Posted: 04 May 2004 at 11:48am
Following on from advice on this forum and elsewhere, my friend
Jennifer re-did all 29 pages on her site and re-launched them (I
helped).
We'd love some feedback on whether it's better or not...
Current design is at:
http://www.algarve-beach-life.com - http://www.algarve-beach-life.com
while previous attempt can be seen at:
http://www.algarve-beach-life.com/old-style.html - http://www.algarve-beach-life.com/old-style.html
Thanks for any feedback.
PS Really glad these forums are up and running again. 
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Replies:
Posted By: BoLt
Date Posted: 04 May 2004 at 12:15pm
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I love the new look. Colours all look good and the flow of the site works well, Very informative site.
The only thing I can see, your subscribe page is missing the page links at the side. 
------------- BoLt (Computer Engineer)
I suffer from Dyslexia, it means I can not spell to well not that I am thick.
www.welshlens.co.uk
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Posted By: KCWebMonkey
Date Posted: 04 May 2004 at 2:06pm
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It would be very easy for you to add interactivity to your site by simply making the Nav Links change color when you hover over them.
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Posted By: sarab
Date Posted: 05 May 2004 at 7:16am
Thanks for the feedback:
...your subscribe page is missing the page links at the side. |
For some reason, we could only get the forms to work using Jen's host's
'template' page, made to look as much like her HTML uploads as
possible. Rather than try to make the limited choices of
nav buttons look like hers, she opted just to have a text link back to
the home page, which has all the nav options available. A
shame, but we are still newbies (and it did get the 'subscribe' form
back out there and working).
...add interactivity to your site by simply making the Nav Links change color when you hover over them. |
Absolutely agreed. We're both trying to pick up enough CSS
to achieve this. That's in the hope that when she gets
around to adding such features, it won't be quite the marathon that
revamping 29 pages of HTML proved last time. (The memory
still smarts).
Or is there a way to do this with HTML??
At the moment, though, Jennifer's just back from her last Algarve hols,
so she has digital photos to process, new pages to write and a monthly
e-zine to produce, so the 'hover' will have to wait. (I can
see her asking me to get started on that while she's busy with the
other stuff).
Thanks again for the encouragement...
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Posted By: Phat
Date Posted: 05 May 2004 at 8:48am
As a suggestion use something like dreamweaver or another program that
supports templates. On my site i can change one template file and it
will update every page i have.
Think frontpage may support them as well.
I found learning CSS also easy with dreamwaever as it does most of it for you.
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Posted By: dpyers
Date Posted: 05 May 2004 at 12:38pm
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Contolling link colors in CSS is pretty simple. You can paste the following code just after your </HEAD> closing tag.
<style type="text/css"> a:link { color: #A52A2A; text-decoration: none; } a:visited { color: #FE8301; text-decoration: none; } a:hover { color: #BFB400; text-decoration: underline; } a:active { color: #FF8000; text-decoration: none; }
</style>
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The preferred way to do it would be to strip the STYLE start and end tags out and put the rest in a file called mysite.css. The contents of that file would look like
a:link { color: #A52A2A; text-decoration: none; } a:visited { color: #FE8301; text-decoration: none; } a:hover { color: #BFB400; text-decoration: underline; } a:active { color: #FF8000; text-decoration: none; }
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Then, assuming mysite.css is in the same directory as the page, put the following tag just before the </HEAD> closing tag
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="mysite.css">
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Change the colors to what ever you want, but be aware thar the sequence matters. The acronym a lot of people use to remember the sequence is LoVe - HA
-------------
Lead me not into temptation... I know the short cut, follow me.
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Posted By: sarab
Date Posted: 06 May 2004 at 5:59am
On my site i can change one template file and it
will update every page i have. |
Unless I'm misreading you, Phat, Jennifer's host offers this facility
also, but only if you use its 'look and feel' customisable templates.
If you choose to upload your own HTML (as she did) you need to redo
every page yourself. Are you saying Dreamweaver would get her
over that problem?
Thanks a lot for the CSS help, dpyers. I'm a bit stumped about the acronym, though...
LoVe - HA. What's it mean, and how would we use it?
Thanks for humouring a newbie. 
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Posted By: dpyers
Date Posted: 06 May 2004 at 2:16pm
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L = link o V = visited e H = hover A - Active
On some browsers, if you set up the link attributes for the anchor tag (a:xxxx) out of sequence, some of them won't work. So you need to remember the sequence they have to be listed in.
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Lead me not into temptation... I know the short cut, follow me.
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Posted By: sarab
Date Posted: 07 May 2004 at 12:11pm
On some browsers,... some of them won't work. So you need
to remember the sequence they have to be listed in. |
Thanks for that, dp. It's in the memory banks (such as they are). 
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Posted By: sarab
Date Posted: 20 May 2004 at 7:59am
So, (thanks again for all the kind help) we bit the bullet, and
Jennifer and I had a bash at using CSS navigation on her website.
We changed it around to suit what we though looked decent with the
current site design, and substituted it for the old, image-based
navigation.
