AbyssUnderground.co.uk Revamp

 
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AbyssUnderground
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 30, 2007 12:25 am    Post subject: AbyssUnderground.co.uk Revamp Reply with quote

Hello all,

After over 6 months dormant with no updates or changes etc I decided I am going to give AbyssUnderground another template revamp. I was inspired by a friends websites and how it used lots of graphical features, so I followed in those footsteps and came up with the new site.

Those interested can see it being developed at http://new.abyssunderground.co.uk

Of course, there will be broken links (all of them except home at the moment) so be patient. When the site is finished it will be released onto the main domain so watch out for it!
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rrinc
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 30, 2007 1:57 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Not bad, I like it.
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TRUSTAbyss
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 30, 2007 7:11 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Nice work! I'm also thinking of giving my website a makeover after learning more about dynamic web design.
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hc2995
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 30, 2007 9:46 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Check the links, i get 404'ed on each page :P
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AbyssUnderground
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 30, 2007 10:54 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

hc2995 wrote:
Check the links, i get 404'ed on each page :P


Check my post, I said they don't work yet.


Thanks for the great comments so far. 4 hours work it took to get it like that last night. I'm going to continue with it today.
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hc2995
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 30, 2007 10:57 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

-_-


I got to start reading things more :P
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rrinc
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 30, 2007 10:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

You use tables, I was hoping such a nice design would use the nice features of CSS and divs. I understand though, I've tried making complicated designs without tables and it almost never works out.
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AbyssUnderground
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 31, 2007 9:24 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

rrinc wrote:
You use tables, I was hoping such a nice design would use the nice features of CSS and divs. I understand though, I've tried making complicated designs without tables and it almost never works out.


Its a combination of both. I've not had much experience with using as much CSS as I have in this design so I'm slowly working my way there.
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AbyssUnderground
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 31, 2007 1:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Just to let you know I've started moving the content over today. I might get finished today but possibly tomorrow so keep watching!

The URL posted above has the progress on it as I change it live. Links along the top all currently work but other links do not.
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aprelium
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 31, 2007 1:55 pm    Post subject: Re: AbyssUnderground.co.uk Revamp Reply with quote

AbyssUnderground,

The new layout is more clear than the previous one. But we strongly suggest that you make the screen width not fixed as it is now (the horizontal scroll bar is very ugly).

We suggest checking http://css.maxdesign.com.au/floatutorial/ and the "Liquid 2/3 column layout" tutorials (#8 and #9) to learn how to create resizeable layout which does not have this horizontal scrollbar problem (which is caused by the fixed widthes such as width="600").

We also suggest that you avoid using fixed heights such as height="25". If someone is using a large font, the display may become unreadable. Use instead relative heights (relatively to the current font): for example height="1.5em" means that the height is 1.5 times the width of the M character in the current font. This scales well even if the visitor has his/her browser set to uses large fonts by default.
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AbyssUnderground
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 31, 2007 2:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Aprelium,

There is no horizontal scroll bar on resolutions I have tested which is 1024x768 and above.

The old AbyssUnderground templates also worked like this. I have also made the font significantly bigger in this design so people will not have to increase the size of the font's themselves.

Also even if they did increase the font size the template only becomes disfigured at the top of the page in the title area, which shouldn't be a problem as no content is there.
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AbyssUnderground
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 31, 2007 4:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

OK, I've been playing with DIV's and CSS and come up with this

http://new.abyssunderground.co.uk/index2.php :-)

All CSS and all DIV's.

Now for the content :-)
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AbyssUnderground
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 31, 2007 5:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Aprelium,

That website is so useful! Its taught me how to use DIV's and CSS in harmony in just hours and its so easy to get it HTML 4.01 compliant!

I'm now adding content to the site. Thanks so much Aprelium! This will totally change how I make websites from now on!
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rrinc
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 31, 2007 8:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

If you can get HTML compliant, then you can easily get it XHTML compliant. Its pretty easy.
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Arctic
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 01, 2007 7:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

rrinc wrote:
If you can get HTML compliant, then you can easily get it XHTML compliant. Its pretty easy.

It's only easy if you understand what the switch to XHTML means. Well-formed HTML is just as good in modern browsers today as XHTML.

Good work, AbyssUnderground. Just remember -- a navigational list is a list. Get the Firefox Web Developer extension and disable CSS with it... your website should make sense without any styling. Just a thought ;)
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AbyssUnderground
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 01, 2007 4:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Great news, the site is finished. Im just doing link checks and then it should be released!

All pages except for 1 are XHTML 1.0 compliant :-) The 1 page is problematic because it has lots of example code in it and the validator complains.

If anyone has any problem, let me know. Also old content will still be available by request. :-)

Long live AbyssUnderground!
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Arctic
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 01, 2007 4:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

AbyssUnderground,

It looks great. On some of the pages your problems are actually caused by unencoded ampersands in URLs, it can be fixed by replacing & with &. URLs must be encoded.
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AbyssUnderground
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 01, 2007 4:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Arctic wrote:
AbyssUnderground,

It looks great. On some of the pages your problems are actually caused by unencoded ampersands in URLs, it can be fixed by replacing & with &. URLs must be encoded.


There is only one page which will not validate and I can't be bothered to encode the example code just so it validates.
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aprelium
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 02, 2007 5:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

AbyssUnderground wrote:
That website is so useful! Its taught me how to use DIV's and CSS in harmony in just hours and its so easy to get it HTML 4.01 compliant!

