first interface

[tornupinside]

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

[Grums]

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

[Charm]

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!"

[tornupinside]

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.

[rahklin]

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!

[Charm]

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*

[*pixie*]

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.

[deker]

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

[tornupinside]

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 ;)

[Charm]

yeah pixie!

finally someone agrees with me on something!

*CHARM*

[*pixie*]

That is the only upside to still having a 56K connection, I think... as a web designer, I can view my pages and make sure they're loading fast enough on an average connection. That is the ONLY thing a 56K is good for though. LOL


Woohoo, Charm! :)

[Charm]

the good thing about having DSL is that it rarely works, so you get to view web pages with a 56k connection.

*CHARM*

[*pixie*]

LOL!

[deker]

My DSL works marvelously. Downloading consistently at 160k per second, web pages one or two seconds. How far away are you from the hub thing? I'm less than a mile from the switchbox/hub/thing, so I get really good speeds.

[Fig]

Coding by hand is essential for really learning how to design for the web. Let me repeat that: Coding by hand is ESSENTIAL for really learning how to design for the web. After you've learned that, however, IMO it's more of a novelty and pretty inefficient. I find that I can do things far faster using Photoshop/ImageReady, Dreamweaver, and a text editor to fix things that need to be fixed. The key is knowing how to fix those things :)

Chris

[Charm]

Knowing how to fix things is not the only key (although it is HUGE...if you can't go into the source and comprehend it, you are going to have problems), but you also need to know the limitations of your software. for example, you may rely on dreamweaver to code complex tables, but on the other hand you might decide to write out your own javascript.

the current layout-based (as opposed to code-based) programs have improved greatly. they are much better when it comes to efficient code than they used to be, but they are not perfect.

if a designer wants to be taken seriously he/she needs to consider the code. anyone can 'view source' and nothing looks more unprofessional than "paste html code here" or some computer generated nonsense code that no person can reasonably understand.

*CHARM*

[Final_Xero]

NOTEPAD IS MY BEST FRIEND!! lol

[tornupinside]

Didn't say I "COULDN'T" just..... NAH!
I prefer not to, if I run into something where I have to then I have no problem going into the code and fixin' it....
thats why DW has that <HTML SOURCE> button ....right? :)

Can't say I "Fully" understand everything I run across when looking thru "some" code...but you can bet within minutes of seeing something I dont understand I can come up with some resources to explain it to me.
Aint the internet great? Lol!

PS. I use Ultra edit :)