Page 2 - 2nd attempt: Serious Critique Please

Get rid of all the intros and make the start page IQWeb.htm (as said above). I can barely see the Site Map links when I highlight over them, green over grey doesn't go well; try changing the font highlight color. The homepage is long; you could possibly break up all the stories and put links to them on the left menu. Other than that, the site doesn't look too bad.

Oh, one more thing: give your site a name. "Untitled Document", while original, doesn't fit with your content

Really . . . I appreciate your time and your suggestions . . .

I can see your poing on all of the suggestions you've made and working on making the changes as quickly as possible.
But, I had no idea that the title was "untitled" hmmmmmm back to the drawing board, again. This "learning" business is rather "unending." Apparently, I can't get-away with any short-cuts.

btw was the content easy to understand and did it make any sense?
Thanks for your help . . .
RebeccaJ
with even more . . .
FAITH IN HUMANITY
(lol even tags in here . . . what a world we live in)

I don't know if I can control the sponsor link as it is added by the web host but I'm checking into it or will make alternate arrangements. Originally, Clan Admin had pointed out that the entire site had by-passed the search meta tags and was only set-up for searching for the webhost. If it wasn't for Clan Admin's knowledge, response, and support, I would have gone on oblivious to my errors.

But you're totally right and you have a good eye - you must have a grounded background in layout and design. The emphasis is not on the website but the pop-up's/sponsors. (I think I was psychologically just trying to ignore them.)

PS
I can't tell you how much I appreciate your words of encouragement . . .

Rebecca

...

On another subject, this idea has clarified the web design process for me, hope it may be helpful to you, if you don't have it already.

http://www.jjg.net/elements/
checkout the Simple planes link and the Original diagram link.

have you considered using templates? yeah this does depend on your tools and what technology your webserver supports.

Thanks again, keep rockin'

Ok . . . getting there - slowly thanks for the advice. I'm still having trouble with the font highlight color as I want to leave the agua color but have the grey black as it is for all the other links. Unfortunately, haven't managed it . . . yet. I'll tackle the length of the homepage after I get that and all the links working properly. Then a nicer masthead on the homepage . . .

thanks to everyone for all the help
RebeccaJ
PS
Then I have to work on getting it onto search engines but I did a Google search and the DevShed Forems page came up with it - go figure

Honestly, your life will be made simpler by using linked style sheet instead of an embedded one.

Dump all your styes into an external file that ends with .css then link it from all your pages.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/insulin_screen.css" media="screen" />

This will save you so much time in the long run I promise. for example, if you change your mind on color of size of a styled item, theres just one place to update. This also helps the site look consistent.

Also you should name your styles with more discriptive names.

I see that on some pages you do this
<p class="style12"><h2>header</h2></p>

you could just redeclare <h2> with a custom style eg:
h2 { font-size: 16px; color: #fff; }

after cleaning it up:
<h2>header</h2>

(actually I don't know what your class does exactly, but you get what I mean right?)

if its the headline of a page, just use <h1> instead of smaller values. So that all headlines on your site is <h1>. Its good for SE crawlers and robots as well.

In case a headline needs to be larger than what is already specified? then just apply an inline style.
<h1 style="font-size: 400%">Very large header</h1>

Lastly, don't forget to doctype your pages, heres some helpful info on that.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/doctype/

Thanks Jamie,

Got rid of the flash

Hi Bambam,

Ok, what you said was wonderful and so helpful, and made sooo much sense, however . . . it went right over my head!

But I think I see where you're getting at so I'll get to work . . . it makes so much sense to have all the styles the same for every page and that is exactly what I would have wanted to do - if I had known how. (I only learned what css ment, last week! Making colums with out ms word two weeks ago!)

So thank you and thank you for the codeing . . . I'm working on it now . . .

