fellow forum members, your honest opinion please about my web site
 

on how my site is now looking?

www.tlarkin.com

I am trying to gear it towards the IT professional that is hesitant of deploying Macs in their existing environment. Once I get my win server back up I will start to write about AD/OD integrations. Now I am just kind of sticking with imaging, package deployment and basic administration.

Be honest, I have thick skin, what do you think?

It still needs polishing and I am still updating it. I have to wait sometimes till one of my friends who does web development professionally to have free time to help me as I am still a newbie when it comes to web development.

Viewed in Safari.

Looks nice.

There are a few graphical quirks:
Link text visible on your graphical menu items; "About > Track" items aren't vertically aligned
I get a weird offset on the background when resizing your Contact field
Some pages have headers below the menu, others lack a header
Your crest may look better if it wasn't set on black (the color contrast may be odd on grey though)
The only other visual oddity is the two styles of tabs.

It's slightly busy in that there are multiple navigation areas (side and top).

See if you can swap the diagonal line direction on opposite sides of your main content? Could be interesting.


Overall, it's a good layout. When in doubt, simplify.

I'm guessing you've tested this mainly in Firefox as several of the graphical notes I mentioned are not present there.

Correct, I develop it entirely using firefox, but was using this as testing it out with other browsers...

http://browsershots.org/

That is pretty extensive

Thanks for your input.

I am still trying to figure out how to hide the left nav bar but keep it there for when I log in. Since I am using a CMS I gotta log in to create content from with in the site

I am also looking at going to a liquid style so it will automatically size with the size of your browser window but I can't seem to get the scaling right. Web development can be pretty darn tedious, and I am just starting to learn.

**EDIT**

I just found out that my site is the second hit when you google "tlarkin," that is pretty freaking sweet. Gotta find that other doppelganger of mine and tell them to stop spamming youtbue so much so I will be the first hit!

forgive me......
As far as design......I don't like.....it looks like something from the mid 90's ;-)
Why not go with a good bought template and pimp it up. Are you using zen/drupal ?
Please take my comments with a pinch of salt as i work with many design companies that are very good at UI design for Web.

As far as content the few articles that are there are brilliant and have been invaluable.
Also overall having someone like you reporting on deployment & management is excellent for us sys admins that battle to get X server into new markets.
Cant wait for more action but for sure you have your 6000's users to set up during the Summer ;-)

You have directly and indirectly saved my bacon a few times, i thankyou for that.
All the best

Any particular reason you are using 23 :eek: stylesheets?

I like the background and the drop shadow around the page content, extend the shadow to the navigation box. (ok, its _there_, but just.)

Simple, clean look but the buttons are mid '90s.

Mirror effect under the logo is very subtle, learly invisible on a laptop.

Subcategories jump out of the navbox, check the tech page.

750px is kind of narrow - way too much background visible on a 13" MB (but a nice moiré effect). Wifey is using the 24" now.....

Some serious issues in MSIE6 - transparency and alignment of the `tech` submenu. can't check IE7/8 right now.

You've got an extra linebreak at the bottom - kill the extra line or add shadow to the bottom.

If you're feeling ambitious you could ajax the view/track tabs, or fake it with a hide/reveal JS

Yes I am using Zen and Drupal. I could use some of the premade themes but I wanted to do it on my own. I wanted it simple, and I am a web developing newbie. I also am not that versed in photoshop so my graphic design skills are also pretty low.

If I was awesome at javascript I would make fully animated drop down windows and maybe even code a bit of 3D stuff. However, my audience I am trying to target are not web designers. I am sure they would say my site looks like a high school kid made it!

I am only really using 1 style sheet. I just have several themes that are installed (but not active) on my site. The zen style sheet should control most of it.

As for the width, I wanted to go with liquid style sheets so it would scale with the size of the browser page but I could never get it to look quite right.

Yeah like I mentioned earlier I just developed the whole thing in firefox. I now see how much it must suck trying to get your webpage to work correctly in every major browser. Not sure if I care about IE users to be honest...

Thanks for the feed back guys, I appreciate it.

Then why do they appear in the header?

Sucks big time. I usually develop for Ffox, adjust for Safari, then add a second style sheet with a conditional comment for MSIE. I don't develop for MSIE 6 anymore unless the client requests it. You should make sure it behaves in MSIE 7 though, or it will look rather unprofessional.

Why not just have a page that says "Stop Using Internet Explorer" for whenever someone comes to your site with explorer..........;). Yeah, that wouldn't fly, would it?

No idea....

Probably something I will ask my web dev buddies to look at.

Looks good, and renders perfectly in Opera (9.64). As you suggested above, a wider body would definitely be a good idea (nearly 1/2 my 1440px wide screen is taken up by the background..!). You may want to have something like 20%:60%:20% ratio of left background to content to right background.

This is a Good Thing™ in my view. I have no sympathy for outdated - and broken - tech. I understand that ~15% of Web traffic is from IE6 (I think), but pandering to them is not the solution. Just put up a big flashing dialog box over the page saying "Use a modern browser, tw*t". :D

I do agree about making in work in IE7 though.

EDIT: bottom of contact page is not perfect (in Opera) - no gap below "Send e-mail" button and bottom border and no shadow. Latter is possibly by design. See attachment for pic.

EDIT 2: yes, I do realise the irony of suggesting you don't code for IE6 but do code for a browser with even less market share!

Yeah I think I will look at doing a liquid format where it is always a percentage of the page. I just need to learn how to do that so it works out well.

