Personal site... PLEASE REVIEW!

PLEASE REVIEW MY SITE!!!
I'm a newbie...this is my first website. I used Adobe GoLive and Adobe Photoshop to put it up. Some people say the design of it sucks, so any and ALL recommendations will be duly noted and acted upon. I take it that you all are experienced veterans, so help a beginner.

http://skacrusader07.tripod.com

First, everything is jammed onto the left half of a full screen on 1028x768. It doesn't even look right on 800x600. You need to resize your content so that it is centered and uses the full screen.

Next, the dark font you use for your tab labels is nearly impossible to read against the black background. True, it highlights on mouseover, but it needs to be readable all the time. Use a different color.

The text on the file background looks tacky when it goes off the bottom edge. Try making a textbox in that background so that all the text remains within the file folder background.
If you can, move the file folder down a bit, so the tabs are not behind the text of the ad on the top, and try to put the labels more in the actual tabs.

There are a few broken picture links in the "High Sierras" page.

For the other pages which don't have pictures yet, say "Pictures will be posted shortly" or something, so people know there will be more than that one sentence of content.

After looking at the site more, I think you need a different color palette. The black and red just doesn't look very good.

Use the validator at http://validator.w3.org/ to check your code.

Check out http://goodpractices.com/ , read the Top 10 resources links, and continue working on it. Your first site is always tough.

I'm using IE 6.0....

on my browser, the tabs are hidden behind the tan box, I can't see the labels at all - the active label shows ok but the text is down in the darker tan area - there is no mouseover highlight for me

same as karsh noticed, your text when long goes down into the black - red on black is absolutely impossible to read =/

on 1280x1024 that backbround image that you're using behind the text repeats... so on my screen (not even fullscreen) you have two

you should only have one, and centered

if you're attempting to keep it self-contained

you also have no doctype, once you have it cleaned up you should add one =)

In Opera (the latest one) the tabe labels are visible but they're not properly placed over the tabs, and they stretch longer than the tabs. They're also dark grey and are mostly against the black - so invisible ... other than that, same problems as IE

also, if I can make a suggestion, display your email as email AT blah DOT blah - so that robots can't steal it just by parsing your page

In Mozilla 1.4 the tripod advertisements are overwriting your tabs

its a fantastic start and i love the idea, the tab'd menu's and the text area for display, just needs some refinement =)

skacrusader07,

Please do take the time to read the Welcome message at the top of this forum - we request that the thread title on the Review board is your site's URL. Thanks.

- drgroove

First of all, I'm very sorry about not putting my site as the subject or whatnot. I'll be sure and do that in the future. Thanks to all for the suggestions.
My problem was that I was making my site for my computer, so it looks perfect to me. I realize, however, all of the problems you state.
My first question: what is a doctype and how do I use it?
Also, keep in mind that I have no idea what Opera or Mozilla are, although I've heard of both.
As for the folder problem, I'm going to change it from a background pic to an image with everything premade, although this makes adjustments difficult. Are there any other suggestions as to how I might fix this, or what the new color scheme should be?

Thanks a lot!

a doctype is the statement at the very beginning of your file that tells the browser how to treat your document

http://www.alistapart.com/stories/doctype/

http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/doctype.html

for more information

Opera and Mozilla are browser software packages, much like Internet Explorer is. Theres also Mozilla Firebird, Safari, Konquerer and who knows how many else Plus most of those are also available for Macintosh and Linux pc's and will view the page differently in each; if care is not taken. You can avoid most problems through the use of valid html and valid css by using this site to validate it:

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

but even with totally valid code you can still have discrepancies, which is why its so important to test on all the popular browsers, whenever possible.

Browsercam is giving away free trials at the moment, I'd highly suggest you use that to see what others are seeing, I've been using it and its been very enlightening (and frustrating)

With the layout you have, css would be a very valid and good way to implement it; however you'll find most of your coding is done in freehand then (although there may be a decent WYSISWYG CSS editor out there, I'm not sure). CSS stands for cascading style sheet and is meant to be used for layout and color - anything structural. Many, many people are moving their sites to CSS these days; there are some great forums that totally specialize in this and have helped me immsensely here:

http://www.csscreator.com/css-forum/

however, the folks here are fantastic and very helpful and knowledgable; so you can just post your css/html questions in the appropriate forum here at devshed

If you want to go to my site, to my bookmarks page:

http://www.lisa-jill.com/basic/bookmarks.php, near the bottom are all of my CSS related bookmarks; this should be more than enough to get you started and keep you busy for years

I don't have any problem with your color scheme; you can use a tool like this:

http://www.imagitek.com/bcs.html

to see what looks good quickly and easily. Try to remember; dark text on light backgrounds or the reverse - light text on dark backgrounds. Red is really a dark color so you have red on black = dark on dark etc, there are a few exceptions out there but its a good rule of thumb to start with

i can't think of anything else at the moment and thats more than enough to keep ya thinkin

Okay to give you an idea of what the site looks like in Mozilla have a look at the attachment to this post.

No problem, don't sweat it.

Mozilla and Opera are web browsers, both with their own dedicated following.

I'm personally a huge fan of the Mozilla browser, particularly Mozilla "Firebird". Go ahead and download it - its free for you to use, and the source code is open as well, so if you get to the point where you'd like to customize it, you can. I'd go into the whole bit about Mozilla being W3C compliant, but I'm sure their website does a much better job of explaining all of that, so I'll skip it.

Well thanks, everybody. This has been a very enlightening and frustrating experience. I am just learning about web design, so I really am thankful for all the help and definitions and everything. I will fix my site some more, so I ask that you all PLEASE periodically check it and see how I'm doing and make suggestions from there on.
THANKS SO MUCH!

it'd probably be a safer bet if you made your changes and got it to where you want it then ask for another review... atleast for me, i won't check it everyday, just don't have the time...

good luck with it!

Took a look at you site and just have a couple of things to say. These have nothing to do with the content, or really anything about layout, but more with just the simple design aspect of the site. There are a couple of rules when you work with web pages. The first is, black backgrounds. There are a lot of sites with black backgrounds, but it is generally related to warez sites, hacking sites, mostly illegal sites. I suggest changing it to another color. Try and look around the net and see what sites with the same sort of content use as a background color. The other thing is the color of your text. You want your site to be legable by our visitors and red on black when the font is so thin is not the best choice. I suggest a white on black, or a brighter color. Try changing the font size to a larger set, or once you change your background color, you can use red or (my suggestion) black.

Hope that helps.

Once again, just my personal preference and ideas.