Its up and running.... hopefully!

[KevinBE]

Hi Clare, congratulations on the new site. I really like the overall design. The consistant menu structure is a plus ( am working on that for my site). I echo most of the other comments. I don't have access to another browser right now so I can't comment on that. I need to get access to other browsers to test my work as well.

One thing I noticed is the access to pricing. Maybe you should consider a menu link to a pricing discussion page that covers all your pricing elements? It is hard to find the way it is now. I'm new at this so I may not be a good judge as to what a site should have. Right now some of my planned changes are evolving before I can impliment them.

Good work! You should be proud of your creation, your hard work shows.

[clare]

Thanks Kevin,

I was meant to address the pricing today but clean forgot! So many other tweaks to implement.... Maybe I will produce a page that is hyperlinked to by other pages but is not in the menu. What do you think? that way it could be an overall price list that includes the restoration, commissions and the image library. I am still so unsure of how to place a price list in that makes it not to fightening for people (not that I even charge the earth, but its just a hang up with financal stuff!)

Clare

[jeaniesa]

My experience is that Netscape and tables are a terrible mix. My site looks so ridiculous in Netscape 4 to 4.8 that I'm just ignoring it. Netscape 6 is better, but has some cosmetic problems with repeating background images (some don't show up - some do, but it doesn't hurt the usability of the site, just the cosmetics). Netscape 6.2 seems to fix the problems with the background images, but makes some of my text overlap and is unreadable - definitely hurts the usability. Netscape 7 is the only one that seems to render my site perfectly.

I guess what I'm saying is if you're using tables and background images, your site might never look right in Netscape. If you're able to figure it out, I'd LOVE to know how you did it. I've spent literally hours trying to get my site design to work in multiple browsers and my husband and brother (both techies) have finally convinced me to get the site out there for the 92% of people (according to stats that I've seen) who use Internet Explorer and work on fixing the problems in the other browsers later.

I took a look at your code to see how you've put things together and I'm impressed with the way you incorporated that full background graphic. I never would have thought to do something like that. But then, I don't think my site would work with that kind of setup anyway. Interesting to think about for the future though. I have so much to learn about CSS!!! (I just spent the past two days learning Flash so that I can make a photo fade from before to after. I still don't fully understand Flash, but I can at least do photo transformations. There is so much to learn. )

Good luck!! If you do find a fix for your site in Netscape, I'd really like to know. I wish I could offer some great advice, but I've about given up on my own site.

Jeanie

[clare]

QUOTE]Originally posted by jeaniesa

I took a look at your code to see how you've put things together and I'm impressed with the way you incorporated that full background graphic. I never would have thought to do something like that.

Jeanie [/b][/quote]

I had no idea what CSS was until the other day after screaming at my computer because nothing was making sense, my partner dragged me down to the local book shop and said 'buy which ever books help you!' So I bought three, and one was on CSS and DHTML. It was in a readable language that said do this do that and theres a whole bunch we haven't even covered.... but it gave the general idea and was enough to get me started.

The book was :

'DHTML and CSS for the world wide web' (Second edition)
Jason Cranford Teague
Peachpit Press (Visual quickstart guide)

I haven't read the second half of the book on DHTML yet, and have only scraped the surface of the other 2 books.

I have no idea about flash!, I look forward to your site.

I have to agree with your 'husband and brother (both techies)' that you can not please every browser at every screen resolution, you just have to create what you can and modify it later if you can. My main problems were with screen resolution, they are now with browsers, oh well you can't win them all If I find a way round the latest problems I will post them, thanks to everyone who is helping me overcome these problems, together I am sure we will suceed.

Clare

Jeanie,
Don't give up on your site, you have learnt so much and have so much to share .... Don't give up you will succeed .... Don't let the web get you down. If I can help in any way just shout

[jeaniesa]

Jeanie, Don't give up on your site, you have learnt so much ...

Yeah, like I just "learned" that the pull-down menus I've implemented show up behind the Flash image I just spent days learning how to create! Ahhhhhhhhhh!!! (Anyone have any clues on that?? The pull-down menus are JavaScript.)

