Looking for design suggestions

jayant

After a lot of headache I finally made a XHTML 1.1 Strict , table-less design. but I am still not happy with it.
Please see http://www.nibbleguru.com/ and suggest changes.
I must have it table-less and XHTML 1.1 strict, dont suggest opting out of this. I have 6 templates for same page in html4,xhtml1.0 with tables.
for great designs tables are needed. but cant we get a good design from XHTML1.1 table-less.
Help me make the design better.

you think while I go and have a tablet for headache+nausea+bad throat+...

Merve

Very good layout nice use of colour, the serif fonts under the links look alright, but you may want to change them to sans-serif fonts.

BuzzLY

My advice... as nice as you might think it looks now, don't use dashed or dotted borders. They are completely overused on the web, and are becoming the next <blink> in terms of annoyance. It won't be long until people think that only those that have limited knowledge of CSS use dashed/dotted borders.

If a dashed line or border is appropriate (like for a printable coupon), then by all means, use it. Otherwise, stick to solid borders, and alter the color to give it some variety.

drawmack

In opera the top line goes through the date.

jayant

Originally posted by Merve
Very good layout nice use of colour, the serif fonts under the links look alright, but you may want to change them to sans-serif fonts.

I have used verdana(sans serif) all over. in those, size was a bit large so looked more like serif ones.
reduced the size.
howz it now?

piersk

Looked a bit plain in firebird but then it all changed, which confused me for a second.. Have you just uploaded a new stylesheet?

Also, nice to see someone who's not afraid to use MT!

BuzzLY

The page itself isn't bad. As far as design goes, I have learned over the years that it's best if you only have about 3 or 4 different typestyles on your page. That includes different sizes, and bolding. Typically, bold and italics are used for emphasis, so they don't really count toward a different "typestyle" unless you use it in a title or something (like you are doing).

I'm not sure I'd go with Verdana as your primary font. It might look good on some screens, but on my laptop the larger fonts (titles) are very jagged and look terrible.

A tip: when testing the appearance of your pages, turn off every option in your browser / computer that enhance the page. For example, font smoothing makes things look better, but hides the fact that a certain font like verdana looks like crap when it's large and bold. If you turn off these options, and still make the page look good, then it will most likely look good for most people that view your page.

I will tell you this, however: With the CSS turned off, your page looks very good. Few people think about the layout of the page with CSS disabled, but it looks like you took that into consideration. Good job.

jayant

Originally posted by piersk
Looked a bit plain in firebird but then it all changed, which confused me for a second.. Have you just uploaded a new stylesheet?

Also, nice to see someone who's not afraid to use MT!

nah, stylesheet was always there. i have been uploading stylesheet again and again making minor changes, so perhaps maybe u were served the blank stylesheet.

MT is a real cool application. MT and Links2 are the only reason I still use Perl.
It looks shamefull to me that no one has written something as powerfull in PHP (pMachine ain't good, plz dont suggest that). I am creating one, slowly and steadily. unable to give in more than 30min in one day, havent touched since last 2 weeks. it should finish in an year, I think.

jayant

buzz, which fonts will u suggest for web other than sans-serif's.

i have a soft heart for sans-serif's specially verdana 🙂

jayant

When validating the page against XHTML1.1 strict.
<a name="000007"></a>
is giving error.
saying name attribute not allowed.
what does one use for internal linking if not anchor names ???

W3C Validation page

piersk

Originally posted by jayant
MT is a real cool application. MT and Links2 are the only reason I still use Perl.
It looks shamefull to me that no one has written something as powerfull in PHP

I'm in the middle of creating something like TypePad (a hosted version of MT), but the difference is that mine's gonna be free.

pyro

Originally posted by jayant
When validating the page against XHTML1.1 strict.
<a name="000007"></a>
is giving error.
saying name attribute not allowed.

It was depreciated in favor of the ID attribute. Use that, instead.

BuzzLY

Originally posted by jayant
buzz, which fonts will u suggest for web other than sans-serif's.

I agree... I like Verdana very much myself. And it's really a minor issue. However, you might try Tahoma, too -- if you like sans serif fonts, tahoma is a good one. And of course, you should always use arial if you don't have the others:

font-family: tahoma,verdana,arial,sans-serif;

drawmack

don't forget to include helvetica in there for our mac friends.

jayant

Originally posted by pyro
It was depreciated in favor of the ID attribute. Use that, instead.

yeah works. I thought of it, was unsure, but didnt test myself earlier until you told 😃

goldbug

Originally posted by jayant
When validating the page against XHTML1.1 strict.
<a name="000007"></a>
is giving error.
saying name attribute not allowed.
what does one use for internal linking if not anchor names ???

W3C Validation page

AFAIK, there isn't really a way, using the current strict W3C standards. IIRC, the id="" attribute should replace the named anchor, but in practice, does not.

EDIT: ewps... sorry for the dupe post 🙂

goldbug

Originally posted by drawmack
don't forget to include helvetica in there for our mac friends.

Gill Sans 0wnz j00! 🙂

vaska

hi...sorry if i'm too late to offer a few ideas...

i too am getting the line through the date at the top right of the page...

your page has two justifications on the left side...i can understand this from a hierarchical point of view, but it looks odd (imo)...perhaps you might try setting everything to have the paddings/margins on the left side...maybe start every with a tiny graphic instead of the caps?

i'm not too crazy about that first cap, but this might look less askew if the padding/margins were all the same...they also indent the following line...

where it says "Posted at..." the text is too small - and i can read small fonts very comfortably. it might be nice also to use some small graphic here to break things up a bit. like a document icon or something - by further differentiating between the post text and the date information it makes for easier reading too...

may i recommend breaking up your individual posts perhaps with a horizontal line (which should have the same width as the individual post itself).

another recommendation, maybe you might go with a header which has a darker background...this too would differentiate types of sections and make it easier to concentrate on the text. obviously, something that would work with green and maroon (is it?).

in terms of colors, you might want to work around a more common pallete - like blues for example. dark blue, light blue, blue and some grays as well (cowpathing!). use a nice complimentary color for the links, hovers, visited...

your margins are quite close to the page edges, but once again, if you reset your padding/margins this might not be an issue any more...

hope it's ok for me to comment like this...i think it's a good start with things for sure.

Merve

One should still use name="" and id="". I hope that the day comes when we only have to use id="". One small suggestion, the blue scrollbar is something I'm not to crazy about. There might be another more subtle colour that would be better for it.

pyro

Thankfully, Mozilla leaves my scollbars along... 🙂