Complete website redesign, what do you think?
 

I just spent the last 2 hours or so redesigning my whole website while I've been in a tourney.

How do you like the new design? What other features do you want to see on it? Any suggestions for improvements?

Thanks!

Oh yeah: http://poker.idonk.com

Old design: http://poker.idonk.com/oldindex.html

To tell you the truth, I like the old one more.

The new site has some pretty glaring colors, and they clash pretty harsh.

Also, you can easily design that site using a CSS format and get rid of all those tables. It would result in much cleaner code and a much easier site to update.

Also, if you're fishing for referrals I'm not biting ;)

I wish I knew how to use CSS! I've done a few web classes on it but I am not comfortable enough yet to do em by myself.

Anyone know of any good books on the subject?

I already get enough referrals through google, I just want some advice!

Thanks :)

Some sites and articles I found to be useful when designing in CSS are:

www.csszengarden.com

http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/practicalcss/

http://www.thenoodleincident.com/tut...css/index.html

If you're comfortable writing HTML by hand, then CSS is really the next logical step. It's very powerful and continues to amaze me the more I learn. I just found out that you can do rollovers with CSS and no Java whatsoever.

Feel free to ask more questions, I sort of like to "spread the gospel" where CSS is concerned.

I like the old one better too. I do appreciate how you kept both sites with a simple layout though...complex layouts suck. One thing I don't like about both sites is how big the white text is in the middle...I'd tone it down 1 or 2 points. I think it'd make it look more professional!

-Lasereth

Great links! Thanks! I'll get started on those as soon as finals are over this week!!!

Yeah, I self taught myself to use CSS/XHTML over a couple of weeks working at my summer job this year.
You can see the results at my site: http://www.rjshade.com/

If you right click and go to View Source you will see how uncluttered and easy to follow the XHTML code is. This is the beauty of separating content and styling using CSS.

Your site is amazing! I hope I have time to learn how to do that sort of stuff! Your blogging system also intrigues me quite a bit. I'd love to be able to do something like that by myself! Any tips on that side of things?

I wrote the blog system using PHP (which is a server side scripting language) and a MySQL database.

Basically, I have a page that has text boxes for the Title of the blog entry, and one for the Content. I fill these in and hit submit. It connects to the MySQL database and creates a new row in the table that has 4 fields. Firstly, ID, which is an auto-incrementing unique identifier. Then Date, which is automatically generated depending on the date posted. Then Title which is just a text field. Then Content which again is just a text field.

It is really simple, I plan on making a page that will list all the Titles and let me click one and edit the contents or delete the post and so on.

I learnt PHP/MySQL using various website, here are some links:

http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey...tutorial4.html

http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/phpmysql/

http://www.createafreewebsite.net/ph...roduction.html

Obviously you need a webhost that supports both PHP and gives you a MySQL database. The cheapest hosting I have found that does both is called d2hosting (www.d2hosting.com). For $2 a month you get loads of stuff.


As for the actual site design side of things, check out some of these sites, they helped/inspired me:

http://www.simplebits.com/

http://www.alistapart.com/

http://www.csszengarden.com/

Have fun!

Robbie

I really like using Dreamweaver, It makes doing alot of this easier. Maybe I'm just lazy.

the best place for tutorials on any web language is www.w3schools.org