My web deign looks a bit dodgy can you help

[ConfusedAgain]

I am slowly getting to grips with accessing data, updating viewing and manipulating but the websites are let down with the design side.

I am sure there is an easy way to put together a slick professional looking design without the pain I am going through.

How easy is it to create a front end like the bbc website or similar.

Where is the best place to get templates and how is the easiest way to incorporate this into my data.

Here is my effort to give you a guide as to where I am at with the design.

www.footballquizleague.com

Look forward to hearing you view all good and bad ones.

Thanks,
Rob

[kxcntry99]

it looks like you have everything setup in tables. Not saying its wrong but have you googled for CSS templates? There are some pretty good templates out there to start with.

[gep13]

I have to agree with kxcntry99. Using Table Layouts, although seems easy at first, where as CSS can be a little bit daunting, can cause you problems down the line.

Too many nested tables makes markup difficult to maintain, and slow to render.

A great place to start with getting to grips with CSS is here:

http://layouts.ironmyers.com/

And for general tutorials, have a look here:

http://www.w3schools.com/css/

and here:

http://www.csszengarden.com/

and not forgetting here:

http://css.maxdesign.com.au/floatutorial/

CSS can be scary to start with, and you will run into problems getting it to look the way you want it, but stick with it, and post back any questions that you might have.

Gary

[ConfusedAgain]

Thanks for that all very helpful and quite sources of information. May take me a bit of time to get through all that so I shall go away now and start working.

Cheers

[brin351]

Honestly I think you need to make a decision if your graphic design is ever going to be any good.

kxcntry99 and Gary have pointed you to how to create the html/css and you can get ideas from others on the colours, images etc but and here is the big BUT how good are you with graphic design and color schemes?

You really must know your css and you will be able to make a great imporvement to your current website GUI, however I think there are very few developers that are good graphic designers so don't worry to much if your not creating GUI's up to the standard of the BBC website

[kxcntry99]

ah, illustrator isn't THAT difficult. Get yourself some good icons, put them on a faded gradient background and you will be looking better in no time.

[brin351]

ah, illustrator isn't THAT difficult. Get yourself some good icons, put them on a faded gradient background and you will be looking better in no time.

I don't like gradient backgrounds. What other designs can you suggest?

Just kidding.

[pukisoft]

there are some very good templates at oswd (open source web design) I'm very bad at designing myself, but if you need to set up something quick, their templates may help you out a lot.

here's the url: http://www.oswd.org/

[gep13]

Nice link!!

I didn't know about that one.

Gary

[kxcntry99]

indeed a nice link. I believe microsoft also had some templates out there but don't quote me on that.

[techgnome]

I've been using OSWD for years.... it is a great resource and time saver. you can even search based on template types - 2 col, 3 col, light, dark, CSS, tables, etc.

-tg

[gep13]

There are some boiler plate templates out there from Microsoft:

http://www.asp.net/community/projects

But they aren't really aimed at design, but rather function.

Gary

[jlbantang]

omg i was totally lost. im currently designing the web with tables and mix with divs. i feel like redoing the whole thing...

anyway, i need you critics to check the design as well.

[/IMG]

i find it easy to design when you use white space instead of filing the entire page with colors.

[pukisoft]

I'm no expert, but that one looks good to me. If something the layout of the controls seems a bit odd but overral I think it looks fine.


No distractions for the user and task oriented. IMHO that is.

[Webskater]

I wouldn't normally pass comments on someone else's web design - as I'm never very impressed with mine. And some people will like it and some will hate it.

I'm in the middle. It looks a bit like a gaming site but without the attention to graphic detail that makes some gaming sites look pretty slick.

I don't like the font colour/background colour choice. Orange on dark grey is hard on the eyes after a while - okay for call outs - but not if there is a lot of it.

And one plea, why not make the text a big bigger? I don't understand this obsession with tiny text. It's something idiot designers came up with in brochures years ago - and it somehow made its way on to the web.

Finally, typography is easy to get right on the web these days with css. If you have text in a table - why not pad it 6px from the left - so the first letter isn't hard up against the border? If you have a lable next to a control - stick a space between it and the control so you can see the last letter easily etc.

If you look at the text/padding on the BBC site - everything is padded nicely so the text isn't crowded. And small fonts look like they are Verdana which is the easiest to read (commonly available) font at small sizes.

[jlbantang]

@webskater i would agree BBC has a pretty slick design and uses div tags instead of normal table.Likewise font colour/background colour choice as it easily blend from the container. So many cool stuff found in the site and I reconsider my design to have another retouch.

Thanks.

[ConfusedAgain]

webskater - No need to worry on casting your opion I did ask for comments good and bad. And, this is my first attempt so I am not offended and grateful for all comments.

I am reading up on the css at the moment and plan to revamp it when I have done that. I also need to finish of some of the coding on the games so the teams points get updated after each game.

Have not had much time of late so hopefully ready for next season now. Thanks all for all comments.

[Webskater]

Just to clarify, it looks okay to me. Something where someone has spent 50k on design would no doubt look better, but it is what I call a 'working site' - it does things - it doesn't just display static data.

Static data is a lot easier to make a pretty site with. Data that changes all the time is much more challenging.

One final thing - and I know the css purists will disagree - I wouldn't get hung up on doing css layouts. I can lay pages out 10 times faster using tables than I can with css - and I can get pages looking the same in Chrome, Firefox, IE and Safari much easier with tables rather than css. Sure, simple stuff is easy, but as soon as layouts get complex I find css a nightmare.

You can use css to do things like pad table cells so you get nicely spaced and formatted text - you just won't spend hours floating divs all over the place praying they'll display correctly.