I'm now adding content to the site. Thanks so much Aprelium! This will totally change how I make websites from now on!


You're welcome but the credits should go to the MaxDesign guys who made such a great knowledge base and tutorials about CSS.

Your new site looks nicer than the previous one and is more "readable". You did a great job with the new template. Congratulations!

By the way, who votes for a CSS/Web design section in the forum where we can exchange information about the latest design trends and answer questions about [X|D]HTML/CSS?
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AbyssUnderground
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 02, 2007 5:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

aprelium wrote:
AbyssUnderground wrote:
That website is so useful! Its taught me how to use DIV's and CSS in harmony in just hours and its so easy to get it HTML 4.01 compliant!

I'm now adding content to the site. Thanks so much Aprelium! This will totally change how I make websites from now on!


You're welcome but the credits should go to the MaxDesign guys who made such a great knowledge base and tutorials about CSS.

Your new site looks nicer than the previous one and is more "readable". You did a great job with the new template. Congratulations!

By the way, who votes for a CSS/Web design section in the forum where we can exchange information about the latest design trends and answer questions about [X|D]HTML/CSS?


Thank you. I couldn't have done it without you. You persuaded me to go for DIV's and CSS and I finally got it to XHTML1.0 standards.

I vote for a new section. We can all share our knowledge then.
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rrinc
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 03, 2007 1:04 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I would like that section too.

Also, maybe make the PHP/Perl/etc Issues forums not be only about issues so we could discuss other things about the languages in them? Or maybe make another section for non-issue language discussions and programming. (Although just the web design forum would be fine I guess)
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 04, 2007 2:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

rrinc,

Interesting suggestion. We are too for removing the word "issues" for language related sections.

We'll do the changes by monday. If you have any other suggestions or ideas about how the sections should be renamed, or what sections do you feel are missing, please let us know.
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Arctic
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 05, 2007 4:12 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

AbyssUnderground, I have just a few final suggestions (that are very general):

The semantics have been sacrificed! :( I know that this was a large leap for you, but next time you make a website another big leap would be to keep semantics in mind. I think the two biggest things that jump out at me are headings, lists, and paragraphs. Those are the three easiest things to control (semantically). Besides meaning more to those with screen readers, it also helps your search engine ranking (level one headings typically get a higher value than text in a paragraph).

Looking at your front page, I would assume (based on hierarchy, not size) that "AbyssUnderground.co.uk" would be in a <H1> tag. This is because it would be the most important heading in the document (arguably). "Welcome to AbyssUnderground.co.uk!" would be in a <H2> heading. "Scripting Languages" would be <H3> (they are under "Articles"). Tada, hierarchy! Try enabling the "Show Outline" option in the validator, you'll see what a difference it can make.

Not only would the usage of headings assist those with screen readers (and other such devices) and help your search engine ranking, but it would be easier to style. Instead of having to keep making new classes (and overusing the CLASS attribute) you could just put:

Code:
h2 {
color:blue;
font:3em Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;
}


and reuse the <H2> heading. It's better than having to keep typing in the classes, no? :P

Styling lists is a pain, but worth it. Once again, you can eliminate classes (especially when using descendant selectors, such as "ul#navigation li" to avoid having to assign classes to each list item).

Just remember to set the list-style to NONE in CSS, and then get to know floats and such. Experiment a bit! :)

I mentioned descendant selectors, but CSS features a number of selectors that aid in eliminating CLASS and ID attribute overuse. For instance, if you had the following:

Code:

<div id="box">
<ul>
<li><a href="#">link one</a></li>
<li><a href="#">link two</a></li>
<li><a href="#">link three</a></li>
</ul>
</div>


You could style it in a number of ways. Let's just pretend that you want to style the LI element.

If this was the only content on the page, you could probably just directly style the LI element:

Code:
li {
color:blue;
}


However, this is less than practical. It would make more sense to use a descendant selector:

Code:
#box li {
color:blue
}


Arr, movie time. Anyways, that's just some thoughts to get you on your way. :P
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AbyssUnderground
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 05, 2007 10:34 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks Arctic,

I'll keep these in mind next time I make changes ;-)
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jibbajabba
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 10, 2007 1:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Congratulations, i like the new layout.. it suits the site very well.
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rrinc
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 10, 2007 5:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

aprelium wrote:
rrinc,

Interesting suggestion. We are too for removing the word "issues" for language related sections.

We'll do the changes by monday. If you have any other suggestions or ideas about how the sections should be renamed, or what sections do you feel are missing, please let us know.


Aprelium, its well past Monday...where's the forum changes?
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 11, 2007 4:02 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Easy there, killer... :) I'm sure Aprelium is diligently working with the beta version right now.
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rrinc
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PostPosted: Sat Aug 11, 2007 5:03 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I know and I'm glad for it, I'd just think in the 4 or 5 days when they've visited the forums they would have made the changes already... :)

I don't know how complicated it is to change stuff like that in phpBB, I've only used other forums.
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 16, 2007 4:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

rrinc,

Sorry for the delay. Actually, we are doing a lot of work in the background to make the forum search more accessible. The new forum sections and the renaming of old ones will also take place when the search feature will be released.
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rrinc
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 17, 2007 4:12 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sounds good. :)
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