Vacant

The internet is a great source of information and entertainment brought into our homes within the last few years. It plays in important role to many individuals and businesses, but how many people actually know what/not to do on the Internet? It isnt something I'm particularly hung up on or afraid of since im certain that nothing I do regarding the internet is illegal, but it is true that an increasing number of people are getting arrested for Internet crime. Not to have a debate about what is right or wrong here, but surely the rules are written down somewhere?The thought of being able to go to court for simply something you type on a keyboard is something that most people, i think, don't consider that much.Just a thought!Vacant.

Hey,Your site's pretty good! The only thing I would say is that you should put alt text on an image containing text (add it into te <img> tag). The orange and blue theme's a bit unconventional, but I like it! Good uck with your project...- Vacant.

Don't use Times New Roman! That is all. If I had my way Times New Roman would be banned from the internet Because its the default text on most browsers I tend to get the impression that the text just hasnt been formatted properly. Mayvbe it's just me... But anyway Georgia is a lot nicer.That slightly biased insight was bought to you by Vacant

How do you expect a review when you havent posted the link to it?

Wow! Thats actually really cool! I'm liking the images there, and mostly everything fits in well and goes together which is always good. Again, I don't like the hit counter, mainly because it flashes. I'd try a text only one at the bottom somewhere, in like blue or something.I've just noticed that some of the lines are broken up, you have about a 25px gap at the right hand edge of the design, so that the grey bar does not scroll right across.The text is a little small in some places as well, as I'm using 1280x1024 resolution...Get these sorted, and that design will be perfect!Hope this helps! Great work!- Vacant

Nice! I'm liking the colour shades. As mentioned before, it takes a while to load and is rather image heavy. I guess you could optimise that by stretching/reusing the images throughout the design to cut loading time. The only thing I would say is that I don't care for the font too much. It seems to 'ordinary', you need a pixel font or something. That would make it look a lot cooler, IMO. The glowing/shadow effect makes it quite hard to read, also.Apart from that, nice design, and good work!- Vacant.

Ok, now before I start i realise I do not know much about forums or a free hosting company. However, it has come to my attention that the forums don't run that quickly compared to other sites. This is especially noticable on 56k connections, and gets quite frustrating when you're trying to post. Looking at your source code, I can see there are approximately 2100 lines of code per page. I know this is server-side generated, but 1360 of those lines are an internal css <style> tag that is present in every document.Why not, then, just have this as a 1 line link to an external file, meaning that we dont have to load the CSS up every time we view a page? Surely this would speed up the forums for people on slow connections.Just a thought!- Vacant.

Mate, at the same time as you do your SATS, Im doing GCSEs. SATS in the great scheme of things, although it is probably irresponsible to say this, don't actually matter that much in that it won't go on your CV or anything, you dont need them to get into college. Not that i'm saying you shouldnt try, before you get any ideas! They're not worth stressing too much over, remember that. They're more a measure of how good the school is! And also, know that theres someone who's stressing more about exams than you at the moment

I have seen many posts about this. The conclusion to most of them is that Firefox rocks, but it will never acheive a decent share of the market whilst microsoft is still in contol of the OS world... its insane that probably the worst browser of them all is the most common, because people can;t be bothered to change! Go firefox, i say. - Vacant.

Ok, so what i think you mean is a banner that changes the message randomly to 1 of several presets. If i were you I'd use javascript, check out http://www.javascriptsource.com/ or http://www.dynamicdrive.com/ for some premade scripts! Hope that helps! Vacant.

Nice coding there... No I can't read croatian either...Only thing I would say, presentation-wise, is perhaps try using rounded corners instead of cut off ones. I have no idea whether this would improve the design, but it might make for a less 'jagged' edge.Oh yeah, and in the coding theres a lot of redundant tags (ones that don't do anything). It doesn't matter that much I guess, but you may want to change it for the sake of clean coding (htmltidy ).Apart from that, nice work! Keep it up.I should learn PHP sometime...

scrollbar colours are something IE made up, so they won't validate either. If you care about that sort of thing. I guess users with firefox will just see the normal ones, so its not that bad really.- Vacant.

Yup. .theDiv {padding-left:2px;padding-right:2px;padding-top:2px;padding-bottom:2px;} If you want to apply padding to everything, use... .theDiv {padding:2px;} Spacing (as in, distance from surrounding divs or whatnot) is as follows.... .theDiv {margin-left:2px;margin-right:2px;margin-top:2px;margin-bottom:2px;} Or for all properties in one declaration... .theDiv {margin:2px;} Of course you should be using ems, but thats jut an example

Good idea, but Ive seen many of these forums that don't work out - everyone seeks information but there are not the required amount of people to give it out andsatisfy the demand. In my experience, getting people to sign up to a forum with no reward other than the satisfaction of helping someone is very hard. Some sites offer rewards, but then the community seems "forced" as people have to post. That aside, if this thing gets off the ground, it'll be good! My advice would be to market your site accurately, and get a dedicated team of techno-people before you start.- Vacant

Have you noticed how the number of adverts etc. on each messenger version keep going up on each version? I think this contributes to the lag, slow running etc. Personally I use trillian, as adverts really annoy me. I mean, now there even ads in the convo windows, as well as, "buy a webcam", the contact list adverts, MSN today has turned in to one massive advert, and dont even get me started on emoticon and winks packs.Still, Microsoft are still losing money in this area (and I can see why)....- Vacant

Just to back up what carsten said... No, you cant avoid people saving your pages. You could password-protect things so that only certain people have access, tats all I can think of but it doesn't really have the same effect, does it?- Vacant.

