New look baby, yeah!

[Bradster]

Yay! He added "selected" in the tags!Rejoice!! I can finally rest at ease now...Lookin' good, Andy.

[AndyThomas]

Heh, we aim to please!  Now, I'm having a curious problem with the thin bounding columns where the navigation and ads go.  When I re-jigged the site the first time a couple of week back I had that grey boundary around it.  That's gone, but some of the table structure for it remains.  I think I'm going to answer my own question, but - if you define a width for a cell but have no content in it to fix it to that width, will another cell in the same column adopt the maximum width available to it if you don't define its width again?To explain.  There's a row which sets blank cells for the various columns used in the main content table.  They all have widths attached, and the ones that span multiple rows seem to enforce those widths.  However, if I then don't re-specify widths for the cells which do include content only the right hand side column seems to obey the width set by the blank cell.What I'm guessing is that this is why progs like Dreamweaver include 1 pixel spacing gifs as placeholders - and why I've avoided making things quite so complicated for myself in the past!  The nested tables may not be helping any, granted.On the plus side, it's easily enough fixed and I've figured out why it needs the horizontal scroll bar and can fix that tonight if I get a chance.  I suppose it's just "one of those things".  The only reason it's working at the moment is that a cascading style sheet is imposing a width on the cell of the nested table I'm using to display navigation/ad options.  So the issue hadn't been so apparent...  I'll have to do some more reading round on this I think, but if anyone has any comments please feel free to make them.  

[AndyThomas]

Got it sorted on all fronts now so I'll be able to fix it on the next update. I'm going to scrub the CSS width definition, put in spacer gifs for the rows which previously had blank cells and make the nav/ad tables 100% of available width, and set left/right margins to 0. All of which should get it looking the way I want it to. BTW, d'you like the buttons? I half figured out layers and opacity 'n' stuff last night, could be fun...

[Bradster]

Quote Quote: from AndyThomas on 12:51 pm on Mar. 19, 2002BTW, d'you like the buttons?They look good, but a little out of place. Everything else on the page is squared off with hard, sharp edges, but those buttons are perfectly round. Do you see what I mean? I think it'd still work fine with the "shiny" buttons as rectangles, though.Are you making those in Photoshop? It's ironic you'd bring this up because I too have been practicing making "Aqua" buttons. By default, the Mac OS X buttons look shiny and translucent like that:Well, here are a couple I just made, first shaped like your original and then squared off:If you're interested, I can send you a tutorial for making that style of button.

[AndyThomas]

Yes, I know what you mean - it's a bit inevitable because they're the first things I've done with Paint Shop Pro 7 (the button functionality is more or less built into the app). I think they do draw attention because they're a bit different, but at the same time I completely take your point. What I may well do is round off some of the pre-existing graphics (although not the logo, I quite like that basic because it reflects the original) so that the contrast isn't quite so stark. If I were using Dreamweaver I'm sure the site could be generally curvier quite easily, but as it is it's far simpler for me to keep it rectangular. Anyone else have any comments? I can easily make rectangular buttons, and I'll probably replace the top right navigation text with buttons as well...

[AndyThomas]

Heh. A colleague just came in (she does our company's web site) and on showing her my new buttons of which I'm so proud (!) her first comment was:"Aren't those a bit curvy for your site?"Looks like I'm off to find some nice rectangular buttons, then