Yes, in case you didn't notice, the front page is a bit more colourful! I always had a lurking suspicion that the blue colour was a bit dull. Will be changing the rest of the website to match the main page. I've also ran the main page through the validator at w3.org and I've put down the number of errors from over 150 to just 25 now.. most of it was trivial stuff like not adding alt tags to web graphics, even though it's not linking to anything.
Posting job advertisments in forum is taking 5 or more seconds each for me. I'm guessing it's due to so many people subscribing to that section. The forum has to immediately email the info to all those subscribers.. >.<
Ok, some more news for those who find Sumea website development updates remotely interesting...
That other unamed project is on hold, and I'm working on converting all the web pages here on Sumea fully into CSS. I actually have most of my previous website development plans [url="http://www.sumea.com.au/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2021"]mentioned here[/url] completed, so I'll be embarking on the next project..
At the moment, the site is a html/css hybrid, with CSS only handling simple things like font types, colours, and links. There are tonnes of table data, tables within tables, and more and tags than you can shake a stick at. This was the proper way of doing pages before CSS came about. Now that CSS is getting more support and compliance from web browsers, it's a good time to ditch the old way of doing web pages and adopt the new streamlined one.
The new way is to seperate out the content and use an external style sheets for layout, font, colour, graphics info etc. It'll mean a heck of a lot less table tags, and all the pages will be really raw with mostly content (text). All the layout/display info is in the style sheet, and since they get cached, there's a lot less to retrieve when you're visiting a new page. So yeh, pages will load much faster! [8D]
The fun thing with external style sheets is that you can have as many as you like, and if you build the pages so, you can make it so visitors could choose different 'skins' on how your site looks. Heck, if I ever feel the urge to redesign the site, I don't have to even touch the pages!
I've got a cable modem and even I get a bit impatient watching each graphic load, so I'll be designing an extremely simple but elegant dialup-modem-friendly skin for Sumea - so pages will be even more faster! Making a new dialup-modem friendly skin was the main motivator for embarking on this project. I don't know how you dialup mode users manage [?].
I'm half way through doing the main page at the moment (I'm learning and refining as I go), and I'm amazed how much less scripting is required... however, Mozilla/Firefox and IE have different ideas on many things like space and margin sizes, and certain things work fine on one browser and flat out break on the other, so it's been a headache trying to make it work fine on both. Haven't tried testing it on Opera, but I guarentee there's going to be problems there too (although only 1% of you are using it on this site).
Haha, very nice of you Souri, including all the browsers and stuff! One reason I will never be a designer is when I made my little sites I made sure it worked on IE and bugger the rest of the guys out there!! haha, but I guess thats why your a webmaster dude, and I'm clearly not!! I also just upgraded to win XP and thought the site was loading a helluvalot fast and thought wooohee go winxp! but now I see it was you tireless efforts to help poor modem users such as myself! Thank you!
http://www.sumea.com.au/1sumea.html
I've tested it on IE6 and FireFox 1 beta release and it works fine (not mentioning the hours and hours of head scratching, and getting things working right on both browsers). I'm sure this is gonna break on Opera, Konquerer, Safari, IE <5.5 including Mac, Netscape <4 etc..
(Ok, a lot of the positioning is messed up slightly in Opera, but it's still usable. Looking at my logs, 0.1% of the visitors here use that browser, so it's no big deal)..
Let me know if any of you find something wrong... post screenies etc
(I know the page doesn't look exciting, but you have to check out the page source to see how leaner and nicer it is)
Just some closure on this topic. I've finally figured out why the site looked like ass on Opera. Basically, you have to set body{margin:0;padding:0;} in CSS. IE and Firefox did that as default, but it seems Opera just gives you padding anyway if you don't set it to anything. [?]
Apart from Opera still not being able to do transparent iFrame backgrounds, the site looks the same in IE, Firefox, and Opera. Hopefully that means it'll be fine on other browsers too.
yeah i did, lookin spiffy souri :D