Rebecca J
FAITH IN HUMANITY
and thanks to all the wonder people to like to help others

I tried putting in the doc type on the index page but when I did that some of the links on the IQWeb.htm linked back to the index page. The IQWeb.htm was originally a template page from Dreamweaver but now I'm doing all the changes in BB Edit and sometimes the changes stay but some, especially to do with font colors keep reverting back to the original . . .

any ideas plus I cannot turn off the grey background when the site links are rolled over . . . does this have to do with Java scripting?

Hi RebeccaJ, which doctype did you use? perhaps if you put up your test file, we could check it?

www.yourdomain.com/testFile.htm
or just post code here?

on the splash page there is a stray </right>-->

excellent

When I tried this doc tag it kept linking the IQWeb.html page back to the index.htm. Unfortunately I used Dreamweaver for the base of IQWeb.html and then built on it with just html coding . . . the Java Script it totally new to me and it's like trying to read Clingon or Greek. I'm still reading up on the css sheets so beginning to get an understanding but still not quiet coherent.

The big questions is: do I put the doctype at the beginning of each page and if so will that mess-up all the existing formatting?

Beginning to think that it might as well be easier to leave well enough alone but . . . some things work in Opera that don't work in Safari or Explorer and visa versa. I think maybe I'm missing the whole point to web design . . . and I hate to keep bothering people for help all the time. Arrgh . . don't know what you mean by a "splash" page . . .

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta name="Guardian's of Humanity" content="insulinquestions@hotmail.com">
<meta name="description" content="The Insulin Questions web site alerts insulin users to the dangers of genetically engineered insulin and provides information on the availability and safety of beef and pork insulin. Symptoms of the deadly Humalog or Humulin insulins, alerts to several life threatening syndromes: dead-in-bed, . . .

Google don't do Doctypes at all, neither does Yahoo! nor Amazon (April 25) Amazon has 2 <HTML> start tags on their homepage , Microsoft.com? dont have, Adobe.com? nope, Apple.com has half a doctype.

Macromedia uses a full standards doctype, Devshed uses full doctype ...

For me, as a little tiny independent web deveopler, I'll stick to the rules set by w3. Just want something dependable. Or just one less item on my things-that-could-go-wrong list... and to improve my own web dev skills

I can't say if its the doctype that will make your page work across all the browsers you mentioned? But imho following standards is the clearer path to take. One note is that all browsers claim they are super standards complaint, but NONE OF THEM REALLY ARE!! w3 dont make browsers, just recommendations. So during development its still best to test test and test. Find workarounds etc.

Yip you are right, the doctype should appear above the <html> tag, it should be the first thing on your HTML page.

A Splash page is like an intro page, like your insulin question home page.

Below is the language Encoding tag for an English page,
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

You should add it too. Just put this as the first of all your meta tags, easypeesy.

But before you do all these little changes on your whole site ... I'm thinking its probably not the doctype that your page displays differently on diff browsers. This page does not have a closing </table> tag for example.

IMHO It may be better to spend some time thinking about a site-wide navigation scheme (global navigation). To make it easier for the web site visitor to reach all sections of your site. I've attached a possible approch, hope you find it useful.

Lastly, take it easy and one step at a time!!

------ Added ---------------------------------
The CSS I provided in the sample was embedded in the page. For actual deployment, styles that are used on more than one page should be placed in an external style sheet, your pages should link to that style instead.

PS: glad you got rid of the ads

Just beginning to grasp a vague understanding of what you've been trying to get across to me . . . can't tell you how much I appreciate all that you've done.

Thank you bambam . . . I think the picture it becoming clearer.

Rebecca J
Faith In Humanity

The time you have spent on this is so greatly appreciated . . . best wishes for you and yours.

Seems to be something new around every corner and this learning process just keeps going on and on.

I've been spending some time reading the tutorials on robot.txt but I'm still unsure if it's necessary in the website and if it is necessary, what should be allowed and not be allowed to be searched by the robot in a website.

Any words of wisdom?

Rebecca J
Faith in Humanity

PS
Thanks for all the help . . .