Limited Conceptions Studios -- Artist Gallery(Public Portfolio?)Site

[limicone]

Hi, new member, new site, and also (sort of) new to web design.

Website: N/A

I've made a couple of personal websites before, once as a class project in high school, once for a personal website later in college.

I'm more of an artist than a web designer, but if I was going to showcase my work, I preferred it be within a space that is also my own. Unfortunately, as perfectionism will have it, I can't seem to settle for simply just taking something like freewebs.com and using my artwork in their templates.

That said, I'd only ever dealt with HTML before. And the second time I made a website, I went the easy way and used Photoshop(slicing) and Dreamweaver. I...did the same thing here, only to find that creating drop-down(pop-out) navigation bars were not possible in just regular old HTML.

I basically learned CSS overnight specifically for the navigation bar. And for some reason it won't work. Which is odd, since it works in both the Live View of Dreamweaver and when I preview the site through Firefox. I'm not sure why the hosted version doesn't work properly. If anyone could advise me on that, I'd be quite grateful.

Other than that, while the rest of the site(other pages) are not actually available yet, I would definitely welcome some critique on the outcome I have so far. Incomplete though it may be, I figure I may be better off if someone catches my wrong-doings early on before I go finish a million pages of template cloning.

Any suggestions or warnings when it comes to creating the actual content(image galleries, flash, thumbnail-to-hosted-image-linking, etc.)would also be highly appreciated.

...I kind of came from the geocities era, so I'm probably really, really behind on web languages. This is the first time I ever used CSS, and I find it daunting that webdesign even requires more than one language in the first place. So, if any technical or higher-than-HTML lingo comes up, please use such with the understanding that I will probably require a brief explanation or a reference.

Thank you for your time and patience.

 

[theone48]

Hi limicone. Interesting to see the different styles and ideas people can come up with in sitebuilding.
Anyways, Welcome to x10!

 

[essellar]

The main problem with your menu is that you're using JavaScript rollovers which, even when they work, need to download a new image when you mouse over an element. We used to solve that (way back in the ancient times) by preloading the images using JavaScript in the header -- but that made the page load time longer, and it still doesn't solve the problem completely. Events take time to bubble through the system, and sometimes either a mouseover or mouseout event would happen too quickly to register while the previous event was still being handled. That would make an image stick in the wrong state. And there's always the case of people who have JavaScript disabled (either altogether or using a NoScript extension/plugin).

These days, if you need hover effects, the accepted way of going about things is to use CSS sprites: one image containing all of your graphics (so that it loads in one go, and all of the images are always immediately available) that gets shifted around behind the "viewbox" that the element represents (the element clips off all of the parts of the big picture that aren't being used). There is a very good tutorial at CSSTricks.com that will explain things a lot more clearly than I can here.

 

[eggo9432]

The site hurts my eyes a bit. I would work on making the top banner image more sharp so that it is less blurry and more easy to read. You also seem to have a lot of 404 errors, probably because you just started your site and have yet to complete it. I would try adding a few differnt colors to make it easier on the eyes. Good work so far!

 

[ellescuba27]

As essellar says, rollover images are broken.

 

[cybrax]

Firstly let me say I have seen FAR worse attempts.

Design Tips#
1. Avoid using fancy or italic fonts for page text or menu buttons.
If you must use them for page or header text then the general rule is the more decorative or unusual the font the larger it needs to be and because you cannot assume the visitor has that font installed on their PC the web page needs to include its own copy with CSS trick called @font-face. Remember search engines have no eyes so putting text inside an image is pointless.

2. People are used to reading black text on white backgrounds. (or at least dark text on a lighter background)
3. Use complimentry colors in the design and even a bad design looks better
4. Books and newspapers have margins for a reason and a web page is not that different.

 

[limicone]

Thanks!

Holy cow, it's been a year since I posted this thread.

First off, let me apologize for not thanking everyone earlier. Life came cooing over my shoulder and swept me away into the tides of time.

Second, thank you so much for the tips. I remember how utterly maddening it was trying to make that template and I'm glad there was more I could learn from it. I think I may have fried my brain at the time, but hopefully I'll be a little better prepared in my next attempt.

@esselar
I've skimmed over the linked page and it looks like an absolute /lifesaver/, thank you.

@cybrax
I'm glad it wasn't the worst thing in the world!
The tips are much appreciated and will be kept in mind for when I try again. I'd love to build my online portfolio and build it right, so I'll be starting from scratch next time! I think I'll try to entrust myself to lighter colors (they scare me you know) instead of all-black.

Hopefully I'll be back for more sometime-not-too-long-from-now(oh dear).

Thanks again!