Site Check Please for Mars Art Gallery

Hello,

I have a new site that I hope some folks here can give the once over.
The name of the web site is Mars Art Gallery and the URL is:

http://www.marsartgallery.com

Please post your comments to the group as this email address is a fake
to foil the $!(#%!*$ spammers.

Thanks in advance for your help.




Best Regards, Jim Plaxco
Astrodigital http://www.astrodigital.org
Mars Art Gallery http://www.marsartgallery.com
Chicago Space Society http://www.chicagospace.org

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Jim <Jim (AT) nospamwanted (DOT) com> writing
in news:7o9q915mkp4pu3gujhnskjlku3o4ikptg5 (AT) 4ax (DOT) com:

Hello,

I have a new site that I hope some folks here can give the once over.
The name of the web site is Mars Art Gallery and the URL is:

http://www.marsartgallery.com

Please post your comments to the group as this email address is a fake
to foil the $!(#%!*$ spammers.

Thanks in advance for your help.



How fun! I especially loved the picture of ol' Tricky Dick!

However, the red on black headings are difficult on the eyes. Perhaps if
you made the heading larger?

You should also validate your markup, there are a lot of errors
<http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.marsartgallery.com/>.

You should also not use pixels for font sizes as they cannot be resized by
a widely popular browser. Using percentages will make the text that
percentage of the user's preferred font size.

I bookmarked it, and will be coming back later to read it all carefully.
Very interesting.

--
Adrienne Boswell
http://www.cavalcade-of-coding.info
Please respond to the group so others can share

Jim wrote:

Hello,

I have a new site that I hope some folks here can give the once over.
The name of the web site is Mars Art Gallery and the URL is:

http://www.marsartgallery.com

Generally I like it, but there are a few easy-to-fix things
that irritate me:

Web idiom for "Web Site Organization" is "Web Map."

Tendency to over-explain. Kill
"I must say that it took some thought to arrive at an organization or
structure that would be both intuitive and require minimal searching for
content. The chief difficulty was in determining how to organize the
galleries. I came up with several alternative structures before deciding
on this organization.Organization"

Simplify:
"The Orbital Gallery contains thumbnail images of all the pictures of
Mars on display here that were taken from an orbiter. Two examples would
be the Mars Global Surveyor and Viking orbiter missions."
To:
"Orbital Gallery: thumbnail images taken from orbiters"
....save more explanation for the page where it belongs.
Actual thumbnails are handled well, although I think some
of them may be a bit too large to get full benefits of fast
download times. o_genesis_tn.jpg is 39K !!
http://www.mbstevens.com/howtothumb/
may help.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...gallery.com%2F
(Not HTML 4.01 Strict, as claimed in source.)

Nice start.

Jim <Jim (AT) nospamwanted (DOT) com> wrote in
news:7o9q915mkp4pu3gujhnskjlku3o4ikptg5 (AT) 4ax (DOT) com:

http://www.marsartgallery.com

Fascinating site. I'll have looked at every page before I'm through
with it. Your coding could use some work as Adrienne pointed out but I
find your basic layout scheme easy to use and view.

Your file size could be trimmed and your coding would be cleaner by
eliminating the table layout. See
http://www.htmldog.com/ptg/archives/000049.php. One thing on the
layout that you might want to change is to go with two column instead
of three. When viewing the pictures, the far right column is off
screen at 800x600. Not a major problem but something to consider.

Many HTML coders like to use list elements for a list of links as you
have in your menus rather than a div with br elements as you have done.
Again, not a major problem, but another way of creating a list of links
is using an unordered list. Check out "2. Vertical Navigation Bar
Using UL Element" at
http://www.daleglaser.com/art/WebTip...stNavBars.html. You
could also snaz up your menus a bit by using :hover which is also
demonstrated on that page.

Your content is excellent and it is easy to see that you have spent a
great deal of time on this. I like your discussion of each picture;
great job on that.

--
Stan McCann "Uncle Pirate" http://stanmccann.us/pirate.html
Webmaster/Computer Center Manager, NMSU at Alamogordo
http://alamo.nmsu.edu/ There are 10 kinds of people.
Those that understand binary and those that don't.

Hello Adrienne,

On Wed, 01 Jun 2005 07:13:26 GMT, Adrienne <arbpen2003 (AT) sbcglobal (DOT) net>
wrote:

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Jim <Jim (AT) nospamwanted (DOT) com> writing
in news:7o9q915mkp4pu3gujhnskjlku3o4ikptg5 (AT) 4ax (DOT) com:

I have a new site that I hope some folks here can give the once over.
The name of the web site is Mars Art Gallery and the URL is:

http://www.marsartgallery.com

Please post your comments to the group as this email address is a fake
to foil the $!(#%!*$ spammers.

