My kid set up a [really awful looking] personal website - very poorly layed out - terrible choices all along the way - I don’t know what he was thinking.
Skipping the backstory - there’s a display anamoly I can’t seem to track down: a box of blue is overlaying one of his image links at the top of the page when displayed in all browsers except Safari…
If you’ve got a couple of minutes to look at the source, can you tell me what the heck is going here and how to fix it? I’m stumped.
you can view the short source code there.
He was using “default.html” as his index page - hopefully he will have changed it to “index.html” by the time you read this.
Also the use of tables for layout is causing rendering issues in legacy IE due to the lack of a doctype – IE is in quirks mode.
Though yeah, it’s about what I expect from a kid just starting out; tables for layout, presentational images in the markup, zero actual content on the page if you turn off images, spacer.gif like it was 1997…
What decade and a half out of date guide has your child been reading?
You get what you pay for. Wow that is one f**ked up mess. I don’t really see the content as the developers fault. That is more or less the responsibility of the creator of copywriter, none the less it needs to be completely redone and rethought for that matter.
The ‘developer’ IS the creator/copywriter - so it is indeed his fault. But there’s pride in ownership - and all I can do is make gentle suggestions to him to look at how professional websites are layed out and professional content is displayed.
His work - his site (ugh!) - his choices. I’m assuming that eventually one of his buddies will say ‘dude - that’s awful, let’s create a good site for you’… but I’m not going to be the one to say that.
You know, I didn’t want to ask him, but I suspect that he built the site by creating a layout in PhotoShop and then sent the PSD(s) to some hosting system’s ‘site builder’ template BS system.
Believe me - it kills me to see it that way, especially knowing that he does have some basic HTML skills (and I could help him do whatever he wanted). He’s not a web guy - his focus is film. What can I say. If you have a kid, you know you don’t criticize - you support.
Developer, designer, programmer is not directly responsible for creating content. As the site owner that is your responsibility or someone who does that for a living. Programmers and designers are not writers. If a site isn’t getting attention is boils down to the owner has nothing useful to say. Granted in this case I don’t think you have been supplied with tools to regularly update the site, none the less they exist and reason they are so popular is so that people such as yourself can take pride in your site, once it has been created without constantly relying on the person who built it. What you are more or less referring to would be having a marketing agency or even a design firm build something handling everything top to bottom. However, you can’t expect that same thing from someone who is not a a writer, marketer and all around brand strategist. Marketing has the ideas, writers create the content and developers build what they are told w/ what they are given, that is how it works.
