[Red Cap]

hello commandprompt, good work it looks nice, i actually think youve been hard done by.

Originally Posted by Luke A

Fixed width layout, a web design blog for 800x600? Build the site for your audience, TopBuzz will need his magnifying glass to read your blog. Liquid Layouts are always the best choice!
Hope this helps.

I dont agree with this. From a designer's stand point, it's alot harder to make an attractive site as your well measured composition will look different on every different screen resolution- theres a reason for the vast majority of websites being fixed width. Luke made a fair point you should always design for your audience, however viewers with 30 inch monitors such as top buzz make up a very small part of your audience. Besides, users with behemoth monitors are probably used to increasing the text size through their browsers - i think youve made a good choice with the elastic layout and good work for making an effort with relative text sizes - not many designers go this extra step. Aswell as designing to your audience, you should always design to the content. As your site is not particularly content heavy if you were to take luke's suggestion and have a liquid layout - with massive monitors many of your pages would appear as a tiny band accross the top - top buzz would still need his magnifying glass!, plus its not easy to ready text that spans large widths (or very attractive).

as for the png its scrolling fine for me in firefox - some browsers have problems rendering tiled backgrounds with transparency this causes the site to scroll sluggishly as it draws the new tiles. You could try tiling a larger image of the bg instead of your 1 x 1 ? - you can afford to go quite big as this wont dramatically effect the file size.
As pgo pointed out you could serve IE with its own stylesheet and chuck in the hack using the IE's proprietary image loader:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/a...mageloader.asp

Using this, your CSS won't validate - thats hardly a major the important thing is having good markup. Anyhow, currently it looks fine with an opaque bg in IE anyways.

This being said i agree with Pat, we have seen this site through all its numerous iterations - its time to start a new project buddy

[commandprompt]

Well I am wrong - I kindof slagged off this community a little and I made a mistake! Sorry everyone! and you can expect to see me round here a little more often.

People have given some great critique and advice and thanks Red Cap for the comments:

I could write a whole article on my layout choices, but have tried to make the site as accessible as possible, I have tested on all current browser versions and IE6, NOT 5.5 yet oops!, I'll look into the image loader, thanks i havent seen that hack before, I usually have a hacks stylesheet and for IE use the wildcard *. Again I havent done IE5.5 yet and this is usually the lowest version I test too. I have found the .png to be fine in all current browsers and IE 6 and below doesnt support the transparency on the .png so u should just see a solid color.

I will take the hint! - I have just won a new project, my first e-commercem watch this space!

thanks, Anthony

[Red Cap]

congrats.
i would'nt recommend using the star(*) or holly hack as this may come undone in future versions of IE - plus your css wont validate. Have a look at a filter rather than a hack:

http://www.positioniseverything.net/...s/multiIE.html

The link i sent you before about the IE imageloader - isnt really a hack but a bit of proprietary code that only IE understands - this is the method used to show png variable transparency on the 'lightbox' popup galleries seen everywhere.

[Mik]

Originally Posted by pat

Rubbish. We've given you plenty of criticism in the past but it gets tiring when you come back asking for crit for such a similar site, barely changed. Show us something different that you've done and we'll give you good feedback, I've never seen anything else of yours but this blog. I seem to remember offering a load of suggestions on how to improve - for instance, you were offering web design services on the site, but not giving any examples of your work. None of my suggestions were taken on board.

Don't expect people to say "Wow yeah it still looks really good" everytime you come back with the same website.

Originally Posted by pat

None of my suggestions were taken on board.

haha.

[commandprompt]

Thanks RedCap I will look into this immediatley!, I have often wondered how lighbox/sweet titles make transparency work! - looks really good!

and thanks Mr Fred!