How fun! I especially loved the picture of ol' Tricky Dick!

Thanks. I figured that for an otherwise serious article, it might be
nice to end on a light note.

However, the red on black headings are difficult on the eyes. Perhaps if
you made the heading larger?

Sounds like I need to do some experimenting.

You should also validate your markup, there are a lot of errors
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.marsartgallery.com/>.

Ouch. I checked several of the pages at validator.w3.org and as they
came back with the same clean results that I was getting from the
error checker in the software I was using to create the pages
(AceHTML), I assumed that no errors from AceHTML would mean valid
markup. Thanks for catching this for me.

You should also not use pixels for font sizes as they cannot be resized by
a widely popular browser. Using percentages will make the text that
percentage of the user's preferred font size.

A very good point. I didn't think this would be a problem as my
browser does allow me to resize the text.

I bookmarked it, and will be coming back later to read it all carefully.
Very interesting.

Thanks Adrienne. I hope to keep it growing. I have a nice backlog of
images to add -- it's just taking the time to do the associated write
up that gets me.


Thanks for your help.





Best Regards, Jim Plaxco
Astrodigital http://www.astrodigital.org
Mars Art Gallery http://www.marsartgallery.com
Chicago Space Society http://www.chicagospace.org

Hi,

On Wed, 01 Jun 2005 15:45:32 GMT, mbstevens
<NOXwebmasterx (AT) xmbstevensx (DOT) com> wrote:

Jim wrote:
Hello,

I have a new site that I hope some folks here can give the once over.
The name of the web site is Mars Art Gallery and the URL is:

http://www.marsartgallery.com

Generally I like it, but there are a few easy-to-fix things
that irritate me:

Web idiom for "Web Site Organization" is "Web Map."

Or site map.

Tendency to over-explain. Kill
"I must say that it took some thought to arrive at an organization or
structure that would be both intuitive and require minimal searching for
content. The chief difficulty was in determining how to organize the
galleries. I came up with several alternative structures before deciding
on this organization.Organization"

Simplify:
"The Orbital Gallery contains thumbnail images of all the pictures of
Mars on display here that were taken from an orbiter. Two examples would
be the Mars Global Surveyor and Viking orbiter missions."
To:
"Orbital Gallery: thumbnail images taken from orbiters"
...save more explanation for the page where it belongs.

Actually I was trying to be use verbose language to improve page
ranking. You can say that I was writing with an eye on what the
search engines would think.

Actual thumbnails are handled well, although I think some
of them may be a bit too large to get full benefits of fast
download times. o_genesis_tn.jpg is 39K !!
http://www.mbstevens.com/howtothumb/
may help.

Thanks. I'll revisit some of these thumbs. After all, not only are you
waiting for the download but I'm paying for the disk space and the
traffic.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...gallery.com%2F
(Not HTML 4.01 Strict, as claimed in source.)

Yep, looks like I need to revisit this. The first couple pages I
checked came out clean. I assumed the rest would be good as well since
I was running a validation on errors for every page using AceHTML.

Nice start.

Thanks. And thanks for your comments.





Best Regards, Jim Plaxco
Astrodigital http://www.astrodigital.org
Mars Art Gallery http://www.marsartgallery.com
Chicago Space Society http://www.chicagospace.org

Hi Stan,

On 1 Jun 2005 10:47:07 -0700, Stan McCann <me (AT) stanmccann (DOT) us> wrote:

Jim <Jim (AT) nospamwanted (DOT) com> wrote in
news:7o9q915mkp4pu3gujhnskjlku3o4ikptg5 (AT) 4ax (DOT) com:

http://www.marsartgallery.com

Fascinating site.

Thanks.

I'll have looked at every page before I'm through
with it. Your coding could use some work as Adrienne pointed out but I
find your basic layout scheme easy to use and view.

Good. I was trying to keep it simple. Easier not only for users but me
as well.

Your file size could be trimmed and your coding would be cleaner by
eliminating the table layout. See
http://www.htmldog.com/ptg/archives/000049.php.

Thanks. My CSS skills are still at the basic level and I've only just
begun to play with positioning.

One thing on the
layout that you might want to change is to go with two column instead
of three. When viewing the pictures, the far right column is off
screen at 800x600. Not a major problem but something to consider.

Yes, I was designing with 1024w in mind as many newer machines are now
running at 1280w.

