Hi all,

Here's a site I've been working on virtually every weekend since February, its for Rock Rhyme & Reason Fest, a free Christian music festival in Manchester, UK.

Heres the URL: http://rockrhymereason.org.uk.dnnmax.com. When the site is ready to go live, this will be switched over to http://www.rockrhymereason.org.uk/ (which currently points to the old site).

This is only my second ever website (DNN or other) and was the result of much study, hard work and prayer. This site has been tested in IE6/7 and firefox 2. This covers 95% of all browsers so to be honest, Im happy with that!.

Known Issues:

1. When hovering over a sIFR replaced heading, the mouse wheel scroll doesnt work in IE. This is documented here: http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic...p?id=21542

2. The worldpay donate button on "Get Involved" page doesnt work as it requires a form tag. I havent figured that out yet!

Its hosted with PowerDNN and yes, they live up to the hype. Their servers are really fast!

Any comments or suggestions would be very much appreciated.
Thanks!

AndyB

Out of all the people who saw this site, not one told me the central rotating picture was showing up as an "X"

The javascript for the rotating picture was still pointing to the images on my localhost version, so it worked fine on my PC, just not everyone elses!!

Anyway its fixed now.

Hi Andy,

It looks really good, the use of sIFR along with the background styling works really well!

I noticed that at 800x600 some of the content is cut off, but I'm not sure how much of an issue that will be for your viewers. - 800x600 is becoming phased out as larger monitors are becoming more popular.

In opera sIFR doesn't work, but the text still looks good.

You may now want to look at a print.css for the pages, if you try to print out the artists page: http://rockrhymereason.org.uk.dnnma...fault.aspx

you get a blank page and then some text, you could clean this up with a print.css file and just display the main text, remove the menu etc.


That was the only element I found, you have implemented everything I would recommend such as text re-sizing, header tags etc.

Good work!

Thanks Lee for the feedback,

I have actually watched about 75% of the tutorials on this site and have found them invaluable as a learning experience for making a dotnetnuke site. I doubt I would have gotten into this framework were it not for your videos/articles. So thanks for that!

I made a conscious decision for the site to require a minimum of 1024x768 as 800x600 is really a minority now. See: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/b...isplay.asp
The 14% with 800x600 would be a problem if I were designing an ecommerce site (ignoring 14% of customers would be foolish), but for this I thought it would be ok.

I think the sIFR / Opera thing is because I'm using sIFR 3, which requires flash-js to communicate. Apparently this doesnt work in Opera. I might revert to sIFR 2 though as the IE scroll bug I mentioned in my first post is really annoying.

As for browsers I've only actually tested on IE6/7 and FF. Again, this covers an astonishing 95%+ of browsers, see http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/b...stats.asp. Perhaps I will in future create an IE5 stylesheet though, even just for the learning experience. Im actually using the code-behind technique we discussed before to swap CSS files for the skin/container depending on browser. It works pretty well!

I will also take your advise on print.css. Im sure someone will want to print the map and be horrified by the layout they see! ... That text resizing is also a bit dodgy, I might clean that up.

Yes I agree 800x600 is becoming a minority, so if it was a conscious decision, fair enough, I did the same for DNN creative after viewing the stats on how many users have 800 x 600. - this is what I would always recommend when designing a site, is to view the current stats of the site for users that have a particular resolution.

on DNN Creative 800x600 is 1.03%, the most common is 1280x1024 with 24.82%

1024x768 is 24.10%

I wouldn't worry too much about an IE5 stylesheet unless the stats in your website show a lot of users are using the browser, if there are a few, you could make some small tweaks to allow IE5 to display without worrying too much about how it looks.

Cheers,

Wow 1% for 800x600, that low? I'm glad Im learning web design now, not 5 years ago! ...

Can you recommend anything for analysing stats? I don't expect a lot of traffic for this site but would be interested in collecting some data.

Cheers

yes very low, but remember DNN Creatives main audience is users who have a good grasp on computers and will have a relatively new system. - Other sites may have over the 14% average.

I use Google analytics.

Very nice! That site is so clean, I could eat off it! One thing I noticed was the photos link on the top of the video page is broke.

Mike

Thanks for that, I never would have found it!

Some users have also seen some wierd sIFR errors, which occur if you have an older version of flash. Updating flash resolves it. Heres an example:



Ok, well I think this site is ready to go live. I've certainly learned a lot from doing this and if I were starting again (or doing another site), I think Id take on board the following advice I've heard (from various parties).

- Make the banner smaller as it eats too much vertical space
- Reduce the amount of padding around the white rectangles
- Try to get more images in the right column with links around the site by reducing the vertical space they take up
- Generally try to reduce the amount of space it takes up in the vertical, so you see more on the homepage on first visit.

I have a whopping widescreen monitor so it all fits nicely on that. Most people tend to have 1024x768 or 1280x1024

Other than that, Im pleased with it. Thanks everyone and thanks to Lee for his great tutorials