adx

Ah, finally! Somebody's got it right I don't really think it's necessary to support IE6 anymore anyways. If it's that important just go with the conditional statements and you'll be fine!

I don't think that many people use 800 by 600 pixel monitors anymore, so a horizontal scroll for that resolution is acceptable. My site is approximately 950 pixels wide and I still have a good inch on either side of the browser window on a 12 inch laptop with vista sidebar enabled. Though if I have the bookmark window open there's a minute scroll to it. I recently viewed it on an Acer aspire one, which has a horizontal resolution of 1024 and it still had a little bit of air to either side. So I would keep it between 900 and 1000 pixels to allow for any vertical scrollbars or sidebars.

It's a nice and easy listing of good restaurants, and serves it's purpose like it should. Though the design is a bit tame and doesn't really catch the eye. The banner should be better than just a happy chef, make the logo and message more visible. Also the ratings system goes from 1 to 5 stars yet the vote is from 1 to 10 which doesn't make much sense. I tried the rating system on the Akash Tandoori restaurant to see if you'd secured it with some SSI like PHP, which you obviously haven't, as it allowed me to replicate the form on my computer and cast a vote of 100. This caused the restaurant to jump to the top of the page with the best rating. You shouldn't underestimate what people will do for a good rating especially when it comes to their business. Sorry about the intrusion though, I just wanted to know if you were securing your ratings! The rating for Akash Tandoori was set at 4 after 1 vote. I recommend you reset it and look into some PHP to thoroughly secure the ratings system.

If I was to pick one thing to comment about it would be that all of your templates are better looking than your site. Which made me think: did you make all the templates yourself? I think you'd be better off using one of the templates to showcase the rest of them. Either go with the medical one or the spa one. They weren't half bad looking

The design looks great! The header font and the colors kind of gave me a medieval archeology vibe. However, I once worked in a medieval archeology museum so you probably shouldn't give it much thought. Happy coding!

A fast and simple way to do images at random with Php would be: <?php $images = array('1.jpg', '2.jpg', '3.jpg'); $randimg = $images[array_rand($images)]; ?> <img src="<?=$randimg;?>" alt="image" /> This is the simplest way I could think of, and it's easy to understand even for those who aren't Php guru's. Does your school support Php on their servers? If they do this should work fine. The image won't be different every single time as it's completely random.. not first, second, third image etc. I'm not a JavaScript genius so I went with a Php example. As for Fluff's comment, I agree about the first site you linked to, different but not too keen on it. The Oxford one was simple but very friendly and clean looking. I only mentioned the Nyu one 'cause the design's were so similar. I don't really have to much more advice on the matter though. Let us know what you figure out

"Also adx, good point about slicing up the bgs for different content areas, and that's what I'm ultimately going to do, except that I wasn't sure as for what the school had wanted it to look like, so I just threw that "mumbo-jumbo" in there." Gotta love some Mumbo-jumbo every now and again. I didn't really expect you to be finished, but I guess I couldn't live without pointing it out! You're right though, it's not the most important thing in terms of the other issues right now. As for the poster above, have you looked at any school web sites lately? They pretty much look like this, only without any artistic anything unlike the site in question. I took a stab in the dark at a school url and came up with www.nyu.edu which isn't all that different looking. Maybe you could stash that 'book' that's in the banner cell below the banner, like where nyu.edu has that 'year end giving' paragraph. As for the rest of it I don't really have any experience with this type of site, so I can't really comment to much about it. Maybe you'll be able to take some tips off other school sites, that use nearly the same layout. I'll check back to see if you've gotten anywhere tomorrow! It's like 5 in the morning over here, gotta rest up!

"Type your message in the box below - *Required<br />" The script you posted doesn't require anything unless you use $_REQUIRE.

I'm a bit partial to Simple Machines or SMF as it's often referred to. Both Demonoid.com and PhpFreaks.com have SMF boards. I just think it's easier to use and understand. How did it miss the polls!

Well as people have mentioned above the header and footer are way too big, but more importantly they don't match the rest of the page in the slightest. I don't really think that they should be wider than the rest of the content, since it makes you page look rather off. If you just squash them to the size of the rest of the page and change the colors/logo it'll do a whole world of change.

I agree with the above about going with left aligned text rather than justify. When it comes to what to do about the huge about text I'm at a loss for words. It's too big and confusing to read on that background. There's no separation between the banner image and the text which makes it seem like the same thing. Also you've got close to 200 Kb's(!) worth of background images, which is making the page really slow. Most of the main background image can be done with regular code. To be clear, creating images that don't allow for easy Css modifications isn't the way to go. The rest of the design is pretty solid and befitting of an Art and design school, and definitely a lot better than the previous site!

Go with empek's solution! It addresses all the concerns that have been stated above and more. A couple gradients here and there and it'll look superb. It's nice to see that somebody takes the time to post a picture

The spacing issue between the navigational links can easily be fixed by something as simple as: "Home | Shop | Submit | About | Contact" - They'd probably look a lot better if they were underlined as well! Since there's not a great deal of content I would think that scrunching the page together to make a centered 900 pixel wide layout, and then add a plain white background to the excess with a subtle left and right gradient. Kind of like here on this board but not as wide. I do love the orange, black and gray color scheme! But a little white would narrow the viewing field and not make your site look like a giant bulletin board. Though when the page fills up it should look spectacular anyway

I agree with empek about the hover issue. The links seem sort of dead if they don't come alive when you hover over them. The site is very simple but as stated above is quite uniform with most hosting web sites, which isn't necessarily a bad thing! However I don't like that the text is wider than the blue header cell. It looks like it's a bug or something. All the pages are pretty much the same page, but I'm sure this will correct itself as you gain a decent following! Nice job though

First thought is that the site looks kind of tame, not because of the lack of content but mainly because of the color scheme. You should definitely look into matching the colors better. Also you could add a couple more subtle gradients here and there, to highlight the page a bit better. The left and right gradient is a little bit to harsh, meaning that it could be a more paler shade of gray. The background image gradient is about 40 some Kb's in size, which is way too much. You should look into getting the background image to repeat itself down the Y-Axis, which means that the image doesn't have to be any bigger than 900 by 1 pixel. This should cut the file size down to approximately 1 Kb. The banner could also need some sprucing up! Besides that the coding is pretty good for a first timer. The page looks pretty solid overall! Not bad at all