Many HTML coders like to use list elements for a list of links as you
have in your menus rather than a div with br elements as you have done.
Again, not a major problem, but another way of creating a list of links
is using an unordered list. Check out "2. Vertical Navigation Bar
Using UL Element" at
http://www.daleglaser.com/art/WebTip...stNavBars.html.

1) Thanks for the link.

2) Yes, I've done ul lists of links before but for this I wanted
something different - more of a text/paragraph feel. However, that
little leading dot would make it easier for users to spot the link.
Looks like some reworking is in order.

You
could also snaz up your menus a bit by using :hover which is also
demonstrated on that page.

I do use hover links for all links: both for the nav bar and the
individual links in the text. Could you give me an example? Note that
for the nav bar links, the hover mode paints the background gray while
leaving the text color unchanged - a subtle but present effect.

Your content is excellent and it is easy to see that you have spent a
great deal of time on this. I like your discussion of each picture;
great job on that.

Thanks. I've been doing presentations about space exploration and
planetary science for years. I actually created this web site to
augment a talk I put together called "Mars As Art". My next public
performance will be June 11 at the DucKon Science Fiction Convention.


Thanks for your input Stan.


I'll probably post another site check thread once I've had a chance to
investigatge and incorporate everyone's comments.




Best Regards, Jim Plaxco
Astrodigital http://www.astrodigital.org
Mars Art Gallery http://www.marsartgallery.com
Chicago Space Society http://www.chicagospace.org

Jim wrote:

Yes, I was designing with 1024w in mind as many newer machines are
now running at 1280w.

Monitor resolution is unimportant. Not everyone browses with their
window maximized. I never do, and it is rare that the window is larger
than 800 pixels wide, on my 1024 monitor.

Make it fluid so size doesn't matter.

--
-bts
-This space intentionally left blank.

Jim <Jim (AT) nospamwanted (DOT) com> wrote in
news:711s91dc3bf6bel7jqkkttmtnon0srnfa8 (AT) 4ax (DOT) com:

Yes, I was designing with 1024w in mind as many newer machines are
now running at 1280w.

I use 1024x768 for my monitor. I do not use windows full screen as I
am usually working in several back and forth sizing and positioning so
that it is just a click on any window to activate it.

What I used to judge the window size is a resize utiltity included in
Web Developer, an add on tool bar for FireFox. For your picture pages,
you may even want to consider horizontal navigation using the entire
width you choose for picture resolution.

I, and I'd guess others are far more likely to temporarily maximaze a
browser window to see the entirety of an interesting picture than to do
so for a menu. Your choice, as the artist, is then the limiting factor
giving you freedom to display even larger sizes if you wish.

2) Yes, I've done ul lists of links before but for this I wanted
something different - more of a text/paragraph feel. However, that
little leading dot would make it easier for users to spot the link.
Looks like some reworking is in order.

You can style the dot away, replace it with your own graphic (doesn't
work right in IE), or use a couple of predefined shapes.

I do use hover links for all links: both for the nav bar and the
individual links in the text. Could you give me an example? Note
that for the nav bar links, the hover mode paints the background
gray while leaving the text color unchanged - a subtle but present
effect.

You've got it, just a bit too subtle for my eye. I had to go back and
look after reading your message to see the gray. I'm not that subtle,
probably my most subtle :hover is on: http://abateofnm.org/

--
Stan McCann "Uncle Pirate" http://stanmccann.us/pirate.html
Webmaster/Computer Center Manager, NMSU at Alamogordo
http://alamo.nmsu.edu/ There are 10 kinds of people.
Those that understand binary and those that don't.

Hi Beauregard ,
On Wed, 01 Jun 2005 19:21:06 GMT, "Beauregard T. Shagnasty"
<a.nony.mous (AT) example (DOT) invalid> wrote:

Jim wrote:
Yes, I was designing with 1024w in mind as many newer machines are
now running at 1280w.

Monitor resolution is unimportant. Not everyone browses with their
window maximized. I never do, and it is rare that the window is larger
than 800 pixels wide, on my 1024 monitor.

I don't either. However with the entire browser at 850 wide, there is
no horizontal scroll on my system.

Make it fluid so size doesn't matter.

Yes but left column is fixed for navigation and center is fixed with
respect to images, which I keep under 600 wide. The right column has
nothing important. So really, there is no room for float.







Best Regards, Jim Plaxco
Astrodigital http://www.astrodigital.org
Mars Art Gallery http://www.marsartgallery.com
Chicago Space Society http://www.chicagospace.org