first interface

I took the advice of several people and used Image ready to do the slicing of my first GUI. WOOOhoooo!
and it worked!
anyhow....tell me what ya think
and maybe some download times ? (I know its pretty big)
http://home.hiwaay.net/~cbutts/oddstuff/webregionsite/indexnew.html

It's a nice GUI, if it is your first one. But it still need some work. It is a bit too blurry, and some of the lines aren't straight.

But it's a good start.

Good luck

I think you have made this way to difficult for yourself. You've cut this thing up into so many more pieces than necessary. You should study up on building tables. This thing could be built much cleaner with the use of colspan and rowspan and 1/3 the number of images. This is the problem with ImageReady (in my opinion). You should learn to cut it up by hand in Photoshop.

Also, i recommend using more descriptive names for your images. Would you remember the difference between first_gui_03.gif and first_gui_33.gif 8 weeks down the road?

Finally, you're rollovers in the left side menu are barely noticeable and not worth the download time.

*CHARM*
"Code by hand!"

Actually, I did the first version by hand "in" photoshop. it didn't work out :( believe me I "wanted" to stay in photoshop.

<==Number of images and quality:::

I went with an optimized gif with very few colors for this first try to see how it downloaded. as far as how many slices I made, I dont really think I made it hard, but this is my first so I'll see in the future.

<==Name of images

As a matter of fact "I do" expact to know what part is what 8 months down the road. I have very good design notes

<==Rollovers

Well, the change is slight, but ya know what?
the guy who's site this thing is going to be on ( a friend)said thats what he wanted. Who am I to say any different ? Although I did have a slightly more dramatic glow to begin with.

Good job for a first, took me a long time to get past simple stupid text based tables :] Keep playing with image ready and try making tables on your own to learn how to manipulate them things. At least thats how I learned. Have fun!

about the rollovers...when it comes down to it the client is always right. if they ask you to change something...well, in the end its their site. so i can't blame you there.

but i still think your tables could be built better and your images cut up a lot less. when i look at this it makes me think that yes this peson understands what they want to do, and how they want it to look, but they are not sure how to best implement it.

*CHARM*

With a 56K connection, it took approx. 45 seconds for the entire page to load.

I pretty much agree with all of Charm's comments. Especially the advice to just code by hand! Code generators are for wimps. ;)

I want a tattoo of the Notepad.exe icon.

What will the little square region on the bottom of the navbar do? Anything?

It took about 2.5 seconds to download on a DSL connection. Which is enough to tell that it's loading quite a bit slower than most pages. If you used fewer 'chunks' of images, it would most likely load faster. The viewer's computer has to request and establish a new connection with the server everytime it requests an image file, so since there are so many images, that may actually make it load slower. Usually it helps to cut up images into smaller pieces to decrease download time, but in your case, I think that since all of the images are so small and quick to download, making all those unnecessary connections will actually slow it down.

Just my thoughts.

Derek

I have plans to put a little flash movie in the "black" region you were talking about, deker....

but right now I'm addressing some of the other post....

Code by hand?..... NAH! Lol!

just call me a wimp ;)

yeah pixie!

finally someone agrees with me on something!

*CHARM*