Thanks for the encouragement though. I won't really give up, I just feel like it sometimes!

Jeanie

[winwintoo]

Hi Clare - having coffee with friends and talking about anything BUT programming does wonders for the old gray matter.

I was able to get the background in the right place on NN6.1 and it works on all the later Mac browsers that I tried too. The background image doesn't show up on NN4.7, but like Jeannie says, who uses it anyway

I changed what I told you about before.

In the file "global.css" I took the background image lines out of the table element and created a new class called ".mybody" - I could have just called it "body" and not had to refer to the class in the <body> tag, but I want to get in the habit of naming classes. (my old programming neurons)

I also too the background color out of the table and put it in the body element. The default background in older browsers is a horrible gray so even though the background image doesn't load in the old browser, what does load looks nice.

In the index.html file, I added "class='mybody'" in the <body> tag.

global.css
table {
font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';
font-size: 12px;
height: 100%;
width: 100%;
color: #000000;
}
h5 {
font-size: 14px;
}

.mybody {
background-image: url(../images/back.jpg);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-color: #ffffff;
}

index.html
.
.
.
<body class="mybody" link="#000000" etc.
.
.
.
Hope this helps Margaret

[jeaniesa]

Brilliant fix Margaret. By removing the association of the background image from the table, you've gotten around the awful Netscape rendering of tables altogether!

Jeanie

[KevinBE]

Jeanie I know what you are going through. I spent a lot of time on my gallery design to learn that the Frontpage link bar doesn't support frames. Now I have located a javascript menu bar that I want to use to find out that it doesn't want to let me use the colors I want and it also wants to place itself behind my page header images. I will have to spend a lot more time on this gallery project than originally anticipated. It seems like every direction I turn only leads to another roadblock. Just think how good it will feel when it quits hurting!

You all are making good progress. Hang in there guys we will get through this.

[clare]

Margret you are a complete STAR

I will go and try this out right now

Thanks so much

By the way what was in the coffee, magic beans - I need some

Thanks Again

Clare

[winwintoo]

I have coffee with a group of ladies who range in age from 80 to 98 and they are the funniest, brightest people - even the one who has Alzheimers!

We talk about current events, kids, romance, recipes, investments and everything in between - it's a hoot.

I live in an apartment building that has a lot of retired folks living in it. Most of them have lived here since the building was new 30+ years ago and they thrive on getting together to talk.

I don't know what's in the coffee, but it sure does me good!!

Margaret

[clare]

Margaret,
Sounds like the coffee is made with a mixture of friendship and feel good beans

I have just put the web site up again, The only thing I changed was adding a line into the css class

background-position: 10px 5px;

this just helped to align the background with the buttons and Home - About Us - etc lines at the bottom of the page. This seems to work really well, thank you for helping me

Clare

[winwintoo]

Your site looks great on all my browsers but there is a spelling error in your CSS:

.mybody {
background-image: url(../images/back.jpg);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-colour: #ffffff;
background-position: 10px 5px;
}

Also, this line in your HTML causes a row of dots to appear on some browsers. I don't know if you intended that to happen:

<font color="#FFFFFF">..........</font><font color="#999999">&copy;Clare
Sadler, Image Pure 2003</font></p></td>

Good job!!

Margaret

[clare]

Colour..... that serves me right for not copy and pasting

I also get a row of ......... before the (C) symbol on some browsers, it was ment to move the (C) along so it looked in line with the background - and never used to show up. I might try moving the background up or down a pixel to see if I can eliminate it.

Thanks for pointing out the colour spelling, I probably wouldn't have picked that one up, isn't the english language fun! (that was the only spelling error wasn't it?????)

Clare

[winwintoo]

I've given up on the "British" spelling of words - spell checkers were making me crazy

I didn't notice any other spelling errors, and I only noticed that one because I've made the same mistake so many times in the past.

Have a good day, Margaret

[clare]

More spelling corrections, (paranoid) quite a few that the grammar and spell check missed but did not get past my sister I agree with you Margaret spell checkers are a pain, I have one set to British and one to International, together they really confuse me.

Clare