Critique please, site layout for vehicle communication company

In article <h0kggf$60j$1 (AT) news (DOT) eternal-september.org>,
"Nik Coughlin" <nrkn.com (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

If there were some way to *snap* the layout elements to multiples of the
item widths as the space became available that would be quite nice. It
could probably be done reasonably easily client side, with the "horrible
looking blank space" of my previous comment as the fallback for those
without JavaScript

An interesting exercise, and could be very cool, but outside of the scope
(and budget!) of this project I'm afraid.

The solution might be to centre a block of floats inside their
containers.

<http://tinyurl.com/2jcs5r>

But, as you say, perhaps outside your budget to be attempting to get
this right

--
dorayme

"dorayme" <doraymeRidThis (AT) optusnet (DOT) com.au> wrote

In article <h0kggf$60j$1 (AT) news (DOT) eternal-september.org>,
"Nik Coughlin" <nrkn.com (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

If there were some way to *snap* the layout elements to multiples of the
item widths as the space became available that would be quite nice. It
could probably be done reasonably easily client side, with the "horrible
looking blank space" of my previous comment as the fallback for those
without JavaScript

An interesting exercise, and could be very cool, but outside of the scope
(and budget!) of this project I'm afraid.

The solution might be to centre a block of floats inside their
containers.

http://tinyurl.com/2jcs5r

But, as you say, perhaps outside your budget to be attempting to get
this right

Thar be JavaScript in them thar hills!

Interesting. I suspect could be onto something here, perhaps in conjunction
with this tiling technique:

http://nrkn.com/fluidTiling/

"Nik Coughlin" <nrkn.com (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

This is the preliminary mockup, so only dummy content, no real links, poor
quality jpegs etc.:

http://informationage.co.nz/kingcom/

HTML validates as 4.01 strict and CSS validates apart from the
vendor-specific properties for rounded corners

TIA!

It is a pet peeve of mine but I think that I should be able to click
on the image or the caption to follow the link. This is especially
true on this page because the captions look like buttons. It follows
that the column headings should be links to the "more...".

If a large proportion of visitors log in I would prefer the log in to
be visible without scrolling.

On 9 June, 00:42, "Nik Coughlin" <nrkn.... (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

This is the preliminary mockup, so only dummy content, no real links, poor
quality jpegs etc.:
http://informationage.co.nz/kingcom/

No time to review it in depth, but:

Generally, looks pretty good.

Markup. Looks like how I'd do it internally, which must be right.
8-) <table> for forms is reasonable, even mixed in with floated
<div>s like this.

Id vs. class. I'd convert some of the "top-level" CSS selectors from
using id to using class (with HTML addition) as these are generally
easier to work with than a top-level id hogging the CSS selector
specificity

Dark? Yes. Think I'd do something about that. White text on black is
always a problem, and you could surely lift the overall brightness of
the page with a different canvas background than solid black.

Print-specific CSS. Are you using one for a controllable black on
white layout when printing? If so, then strip the menus off too. Also
any heavy-looking item borders.

Thumbnails resize dynamically (probably a good approach these days),
but I'd be inclined to make the maxiumum sizes bigger. "Typical"
monitors and display boards are pretty big these days, esp.
widescreens.

Few encoding glitches around ampersands and numeric entities. Now
these really worry me - if they're there at all, it suggests you're
not using a really good validator (e.g. Marc Guery's), and that's its
own problem.

On 08 Jun 2009, "Nik Coughlin" <nrkn.com (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

"Neredbojias" <neredbojias (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote in message
news:Xns9C24B8578DAB7neredbojiasnano (AT) news (DOT) albasani.net...
On 08 Jun 2009, "Nik Coughlin" <nrkn.com (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

Would be more impressive if you could make the section heights in
1st column same as those in other columns.

I agree, but it probably isn't viable given that the leftmost column
has paragraphs of text in it, not to mention form elements which look
very different across different browser/OS combination; it just adds
too much variability. Any suggestions?

Well, if I had a lot of time I might play around with fixed heights,
overflow hidden, position relative, display inline-block, and
bottom-positioning of a "footer" with "more" in it, but you're probably
right: it just wouldn't be worth it.

--
Neredbojias
http://www.neredbojias.org/
http://www.neredbojias.net/