www.gliderscore.com

Discussion in 'Open Discussion' started by Gerry, Aug 28, 2010.

  1. I'm totally new to building web pages. Started about 3 weeks ago. My site is aimed at getting more users for a scoring program for radio controlled model glider competitions. Over the years I have invested a huge amount of time into this program so it would be nice to see it widely used.
    Comments and suggestions, good and bad, all welcome.
     
  2. Ray

    Ray

    You seem to have a broken link or misaligned space between the menus Contact and MainMenu. Is it suppose to be like that?

    And you may want to edit the menu's such as MainMenu to Main Menu, it is two words after all.
     
  3. Thanks Ray.
    The gap between the Contact and Main Menu links is deliberate, but I would rather that it didn't show up the way that it does. I want to keep the links that relate to the program for download separate from the first four that don't. So I put spaces in there. Just don't know any other way to do it.

    I've changed MainMenu to Main Menu, and also the others that were similar.
     
  4. Ray

    Ray

    Have you considered placing the links "Home", "Donate", "Download", and "Contact" on the left hand side. Place it vertically on the left hand side. You may need to set it in a table. It's much more easier to manipulate the format that way.
     
  5. I see you have <div id="menu"> but "menu" isn't defined in your Styles.css file.

    Try defining two separate menu IDs and float:right one of them. You can cut and paste this into a test .html file to see what I mean:

    HTML:
    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
    <html>
    <head>
    <title></title>
    <STYLE TYPE="text/css">
    <!--
      #menu {
        font: 16px Arial;
      }
      #menuright {
        font: 16px Arial;
        float: right;
      }
      -->
      </STYLE>
    </head>
    <body>
    
    <div id="menu" >
    <a href="Default.aspx">HOME</a> |
    <a href="Donate.aspx">Donate</a> |
    <a href="Download.aspx">Download</a> |
    <a href="Contact.aspx">Contact</a>
      <div id="menuright" >
      <a href="MainMenu.aspx">Main Menu</a> |
      <a href="NewComp.aspx">New Comp</a> |
      <a href="Setup.aspx">Setup Comp</a> |
      <a href="DrawRounds.aspx">Draw Rounds</a> |
      <a href="Scoring.aspx">Scoring</a> |
      <a href="Reports.aspx">Reports</a> |
      <a href="CompSeries.aspx">Comp Series</a>
      </div>
    </div>
    
    </body>
    </html>
    Note that the div you want to float to the right is nested within the other one. If you don't nest "menuright" it won't align properly with the menu on the left.
     
  6. Thanks Ray and Hank.
    I will try out your suggestions tonight and let you know how I get on.
     
  7. Following on from your suggestions and reading more tutorials online I now have the menus where I always wanted them (and I understand CSS a lot better). Thanks again.
     
  8. Sure, glad to help.
     
  9. After some changes, a menu item 'Draw Rounds' appears differently to other items in the same menu. But this only happens when I look at the web site on the www. It is fine on my local machine. I am using IE8. Any ideas??
     
  10. I seem to have fixed that one by adding the background-image url to the menu elements (generally, using CSS), plus some height and position adjustments.
     
  11. Ray

    Ray

    You may want to test your site out by pulling it up with different browsers. Unfortunately browser compatibility is still an issue when doing web development.

    As an example, I pulled up your site "www.gliderscore.com" on IE8, Chrome, and Firefox. IE8 and Chrome appears to be the same, but on FireFox the link "Back to top" appears on the top right hand side instead of being underneath the button "Download GliderScore".

    And by the way, you may also want to fix that button "GliderScore". Typically the title on the button is simple so you just may want to code it with "Download".
     
  12. Yeah, definite Firefox problem there. Probably related to using a table for that small bottom section. I don't have time at the moment to check the code for the entire page, but that table is what you want to look at.
     
  13. Thank you very much for looking at my site and making those suggestions.
    The text at the bottom of the page that was a problem in Firefox was in a table on the Master page. It is now in a ContentPlaceholder and works fine.

    I have one page that does not derive from the Master page and that is the Donate page. This is because the PayPal button wouldn't work with the Master page, I think because it effectively embedded a form within a form, and that isn't allowed. Anyway, the Donate page had the same issue with the last lines of text. I solved this by putting the text in a panel and this worked fine.

    All the 'Back to top' links have gone in a redesign of the web site so I didn't have to solve this one. I now use the Ajax tab control for navigation and that's much better for the information on my site.

    I have noticed that the images show up poorly on Firefox, and much better on IE8. They are all .jpg files and I have saved them with width 600px to fit the screen space and keep size to a minimum. Any suggestions to make these sharper on Firefox would be appreciated.

    Gerry
     
  14. What do you mean "poorly"? Firefox should be displaying the images as-is. I don't think it even has any image manipulation settings.

    IE on the other hand, does (dithering, sizing, etc.), so I would guess that your settings in IE are what is making the images appear different between browsers. If you turn off all the automatic image adjustments in IE the images should look the same in either browser.
     
  15. I am looking at www.GliderScore.com, then
    Reports / Competition Reports / Overall Results.
    The image is quite poor in Firefox, and relatively good in IE8.

    I wonder whether it is the same for you.

    I didn't find any image enhancing options in IE8 Tools other than
    dithering. Changing that didn't make any discernible difference.
     
  16. Ray

    Ray

    What is the actual size of the image. I pulled up the image both on IE and Firefox. You're right the image does look better on IE but if you go to properties on the image you will see that IE has it set to 660 X 425 pixels, while Firefox has it to 1357 X 955 scaled (600 X 425 px). This tells me that the image is actually 1357 X 955 px. You may want to use some kind of imaging program such as Photshop and resize to what you want it to be.
     
  17. You were absolutely right about the image size.
    My image panels are all 600px wide. Lots of images were much bigger.
    I have now re-sized my images (with MS Paint) to be 600 wide although I made one 1200px wide. Firefox handled that one OK.

    Now that Firefox doesn't have to do any (tricky) down-scaling to the images the results are about the same as IE8. So it seems that Firefox doesn't handle down-scaling of images very well.

    Thanks for your help with this.
     
  18. Ray

    Ray

    Personally I find this an advantage not a disadvantage. It forces you to optimize your images. Optimizing your image to its true size rather then resizing it with HTML can make your site run much faster.
     
  19. There are two schools of thought on whether the browser should do image manipulation/adjustment. Web site designers and graphic artists will typically not want the browser to alter the images at all (outside of the constraining you can do with width and height in the img tag). Browsers dithering and degrading images was pretty common in ye olden 14.4 modem dayes, but it is not necessary anymore. IE is the only major browser that still alters images by default.
     

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