Hey, theres these guys i've heard of that you may be familiar with, if its hosting you want. It's pretty good in my experience, and they do paid hosting ... in fact I'm amazed that you havent heard of them. Check out http://forums.xisto.com/ ... </sarcasm> :)

Nice looking page, apart from a couple of things...The images on the right hand side of the content boxes don't display - i get a broken link image. It's important that you make sure everything works so that people will understand your site :)Also, the header pic looks kind of grainy. I dont know whether it's been squashed or compressed, but it just doesn't look high-quality to me (not the design of it, don't worry - its more the "grainyness" of it).Hope that helps, and good luck with the site!- Vacant.

I have an HP branded PC. At the time it was a bargain, especially since it came with a 17" LCD flat panel... yum! Anyway, I have had no problems with it, and in contrast with most of the previous posters, yes you can upgrade and swap parts, I have sucessfully done it myself!There were a lot of "support programs" that were preinstalled... interesting "support" since I ran my PC perfectly when they were disabled...Customer service was good, they sympathetically replaced my HD even after the warranty ran out. The nice people.I havent tried a Dell PC myself and so have no point of comparison... but there you go.- Vacant.

If you just hovered over them it might be the settings doing that, not the speed of your pc - you can tweak it so that it waits for a certain period of time if you are hovering. Or perhaps it isnt! Anyway... I think a classic example of annoying-beige-popup syndrome is the one when you first install XP. It simply says: ...or something very similar. And thats it! I mean, honestly, you think I care? I guess we are kind of stuck with XP, as it is the operating system most modern software is designed for. It also has a lot of new features over 98 and 2k, if you can find them... Yes I know, Linux etc but do you think I'm that smart? Conclusion: you have to live with it, so start putting up with it - Vacant.

Your design is really cool, I wish I was good with images... I mainly do non-image designs (shameless plug: http://www.oswd.org/user/profile/id/6273/). Anyway, the only thing I would say: I use 1280x1024 resolution, and theres a gap at the bottom where the design is smaller than my browser is vertically. You should make some way to make it stretch to be 100% height, so that it would display properly in large resolutions. Also the Aqua colour looks nice... but I think it could be replaced with a stronger colour personally. Maybe its just me... without testing some I dont know Anyway this gets top marks from me, keep it up mate.

Everyone, in fact, is NOT on broadband. Places like Japan may be on 12 mb connections but over here in the UK we've only just discovered broadband... and most people don't have it here. You need to think about every user to your site. However, I think that in most cases the preload is not essential anyway...

<img src="blah.jpg" width="1px" height="1px" /> Stick this on the homepage (or whatever, the page before the one you want the preloading done on). This will load the image, but will only display 1px of it (which you can't see). Do this for every image, and in theory it'll act as a preload because it will load the image first. Its a quick fix, but it works for me.... - Vacant.

You've hit the problem I, along with just about every other web designer, are finding... CSS is split into 3 categories, cunningly entitled CSS1, CSS2 and CSS3. (CSS3 is the newest). How the browser interprets the page depends on which of these it supports. Example: Internet Explorer only supports CSS1 officially. Meaning that it has trouble with some of the more advanced stuff in CSS2. Firefox and Gecko browsers now support CSS2 and parts of CSS3 (even though css3 isnt officially out yet so I guess we shouldn't count it). Theoretically then, if you had a browser that used only basic CSS then the page would look the same? Sadly not. Text sizes, screen res and generally what the browsers settings are affect your design. opera, for example, puts an 8px white space around every page! But then Opera is the wierdest and most illogical browser I've ever seen.Conclusion: No. Even if you validate it completely it's never going to look exactly the same, especially if you use more complx css. Annoying. This is the main reason why I prefer firefox over anything else. It renders things properly!

In my opinion its up to you whether you design your site with this in mind or not. However, on the basis that every visitor has taken the time to visit your site, they are all important, regardless of disabilities. Personally I always design my websites to be viewable to this audience - without going too far. A text only version of your site may be slightly annoying, but to some people means the difference between finding and not finding the information they require.There has to be a balance between design and accessibility - I mean, if you made it completely accessible to everyone, your page would be simply the default text on the default background of your browser. Of course, you couldn't use tables as they are inaccessible. And don't change the font size, as people won't be able to see it...First rule of web design, according to me: Content. The design is always secondary to this, being relatively superficial. However, a site devoid of all presentational devices for the sake of a handful of viewers isn't right either. conclusion: make a text only version of your website as well as one with a normal design. I suggest doing this with includes, or external CSS - or some other fancy method that I am not aware of. The right balance of accessibility and design makes for contented viewers!- Vacant.