All went well, and the two new pages were duly launched, when --
scream, horror!!!! -- we checked them out in Netscape Nav 7.1 and
found that the new navigation text has shifted out of its table column
and partly overwrites the main body text!
We checked the pages using IE6 and everything looks fine... Is this just a problem with Navigator?
We've plummetted from cautiously triumphant to desperately
depressed. Our first foray into CSS has proved to be a
quagmire... or has it?
Please let me know how the new pages work in your various
browsers. And if anyone knows a fix that'll make them work
properly in Netscape, we'd be tremendously grateful.
The new pages are:
http://www.algarve-beach-life.com/algarve-apartments.html - http://www.algarve-beach-life.com/algarve-apartments.html
and
http://www.algarve-beach-life.com/loule.html - http://www.algarve-beach-life.com/loule.html
The current, image-based nav is on the index page:
http://www.algarve-beach-life.com/ - http://www.algarve-beach-life.com/
Thanks in advance for any pointers. I may just have
to reach for the sherry decanter while I wait... 
PS We did validate the pages before we put them up (using 1stPage2000).
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Posted By: Bluefrog
Date Posted: 21 May 2004 at 1:02pm
Don't worry too much about it. You have most of your audience captured with IE. Netscape, etc. are all just frills. In the big scheme of things if it works in IE, then you are ok. Those details are most important to people who run sites that have HUGE traffic.
------------- http://renegademinds.com/" rel="nofollow - Renegade Minds - Guitar Software http://renegademinds.com/Default.aspx?tabid=65" rel="nofollow - Slow Down Music
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Posted By: dpyers
Date Posted: 21 May 2004 at 2:16pm
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Looks pretty good to me. the only things you might want to check out are dieplay:block - some versions of IE and NS did this poorly or not at all. Don't know about NS7.1.
Also, in the css, noted you referenced ID's of active and current for the first li and it's anchor tag. not sure what you're doing there as the ID' weren't defined in the css. In the html, you only referenced the active, not the current id.
You may be inteested in this page on browser stats: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp - http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
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Lead me not into temptation... I know the short cut, follow me.
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Posted By: dpyers
Date Posted: 23 May 2004 at 2:25am
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Just a thought,
Try using padding: 0; instead of padding: none;
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Lead me not into temptation... I know the short cut, follow me.
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Posted By: sarab
Date Posted: 23 May 2004 at 6:16am
Thanks for the suggestion, dpyers. We'll run that one up the flagpole, as they say.
We did get a 'fix' of sorts, but it was a BIG compromise, and it isn't
uploaded yet onto those pages. In brief, if we reset the
nav column's left margin to -30 px and increase its width by 30px (to
165px) then the nav text will appear in the column. But we
can only get it to look the same in IE and Netscape if we right-align
it and pad it 10px away from the right edge.
Not much of a victory... But why does that weird 30px
offset to the right appear in Netscape and Mozilla
browsers? There doesn't seem to be anything in the CSS that
would do it. And the previous image-based navigation
(which was HTML only) looks nicely centred on all the other uploaded
pages for the site.
For the moment I remain the utterly confused
sarab 
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Posted By: sarab
Date Posted: 29 May 2004 at 6:43am
Try using padding: 0; instead of padding: none; |
We tried that, but it made no difference.
Anyone have any other ideas for a fix? 
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Posted By: dpyers
Date Posted: 29 May 2004 at 10:00am
About out of straws to grasp. You might want to try posting the problem to news:comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets - news:comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets or to news:netscape.public.dev.css - news:netscape.public.dev.css
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Lead me not into temptation... I know the short cut, follow me.
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Posted By: sarab
Date Posted: 30 May 2004 at 5:38am
Thanks for those URLs, dpdyers. We'd never heard of them before... 
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Posted By: dpyers
Date Posted: 30 May 2004 at 7:53am
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If you're not used to using Usenet news groups, clicking on those URL's will create entries for them in Outlook Express, or whatever your designated news group reader is.
- Read the FAQ for the NG. There'll be a thread for the FAQ.
- Don't "Top Post", respond to all replies at the bottom of the message (Some folk get very... very... nasty about this).
- Don't ask that people email you with an answer. The rule is that questions and answers are for the benefit of everyone. Post it in Usenet, Read it in Usenet.
- Stay in the thread, use the "Reply to" instead of "New" buttons. The archived posts are often searched, so although the two threads may list in sequence on your NG reader, breaking the thread breaks the archives.
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Lead me not into temptation... I know the short cut, follow me.
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Posted By: sarab
Date Posted: 07 June 2004 at 5:19am
Just an update for anyone interested in the outcome of the navigation
alignment problems we were having with a CSS version of the site's
pages...
It turned out to be a function of the different rendering capabilities
of browsers for an unnumbered list. That's the format we
had for our text navigation in CSS (though we can't remember why).
Once the list had been changed to just plain text in a nav container in
CSS, the problem disappeared and the alignment looks fine in IE and
Navigator (and therefore Mozilla, one hopes).
I felt I'd better post this, in case it proves to be of any help to anyone else...
Thanks for all the input in this thread, to those who contributed. 
Now all we have to do is reformat 32 pages and upload them, and life should be sweet...
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