Website Review and Suggestions

**Ken Rogers** · 09:21 PM

Here's a website I've been working on for the past few weeks. It's an online magazine aimed at pilots. I am interested in advice on both the design of the site, as well as organization of it's stories and articles.

BTW, the site is W3C compliant for XHTML 1.0 Strict but the advertisements themselves create many errors. I've been told that I need to choose between:

1. being W3C compliant
2. having ads

One concern I have is the use of a .png image to create my menu CSS rollover effect. It won't work in IE6 Quirks Mode, but I don't imagine there are many people still using IE6.

http://www.friendly-skies.com

Ken

**Nathand** · 12-02-2007, 02:08 PM

I like it a lot. I'm a student pilot, so it's pretty interesting content to me.

I would change one thing though. The text you have that's kind of brownish/gold is very hard to read. I'd change it to a brighter shade of yellow.

Otherwise looks good! Make sure to put lots of cool pictures on it too

Nathan

**Arenlor** · 12-02-2007, 04:02 PM

Not a lot of people using IE6? It's about 50/50 between those who use IE7 and IE6! I like it, personally nothing I can find wrong, if you have an image you want made into a favicon (it must be a square already and just ready to be resized and converted) send it me and I'll make it into one for you. Anyway, http://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/co...iral/demo.html read about that and you'll see how you can make the hover effect work with just CSS.

**clink** · 12-02-2007, 06:41 PM

Nice use of the opacity effect.

However, your site would look 100 times better if you continued the image in your header out horizontally. The image itself gives a great impression of freedom and openess which is what your site needs, but this is suddenly cut off by the sharp impact of the side background area. If you spanned the image across as a background it would really open up your layout. Try it

**Ken Rogers** · 12-02-2007, 07:07 PM

I like all the suggestions. I will change the brown text for sure. I really like the opacity effect in the menu rollover. I can't do this for IE6, unless maybe a separate CSS file for IE6 that instead uses a .gif with 50% of its pixels being transparent.

I was torn between liquid and fixed. I decided on fixed, because I want complete control over the layout. I don't want long lines of text that make it hard to read. I also want to keep the ads as close as possible to the content. I think that wide resolutions such as 1200x1920 make liquid layouts appear a bit funny.

Ken