ncross

I have just started designing a new website in Australia but to be hosted with UH.

Here it is in it's very early stages:

Treetops Retreat

First thing. I'm posting sooner than I normally would because I can't actually see the site online - I'm still getting Enetica's parking page. I have uploaded it but despite clearing my cache and history I still can't see it. So the first thing I want is some confirmation that you can actually see the page with a photo of 2 houses and a mountain.

I intend to make put the navigation bar including white-ish buttons and place it just below the title.

Does anybody have some suggestions of where I can buy or get a good set of fonts for web design as I am just struggling along with my bog standard ones.

I intend to make the site a little more dynamic but as I say firstly I just want some confirmation of what you can see. Any other comments welcome but it really is in its infancy.

Cheers

Nigel

MrBen

Yeah it's online. There is a large background image on the right side missing though. It's called bw5.jpg by the looks of it.

Ben

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Terra

When you say fonts for webdesign I take you mean fonts you can use in images? If yes, then something like myfonts.com is a good value font source.

Don't forget that for text you can't be sure what fonts will be used as it depends on what the user has installed.

And yes, site is online - have you tried flushing your DNS cache? Or you could use a proxy service .. I think there's been some stuff posted by UH on this somewhere on this forum.

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percepts

yup myfonts is the best source of paid for fonts I have found.

for free fonts the Download fonts | dafont.com is the easiest source but some are low quality although for web graphics most are fine.

Just remember that for body text which can be found by search engines, then use fonts which are available on most platforms. That means MS core fonts such as Verdana, and Times etc. These are also standard on Macs. The list of these are very very limited.

for fonts embeded in graphics then the choice is unlimited.

For some different fonts, take a look at

Fontcraft's Scriptorium Fonts and Graphic Arts

some are free some are paid for.

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ncross

Thanks for your help!

Great leads and advise with the fonts. I do want them for insertion into Graphics just to try and make it look like a designer did the work rather than a kid down the road.

I'm looking forward to setting up my brand new machine with Windows XP and a new monitor to get a better idea how most of the world see things. I have been running Windows '98. I looked at this site online earlier on the Library computer to discover that it looked quite different to how it did on my machine. The PNG graphics which had transparent areas weren't transparent at all on their machine.

Next time I have that refresh problem I will look at flushing the dns. As it is after being away from the machine for 2 days it has now refreshed.

I'll let you know when this site has progressed a little on the design front, for your further feedback.

Cheers

Nigel

Terra

If you search for IE and PNG support either on this forum or on Google you'll get resources - basically IE lacks alpha transparency support for PNGs. I think there was a work around published on the UH forum not too long ago.

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ncross

Thanks for the info. Terra. Amazingly, the transparent PNG's look fine in Windows '98. Also, Flash movies don't require to be clicked to become active. Both of those things are quite annoying and you would have thought that Microsoft would have moved forwards and not backwards.

The work arounds for the transparent PNG's seem to involve coding which has some compatablity problems also. I think I will go with a Flash solution again - makes things look a bit more cool anyway.

Cheers

Nigel

Samizdata

While I would not necessarily have thought that, the "click to activate" problem only affects Internet Explorer 6 and above, which I believe Windows 98 and Windows Me cannot run.

The problem is that Microsoft lost a controversial court case regarding a patent infringement, and rather than pay out the $521,000,000 awarded by the jury decided to change the way the browser worked, affecting all multimedia content - Flash, ShockWave, QuickTime, RealPlayer, Java, Acrobat and even Windows Media Player. No other browsers were hit, but they could be in theory.

Consequently, the HTML that Flash, Dreamweaver etc spew out in their older versions is now useless. As I specialise in multimedia delivery this was a nightmare for me, with about 1,000 pages having to be rewritten last year. The usual workaround is a JavaScript technique, which in the case of Flash is freely available as swfObject.

Happy Googling!

...

Terra

I think IE5.5 supports alpha transparency - but then IE5.5 has a completely faulty box model interpretation which makes a mess of margin/padding/width.

If you are using IE5.5 then PNGs should work but you may see odd dimensions on sites due the faulty box model.

Personally, I've finally thrown in the towel and stopped supporting IE5.5 - life's too short and luckily it's now a very small minority who use this browser (at least on the sites I'm working on).

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ncross

Thanks,

Samizdata , Which versions of these programmes are ok, in your opinion?

Do you mean exporting a Flash multimedia file as swfObject solves all of the problems associated with older versions of Flash.

Cheers

Nigel

Samizdata

The HTML that older versions generate - OBJECT and EMBED tags - is now obsolete, and that is what produces the "click to activate" error.

You can still use older versions of Flash to produce the SWF file, you just have to change the embedding method in the HTML that delivers it.

Google swfObject - it is very easy to use, and free.

ncross

Thanks a lot Samizdata! Looks very good. What version of Flash or Dreamweaver would I need so that I wouldn't even have to manually use this workaround?

Samizdata

I think Flash 8 and Dreamweaver 8 have it, but I'm not sure - I always do the HTML manually anyway, it's just a quick copy/paste and change a couple of parameters.

QuickTime, ShockWave, Java, RealPlayer etc require a similar approach.

ncross

This not working for me at the moment.

I tried to follow this example:

Vol 4 - Issue 3

On my site I tried to convert the home page to display the Flash in that way on a test page:

Treetops Retreat

I did upload the swfobject first:

http://hallsgapaccommodation.net.au/swfobject.js

I am sure that I have made an error in the coding. I'd be grateful if somebody would please take a look and and point out the error of my ways.

Cheers

Nigel

Samizdata

"The requested URL /treetops_navigation.swf was not found on this server."

Are you sure you uploaded the Flash file to the specified path?

ncross

You are quite right, I had not. I have now and it looks to be working well. Thanks a lot, Samizdata!

Cheers

Nigel