I need BIG help if possible please?

Message

adelleteresa · #1 Post by **adelleteresa** » 2007-09-16 12:02

Hi guys,

I have recently created a website - my first and only one. I have taught myself everything about doing it and I have had some suggestions along the way. One of them being 'dowload filezilla'.
I bought my website and am using Frontpage 2003 to create my pages and upload the files. I have a forum for the website too, and some of my members have told me that the main index page of the website is off centered to the left... but for others (including me) its perfectly centered ?!? I'm so confused... I went onto a phpBB forum and the gentleman on there suggested I used filezilla for my website but I just dont understand what it is for exactly. I have downloaded Filezilla Client and have added my host, username and password - so I now have a page with lots of words on, what do I do with this? Is the fact that I'm using frontpage something to do with the main index being off centered? Please can someone help me?
Have a look for yourself http://www.foreversearching.com

Thankyou xx

calebrw · #2 Post by **calebrw** » 2007-09-16 18:11

I see that this page is full of horrible HTML code. That's FrontPage's fault. FrontPage generated HTML is always going to have crazy stuff in it. That makes it not compatible with some browsers. I looked in Firefox and Internet Explorer and both showed the same thing.

I used Dreamweaver CS3 to creat the cleanest code I could so that you should get a standard display. I got rid of your silly arched-text graphics. They may look cool to a beginning web designer, but they end up looking unprofessional.

I also got rid of the offending gradient graphic at the bottom and the image with the text on it. Again, it may look cool, but it is indeed quite pointless and unprofessional looking. If you must stick with the gradient at the bottom, make it 950px wide so that it matches with the header graphic.

This code won't solve all your problems, but it should look good on all browsers and is quite clean: 76 lines of code instead of the original 247 lines. Mine is 5.5 times smaller and loads that much quicker. Hope that helps.

Code: Select all

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Forever Seaching</title>
<style type="text/css">
<!--
body,td,th {
	font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
	font-size: 12pt;
	color: #000000;
}
body {
	background-color: #CC99FF;
	margin-top: 0px;
	margin-bottom: 0px;
}
a {
	font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
	font-size: 12pt;
	color: #000000;
}
a:link {
	text-decoration: underline;
}
a:visited {
	text-decoration: underline;
	color: #000000;
}
a:hover {
	text-decoration: none;
	color: #000000;
}
a:active {
	text-decoration: underline;
	color: #000000;
}
#copyright {
	font-size: 10pt
}
-->
</style>
</head>

<body>
<table width="950" border="0" align="center">
  <tr>
    <td colspan="3"><div align="center"><a href="http://www.foreversearching.com/"><img src="New website banner.jpg" alt="http://www.foreversearching.com/" width="950" height="120" border="0" /></a></div></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td colspan="3"><div align="center">
        <a href="About us.htm">About Us</a>&nbsp;|&nbsp;<a href="Teams.htm">Teams</a>&nbsp;|&nbsp;<a href="http://www.foreversearching.freeforums.org/">Forum</a>&nbsp;|&nbsp;<a href="mailto:register@foreversearching.com">Join Us</a>&nbsp;|&nbsp;<a href="Links.htm">Links</a>&nbsp;|&nbsp;<a href="News.htm">News</a>&nbsp;|&nbsp;<a href="webmail/">Webmail</a>
    </div></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td colspan="3"><h2 align="center">Missing Children</h2>    </td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td width="237">&nbsp;</td>
    <td width="476" bordercolor="#000000"><div align="center">The sole purpose of our group is to raise awareness to the issue of Child Abduction, to every corner of the globe. We will always consider the consequences of what we do and the decisions we make, so that our contribution to this cause is evident, unceasing and will always make us proud.</div></td>
    <td width="237">&nbsp;</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td colspan="3"><h2 align="center">Site Enquires</h2>
      <p align="center">Site Administrator - Adelle <a href="mailto:adelle@foreversearching.com">adelle@foreversearching.com<br />
      </a>Site Moderator - Kathy <a href="mailto:kathy@foreversearching.com">kathy@foreversearching.com</a></p>
    </td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td colspan="3"><div align="center" id="copyright">Copyright © 2007 by Forever Seaching<br />
    All Rights Reserved</div></td>
  </tr>
</table>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
</body>
</html>

Okay, that should be the cleanest code you can use. Expand as needed.

adelleteresa · #3 Post by **adelleteresa** » 2007-09-16 18:47

I just got your email caleb thankyou. Does it really look that bad and amateur? I feel a bit stupid for even bothering now

calebrw · #4 Post by **calebrw** » 2007-09-16 22:27

You shouldn't feel stupid in anyway. My first websites were horrible and the stuff I do now isn't all that great.

I can code fairly well, so that's the stuff that's worse in my view. It creates browser compatibility issues.

I should also clarify: the gradient graphic at the bottom is not offensive, it's it was the problem in the original site.

adelleteresa · #5 Post by **adelleteresa** » 2007-09-17 09:22

Sorry i dont understand, what was the problem in the original site?

calebrw · #6 Post by **calebrw** » 2007-09-17 21:11

There was nothing wrong with the original site. It worked, but it was built on faulty code. Because of this, it was prone to a problem all sites have if not coded and designed properly - the fact that they display differently from browser to browser, system to system. Recent improvements in HTML: the largest of which is XTHML. XHTML forces you to get the code right by its very nature. It emphasizes accuracy of coding much more so than HTML did.

http://www.webstandards.org/learn/artic ... c/oct2003/
http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/xhtml_html.asp

These links provide an excellent overview of the differences between the two markups.