Hi, I've just made a site template, written in Notepad (none other!), using HTML and CSS. It's located at www.james-greenwood.co.uk/mysite/. So far, I've only made the home page and I'm going to use that page as a basis for the rest. If you didn't guess, my favourite colour is orange. But do you think this makes the site too hard to see/read? I've implemented a random famous/funny quotes bit at the top. Refresh the page to see a different quote each time. I've also made a "monthly poll" which should appear on the right-hand side on most browsers. I've made it so you can only vote once. (It tracks each IP and checks whether they've voted before. Not perfect, but adequate for my needs.) The menu links don't work yet because I've only just made the site template. I'm not going to officialy put the site up (as in the root of my domain) until I've finished the entire site. Please have a look at the site and I really would like everyone to make as much (positive) criticisms as they like. Tell me what's not good and what needs to be there that isn't. Thanks a lot, James

hi J lad, had a look at your site, the orange colour works quite well, not sure on the darker shade of orange at heading, but yes not bad Links... youve used a hover effect in the CSS to display a yellow background to text, can i suggest using my approch to this and display the whole table cell that color with a border around it. e.g www.nolimits.co.nr Your layout is great with links on left, content in center an poll right, makes the page look neat nice font, easy to read and looks professional can i suggest making the middle table (content) an iframe. just means that things load a little quicker as its only the content gotta be loaded, not the rest of page erm, the heading say 'James Greenwood' in plain text. how about a nice snifty graphic, make it look more professional GOOD JOB MAN, need any help with anything just giz a shout ;) Sign Me Guestbook! jaymc.co.nr

1 minor thing, on your center table (content) their is no border at the bottom, maybe you should include a border, would look better... Sign Me Guestbook! jaymc.co.nr

About computing.net, you say "which are one of the biggest ..." Should be "which is" I found your 'explanation' of your email address confusing and not very plain. Just listing it 'computing.net@arnett.nu' is much more straightfoward IMO. Nothing wrong with the menu rollovers suggested by Jamie, but I liked yours fine also. Overall the page looks nice. Not everyone is not going to like everything. Some will think that the orange is terrible. Who cares.

well i think the page is pretty sweet, but now for the good part. why would someone make a website w/o using programs? does it make them feel more manly? if you want to use a good free program, i suggest AceHTML. spending more time making a website doesnt make you cooler, its just the opposite, get one of these programs, they make your web-making a lot easier. FBI_Agent

Your design seems extremely similar to mine :) I also write my own html, but with gedit on linux, it has syntax highlighting (makes it much easier to spot simple mistakes). I like your approach, and your orange background. However, I have some suggestions: 1. Put your css in a seperate file, to save bandwidth. When a visitor looks at seperate pages on your website the css file will be in the cache instead of having to load it every time with the page. Also, you can make site wide changes by editing one file. btw: if you don't want to use this method, css info is supposed to be in the head tag 2. Write valid code, check out the w3c html validator 3. Don't use the iframe suggestion somebody else mentioned. I have a page on my "promotion guide" that explains why they are a bad idea. 4. When developing your site keep in mind that content is more important than style. These are just some suggestions, you don't have to follow them :)

Thanks for all those positive comments, Jamie: I chose orange simply because it's my favourite colour (as I said before) and the way I chose the colour scheme by using a "colour schemer" online. I basically put in #FFA500 (or whatever orange is...) and then chose from the colours it gave me. The reason I chose to do a hover effect which changes the background colour to yellow is because I wanted to keep it so that the links are underlined and blue -- as people expect them to be on the Web. I have made CSS menus before which make the whole "cell" background change colour. For example, see this page. If you have noticed, I haven't used any pictures except the results for the monthly poll. And anyway, this file -- red.gif -- is only a 1x1 pixel image and so shouldn't take long to load. ;) I might make a graphic for the "James Greenwood" title but what I am aiming for is speed of loading and decent content. The reason there is no border at the bottom of the content <div> is because I instead put a paragraph, or footer, at the bottom containing copyright information. I am having a problem; I can't actually put a margin at the bottom of that <div>; it just doesn't seem to work. Don: Yes, I will change the comment about Computing.Net. :) And I've re-read my page and the e-mail part is, as you said, (ultra-)confusing. I just don't won't people spamming me, though. So, I thought of having a contact form which sends me the e-mail directly through a PHP script using the mail() command. However, most people like to compose e-mails in their own e-mail client and so I decided to include my e-mail address too. I think the best solution is probably just to include a link to a page which only has my e-mail address on it but it's still written in the "james at..." way. This way, people will probably be able to interpret it. If not, they can use the e-mail form. Yes, that's exactly what I thought about the orange. It's a personal site and so I can have personal preferences and statements. FBI Agent: The reason people make pages without using applications, such as Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage, is because it gives them complete control over the look, functionality and every other aspect of the site. I've tried using many different programs to write HTML. I don't like WYSIWYG editors because they output crap (or most of them do). I also know HTML and CSS pretty well, so the best option is to type it "manually" in Notepad -- the simplest text editor. Although some argue this takes more time, it gives me satisfaction that my pages are near-perfect and I can write pages that validate to [X]HTML and CSS specs. I don't think it makes me "cooler", I just think it's a more effective method. Anyway, that's just my opinion and I don't know how many others share it. b0red: OMG! I didn't know you were a member of Computing.Net! Your site is the one I visited and the one that gave me the inspiration to write a similar layout. I'm sorry that I've basically copied your design 1:1 but I thought it was really good. Yes, I might get a slightly-more-complex text editor that has syntax highlighting; it's definitely a useful feature. 1. I always put my CSS in a seperate file if I can. The only reason I didn't is because I had only made one page and therefore there are no others pages which need the same CSS code yet. ;) Yes, I didn't notice that I hadn't put the <style> bit in the <head>. How stupid of me. I usually open up an XHTML 1.0 Strict template I have built but this time I decided to type it from scratch. lol 2. Yes, I'm going to make all of my pages validate to the W3C specs, thanks for reminding me. And I'm also going to have those lovely slim W3C compliant pictures for XHTML and CSS that I saw somewhere on the Web... 3. I won't use the <iframe> suggestion from Jamie simply because I don't like using anything in HTML with the word "frame" in it. lol I dislike frames because of many reasons, which is why I prefer lovely CSS layouts. By the way, I've read your entire site and I think your content is amazing. :-D I agreed with every point you make on your site... keep up the good work! 4. Yes, this is what I try to keep in mind. However, a lot of the time I can't think of what to write and so I produce useless pages similar to some of the ones on geocities.com or Tripod. This site is definitely going to have some good content, most of which is concentrated on computers, the Internet and programming. Once again, thank you everyone for making all of those comments. I really appreciate it. :) Once I've finished the site, I'll post in the WebDev forum again with a subject that is something like "My Site is Finished!" Please make any further criticisms about the page/template I have so far. By the way, I have corrected many errors and I am going to upload an updated version soon. Thanks a lot, James P.S. Sorry for the HUGE post, it's probably the biggest one I've ever written. lol