Filmmaking 101

hey, this is a site I designed recently for an online filmmaking community. I am interested in any comments and suggestions you guys might have. It's my first site using image splicing, and it's kinda simple, but I like the look of it. Let me know what you think:

Filmmaking-101.com

i dont really know about this one. IT is ok. BUt i can say anymore.

what do you think could be better about it?

It looks very '96... tacky looking graphics. Try to be more subtle.

Don't use serif fonts on screens (too low res), they were designed for print. Try sans-serif fonts like Verdana, Tahoma or Arial.

One of your tables at the top of the page doesn't display correctly in Opera 5.12.

Don't use M$ Front Page.

thanks for the critique, tre.

But I'm using Arial. Do you see a different font? Actually I just realized the main page is TNR but the rest is Arial. I can change that easily.

What's Opera? A browser of some sort? How would I make it compatible? It's just a regular table. How much of it couldn't you see?

Front Page is all I have right now, what's so bad about it? There's a few bugs in the program, and I've heard it doesn't generate the cleanest code, but why shouldn't I use it?

and, hehe, I didn't realize there was a '96 look in web design. You mean "that's SO 5 years ago!" lol...I'll try working on a new design... Thanks for your comments. Anyone else please comment as well.

Well like you said, it's buggy and puts stupid M$ tags in where they're not needed. But the other big problem with it is that it can't be extended. Macromedia has a huge public archive of extensions, allowing you to do just about anything. You should download the demo from their web site, it looks a bit strange compared to M$ Front Page, but it's far better. Plus if you intend on being a pro web designer, you'll need to learn Dreamweaver as it's the industry standard. I guess you could compare Front Page and Dreamweaver to Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop.

I didn't dive deep enough into your page to see that you've used Arial and that TNR was just a mistake. One thing that Dreamweaver supports that Frontpage doesn't that would help your site out allot is Cascading Style Sheets. They control your type and layout styles from a single file. Very handy! =)

Opera is one of the most popular browsers. It's actually superior to Internet Explorer in that it meets many more web standards set by the "W3C" and "WaSP". The only thing is that it's not as known about as Internet Explorer. When I test web sites, I always check them in IE 5.5, Mozilla 0.9 (NS6) and Opera 5 (the three most popular browsers).

The table fault could be caused by a pixel value not being set. You might have just inserted an image into a table which streched to fit. This doesn't always work. It's always a good thing to set all dimensions of your tables. However, it might be something else. It's worth a look though.

'96/'97 were classic years of tacky images and the over use of the animated GIF format. Aghhhhh... those were the days! =D

Alternative browsers...

www.mozilla.org (Stable version of NS6)
www.opera.com

Other good sites...

www.alistapart.com
www.stars.com
www.w3.org
www.webstandards.org