Need an opinion on website

[laozing]

I know a friend called turok. He just recently started to advertise (veryy low budget) his developing website. He asked me whether it's decent or not.
I gave it a 8/10, but he is not convinced. can you guys rate the site?
--Click here to check it out--

[Desert Drifter]

It's pretty eye-catching and yet professional looking. Probably give it a 9/10.

[Zach]

Main page looks OK I guess.. some 404's tho.. the forum banner is totally messed up tho.

Couldn't stand to look at it beyond that. Anyway personally I wouldn't actively seek out anyone espousing the virtues of a Microsoft product for web design, as they traditionally are only meant to make code that works well with IE, doesn't conform to W3C standards, and so on. Maybe I'm old school, but I like Dreamweaver and Notepad, because I know what I'm doing and don't need WYSIWYG interfaces to build a page and plop down buttons and forms, etc.

To each their own.

[laozing]

Actually A lot of the coding Turok does IS in notepad. I'm trying to learn some html myself and as such I ask him some pointers about learning the stuff. First one off the bat was w3schools.com. he learned his coding there. second was using two or three html editors to get the best results. I am currently trying out dreamweaver although Turok advised me not to but went on with the whole "you should try things that works for you and stop emailing me". long story short I'm trying it along with Kompozer as I am still experimenting. I plan on joining his forum. What's wrong with the banner? looks awesome to me.

[Desert Drifter]

Personally, I thought the site looked well represented - taking I'm not an anime fan. As for what was used for developing it, who cares. Everyone has their preference - myself, I use FrontPage and CoffeeCup (while leaving the small stuff to notepad)...

Just tell your buddy a "drifter" said it looks bad@$$ - and keep up the content.

[Zach]

Well your friend is right, we all code in what works for us best after trying out different stuff. Good to hear he uses notepad and sent you to w3school tho.
I just don't have a lot of faith in Microsoft web design products I guess.

But like I said to each their own.

As for the forum.. His huge graphic banner is sitting ontop of the rest of the forum, in a way that looks very bad. It doesn't look blended in at all, and it's just wrong.. I may have to resort to a screenshot to describe it..

I'm viewing the site in Mozilla Firefox btw..

I'm suspecting he didn't think to implement his graphic in a way so that it auto-stretches to cover the entire browser width, or alternatively fixed the tables and banner at a hard center so that no matter what resolution it was, it would look proper.

[Desert Drifter]

Didn't know we're talking "forums" here - but the main site's presentation (as my opinion of that above didn't change). Though speaking of the forums, they're so-so, which can still see it needs a lot more work to put into (can't argue with that, use to skin them a few years ago and know those ropes - which becomes very time consuming with their "odd" way of PHP scripting). As for the banner, IPB's are a pain when it comes to "perfecting" them, while removing it from the style sheet and replacing it with a logo (with a transparent background that is) works much better upon pulls and stretches of the page (as I did with of my own back in the day)...

[Zach]

When I used to run a forum, I always deleted that bulky stylsheet crap from the main source page and linked it to an external file, also helps to modify files manually when you want to do something. Not too hard, just like working with a web site as long as you understand the coding process and what does what.

[Desert Drifter]

When I used to run a forum, I always deleted that bulky stylsheet crap from the main source page and linked it to an external file, also helps to modify files manually when you want to do something. Not too hard, just like working with a web site as long as you understand the coding process and what does what.

I agree - customizing the scripting to your own liking is the way to go. Even though my community had "Invision Power Board v1.0.1" at the bottom, it was completely different then you could of imagined (which thinking of upgrading would of been nuts to consider).

Original isn't always best - just as one shoe doesn't fit all...

[laozing]

Well I asked him myself about the banner thing and he told me:

"Itching to fix that and auto strech to browser width but I am unforunately too lazy to even bother with it. If two or three people would just say something about the banner issue I'll change it quick. By the way, WTF are you still emailing me!? Go to w3schools and learn CSS!"

yeah.. I spam the guy. A LOT .

Also he seems perfectly content with how the boarrd is save the banner.

man this is like the third edit. firefox? If I remember turok uses IE7 and opera, the latter being his prime choice for browsing. IE7 just to download.