beginners guide

**boutte** · 01:12 AM

http://boutte.awardspace.com
This is my first attempt at CSS. Actually it's the first site I've done in six years. It's a whole new world since my last website which was all tables.

**bluesage** · 02-11-2007, 06:57 AM

nice and simple, css works well.

some stuff that could be improved, worked on:

1. no need for the border around the content, would be better without

2. try to avoid using "click here" for links, actually put text that says what the links point to

3. possibly style the links, so its not the standard blue and purple links

4. the text could be more readable without bold, using line-height to space it out a bit more, possibly justifying it would look better too

5. for stuff like background color, should have that defined in the css

body {
background-color: etc...
}

makes it easier to modify stuff later in my opinion

6. the text
"A beginners guide to wesite design. Find the free tools, tips and services you need to start designing great web pages today!"

below the main header text, is a bit small.

**boutte** · 02-11-2007, 02:17 PM

Thanks Bluesage, you were right on all counts. The only thing I didn't change was the text weight. I'll play around with it and see what I come up with.

**aldor** · 02-14-2007, 11:29 AM

I note that you define your text size for "Boutte's Beginner's Web Guide" in ems. When you define text sizes for other items on your page you use points. It would be better to use ems throughout as then users can alter the size to suit their needs.
I have checked in both Firefox and IE7 and find your images are not loading. Have you specified the correct path or did you forget to load them to the server.
You are making things difficult for yourself, why do you embed your style in each page, far better to create a separate document and link each page to this. You then only need to write one style sheet and when you want to change anything only do it once.

**RanaD** · 02-14-2007, 03:06 PM

Wow

I think your header is too big. Lose the "Welcome to". The whole thing can probably done in a nice image (or perhaps even simple text with CSS) no higher than 200px.

Your site makes me feel claustrophobic - information overload in a font that is hard to read. You can perhaps make your menu smaller by listing the main category, then have a page for the sub-categories with a review / description of each along with the link.

I believe a lot of improvement can be done on the first page with layout and presentation.

You fail W3C Validation on 30 points. Most of the points can be fixed by putting it in CSS.

Your style should be in an external CSS file. This will simplify life for you tremendously, as well as cutting down on your transfer bandwidth. At the moment each page has to be downloaded with the full CSS specification included in the header. With an external CSS file, the CSS file is downloaded once, and applied to all pages that use it.

1 em = 100% of parent font size. Thus, if you set the font size of the body to 16px, 1em anywhere in the body will be 16px. You use pt, which I've never used, nor ever will, but 1pt = 1/72 in.

Bluesage point 2: This is part of webstandards. When a blind reader visits your site, they can skip from link to link and have the links read to them. Imagine them hearing "click here, click here, click here". If I was them, I'd leave your site as soon as possible. A better option perhaps is "Visit xyz", or "Click here to go to xyz"