Various other wrappers will interfere with the maximum width, and images will set the minimum width for you (wether you want them to or not).

I will mess with it, but first gotta do a fresh back up. This would go in the main css page?

one of them :-)

I recommend a big css cleanup before you do much else.

I don't mind it too much, but I have to agree with the above. I think the horizontal stripes are a bit "strobe-y". If you wanted to keep the stripes, I would make the stripes wider, and make the contrast between them much less. For example, make the light stripes only a shade or two lighter than the dark stripes. Make them both pretty light, that'll be less distracting from your content, but still give some interest.

I don't mind the left side navigation, but the buttons at the top are a little chunky. As are the blog titles.

I think you should think about giving it a name, other than tlarkin.com that is. Something that represents what you are "selling" in a way.

If you are doing it as a learning experience, then you are well on your way. But if you are serious about "selling" yourself (there's that ugly word again), then I always recommend getting a design professional to design it for you. And I mean someone who is at least as much a designer as they are a developer, if not more. Not a developer who has "designed" a couple of things here and there. Remember, as Apple well knows, it's the little things that count!

That all said, I think it is pretty good and you should be congratulated.

Well, there is this guy, who is trying to steal my name and my thunder

http://www.tomlarkin.com/

I am gearing my site towards IT people and I am not trying to be a web designer, therefore content is my number 1 goal. I have actually received quite a few emails thanking me for my stuff, and one guy even clicked on the "buy me a beer" link and paypal'd me $10 and said buy myself a sick pack.

I would still suggest finding some really nice default templates. There are a zillion nice WP ones that you could modify.

However, I have some suggestions:
1) keep your url structure consistent
2) you have "Blogs", but the URL say "blog"
3) Kansas City looks like it belongs under About
4) Forums vs "forum" in the URL
5) there is navigation on the left that isn't in the bar at the top, is that intentional?
6) the font in the bar and the font used in the rest of the pages is different and a different size

That stuff is being addressed, it is part of using the roll your own css theme I am using with Drupal. I am trying to not use built in themes and templates as I want to actually learn how this stuff works.

*EDIT* The CSS is fixed, I aggregated all CSS into one file, which is an option after you are done building the CSS, then if you want to go back and modify you gotta turn that feature off. Still learning the CMS side of stuff too!

I updated a few content entries, and here they are

http://tlarkin.com/tech/passenger-v379-review

http://tlarkin.com/tech/managed-dual-booting-casper

http://tlarkin.com/tech/how-deploy-n...el-macs-casper

As far as content goes and my writing do you feel you can follow along and get the jest of what I am saying?

Thanks again for your feedback.

I am still teaching myself the back end stuff, MySQL Server, Apache 2, PHP 5, php command line and scripting, and then calls to shell when needed. Once I get that stuff down I am going to polish up on CSS and HTML and then once I get that down start to focus on the design aspect. Though to be honest, I wouldn't mind trading work or even paying someone to design me some things.

Thread revival.....

So, I have had a little more time, very little to play around with drupal more and I have been into creating user roles for specific users. Now, I just need some content right???

Well, if anyone is interested in writing up any kind of article or blog about Macs and the technologies that are used with the Apple platform, or anything technology related (development, web stuff, IT, hardware, etc), please feel free to sign up and contact me and I can grant you access to certain parts of the site to create content.

Thanks again to everyone on this site for their opinions and help. I am going to redesign the site a bit later on down the road and probably go with a liquid layout instead of a fixed.

Aaagh my eyes ;). I found those diagonal lines at the sides a bit intense. Plus when it first loaded (Safari 4.0.4) there was a bit of tearing in the tiling. When I resized the window it corrected itself.

Yeah I am going to change that pattern, I don't like it that much either. I also see the resizing issue, but oddly only on Macs. I see it on Safari and sometimes on Firefox, but I never once see it on my PCs. I wonder why that is?

There is a display problem in Opera (10.10) with the links for "Create new account" and "Request new password": they overlap.

The problem is caused by the #user-login-form ul element's line-height:0; attribute in your style-sheet. I was not able to modify the style-sheet in Opera, but adding style="line-height:1;" to the UL tag fixed the problem (i.e. the two links were regularly spaced). However, there was no longer a gap between the links and the bottom of the div. See attachments for more info.

In Safari (4.0.4) and Firefox (3.6), the two links are on separate lines, but there is no gap between the text. I have not tested the above "fix" in either of those browsers.

Note: I have no idea if the problem is actually with your CSS, or if it with the various browsers' interpretation thereof.

The same problem shows up on Chrome 4.0

The diagonal bars kind of made my brain hurt though. They make a strange effect, and its hard to focus on the page content.

Site details aside, I really liked that MacCuff/MacMini on the back of the Acer monitor. Neat idea.

That was just a test run, the main idea is to have them mounted on the back of large display screens in certain areas that would need a HTPC like ability. They installed a few here and there but I don't deal with those, our A/V guy does most of that stuff.

But also a perfect way to run a kiosk. You could tether (from the lock) the MacCuff to the wall (like a clock over a clock receptacle, hang it all up with a simple addition of a bracket to the top of the MacCuff and have protection for the Mini and the screen.

I updated a few things and added a module. I am still tinkering with the links for logging in and creating an account but they should be fixed soon.

http://tlarkin.com/blog/testing-out-geshi

Does this look better?

I always thought these were really cool

http://www.google.com/products?clien...ed=0CCEQzAMwAg