Logo suggestions

[Erik]

Yep, it is a perfect fit within 800x600 - which still is used by some 20-30% of the surfers but too many sites (like those I design ;-) neglect. Is that grey material supposed to look like metal or grey wood?

It's supposed to look like a brushed metal. It may be a little dark but I wanted to maintain contrast with the white text.

I am shooting for a site that will fit within 800x600 without horizontal scrolling. In my next iteration (probaby about 2 years out if history is any indication) I am almost certainly going to assume that most folks are semi-current!

While some of us hate it, you might want to consider a top frame or other absolute/fixed positioning of the navigation. With some tweaking, it is possible to use a fixed element without frames (based upon you have some server-side parsing of each page - e.g. written in PHP), but it is optional. You might also want to move the headline inside the navigation?

I'm not a big fan of frames and while I'd like the navigation to be "fixed" I am not willing to sacrifice the rest of my goals for that. That's one reason I have the bottom navigation menu (which needs to be updated to match the top) in case the page was scrolled.

I will probably have to do some code to keep the menu bar on the left growing with the text on the site which might get fun. . .

I pulled the headline from the navigation graphics specifically so that I can have it in straight HTML. I'll be doing some other manipulations like that to make sure that the page is search-optimized. Server side parsing is nice but beyond doing some SSI to get the scripts standardized I probably won't do too much content generation on-the-fly since it really disorients the spiders and makes your rankings plummet.

Regarding the left column is too wide - check it in 800x600 and see if the remaining space is enough for what you want to display. The site I'm currently working with has about exact the same width on its left frame, and wider than that I wouldn't go.

I did come up with the width based on what I need space for in the page area. I'm going to have to resize many of my graphics as is and I don't want them to get too small. I think you're probably right that the size is about where it needs to be.

Thanks tons for the feedback! I'm pretty green at this and I'm learning a lot as I go. . .

Erik

 

[carlsson]

I am shooting for a site that will fit within 800x600 without horizontal scrolling.

Since it is a retro site, maybe it should be a horizontal scroller (or you were not much into computer games?).

I'm not a big fan of frames and while I'd like the navigation to be "fixed" I am not willing to sacrifice the rest of my goals for that.
Server side parsing is nice but beyond doing some SSI to get the scripts standardized I probably won't do too much content generation on-the-fly since it really disorients the spiders and makes your rankings plummet.

If you like, I can provide you (and anyone else interested) with a skeleton how to make things stick without frames and still looking halfway decent.

Besides, I thought quality web results were achieved through using a few but relevant meta keywords rather than relying on crawling. A page can be "dynamic" without the contents changing too.. although most people would call that a waste of CPU power.

 

[Erik]

If you like, I can provide you (and anyone else interested) with a skeleton how to make things stick without frames and still looking halfway decent.

I'd love to see the code. I'm always looking for interesting stuff to learn from or add to my site.

Besides, I thought quality web results were achieved through using a few but relevant meta keywords rather than relying on crawling. A page can be "dynamic" without the contents changing too.. although most people would call that a waste of CPU power.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) these days is a whole new ballgame. Meta tags are useless for almost all search engines, especially the big ones like Google. Sites with the highest ranks get them from a variety of things with the most important being content, link popularity/relevancy and structure.

The spiders are all about getting content to search engines and anything that hides any aspect of the content is a bad thing.

Erik

 

[carlsson]

I'd love to see the code. I'm always looking for interesting stuff to learn from or add to my site.

I'll try to cook something together and send you. I have to check that it works before suggesting it.

In the mean time, you can check out this site which I used as my source. To create fixed elements for Mozilla and other competent browsers is rather simple, but if you want it to work for the 90% users who prefer Internet Explorer, some tweaking as described on the page is required:

http://devnull.tagsoup.com/fixed/