Have have never had any training tin web-design. Completely self taught. I have come to realise a lot of my short comings after publishing that website. A lot of things only became obvious after posting it. When I started to try to "submit to google" and create a site-map it became obvious that the frames cripple the effectivness of the site straight away.

Im using css for the fonts/text style. My uncle was showing me last week that it can be used to actually format the page too! I thought it was only used for the text-styling! I can see straight away (now) that the benefit of using it for the actual layout is fantastic, and the desired website style is to have each page of information as a stand-alone page, with its own menus/links. It would be quicker to load, and google's robots would "see" the whole page. At the moment I think they see the root page (index.htm) which contains frame defenitions and not much else, and then miss the rest of the site. This is in the head:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content=
"text/html; charset=us-ascii" />
<meta name="revisit-after" content="35 days" />
<meta name="robots" content="all" />
<meta name="description" content=
"Lakeland-Scottish Feeds and Services are Agricultural Merchants ........ etc/>
<meta name="keywords" content=
"Lakeland-Scottish, Lakeland, Scott...... etc

I dont know if this will help things or not, but for starters I would have to update the list of keywords manually, it wouldnt be dynamic and most of the site is still missed...

So yeah - xhtml and css you say? Any where with detailed info, tutorials you might point me (I need to look anyway)...

(thanks btw)

:P 

Awesome, so Chicago just got more shooting deaths (31) over a single weekend than my entire country (Finland) does over a year. WTF. 

It's cause GTAIV was released, duh. 

now pls. 

Let's talk GTAIV instead. 

Wander how long before the PC version does? I'll probably get the 360 version! (Cant believe it, the 360 I bought 25 months ago still works, I bought it with GTAIV in mind!)

Apparently you cant make yourself really fat in this one :( 

 

get this instead to feel better: http://yumeneko.sega.jp/support/index.html 

Finland is teh loser. 

Stalker, Company Website and Band.

The titles of three things which have been stopping me from mapping...

Tsk tsk

(PS - Heh - Newer version of company website now availiable for heckling:

http://www.lakescot.co.uk/

At least it shows up in Google now, down with frames!!!!) 

jpg sucks for such graphics, gets distortion on sharp boundaries.

Also I'd say go for a more pro look. It's clean but amateurish. Too big text, weird colors etc... 

That website (V2) was a quick fix just to get it onto google. I think it looks better than the first one, although I should have removed all of the table borders.

New website is made from CSS and XHTML as suggested. Heh - I've been about a decade behind with my web skillz. :-(

That CSS is eating up my mapping time. Ah well, atleast I'll be able to make a decent website for myself after I've learned all this!

CSS is ace man! The only thing that was bugging me is trying to get an outline around fonts without having to use a java plugin type thingy. I dont think it's possible. Opacity function is cool, also rollover is cool and doesnt require Java. I've learned a hell of a lot in the last 72 hours about web-authoring!

Heh, I'll post another link after I've released the new one. Fuck me - 42 hits and I bet not one of them was a prospective customer! :P

All just nosey Quake fans 

after I've released the new one

that almost sounded is if it were a new level or something, as if a single person who reads this is gonna find it even vaguely interesting. 

I love tinkering around and played with that page, take or leave it for further fun. No idea how it renders in different browsers and OSs, but it shouldn't be too bad.
http://www.quaddicted.com/stuff/rickyt23/
At least the code should be a decent base for you.
I will remove it once you replied so no search engine spiders it.

Java is not Javascript. And do not use Javascript unless you MUST. :p 

that's useful for many people who do web design every now and then 

semantic classnames and ids, please. 

Well, Your suggestion looks pretty pro, as in its smart aesthetically pleasing!

this is what I've done since posting V2:

http://www.lakescot.co.uk/default.htm

It's not finished. I think a custom google search is a good suggestion, I was looking into that a bit last night too.

Also I'm planning on fixing up the colours a bit more, fixing up boxes/headers for the body text etc etc etc

The idea of forms is something I have never tried. It would be useful to be able to do surveys and eventually we plan to have an online ordering system, but I think its a couple of steps off of that atm.

TBH I think the graphics could be improved a lot. I was finding the whole css/xhtml thing dead INTERESTING last night. 

you need to get rid of the bullet points in the menu, center the logo and increase the horizontal and bottom padding of the text in the content box.

Ricky, your second version looks awful, to be honest. The menu is hardly legible (not enough contrast), the text runs against the borders, the logo text is horrible and your choice of colors is bad. 

I name classes and ids depending on their purpose. Dunno what's not semantic about a listing with fixed narrow width named "narrowlisting".

Ricky: Eeeeek, the colors! 

Naming classes - a bit like naming entities in Quake. You can either call them something obvious like "grunt_balcony_1" or use your imagination and call them something like "evilzombiefucker" or "coldshit" or "frederick" or whatever...

What does semantic mean?

Also I fixed the company logo on the bottom right corner of the screen too!

Heh - I'll give another heads up when its a bit prettier! 

Does anybody use anything other than just notepad to script web-pages? I mean I've looked at stuff like NVU but found it over complicated things for me (personally) 

I use Eclipse, but that's because I use it for other things as well. Probably overkill for just HTML/CSS. 

narrowlisting does not convey information about the contents of the element, only about the styling, which you want to seperate out of the html in the first place.

id="article" is a nice semantic name. 

I disagree. You cannot generalise that.
If you have a very distinct website where every element has it's unique place then such semantic names are nice.
If you have a more random site with different stuff here and there then it might be a good idea to name the styles after how they end up looking like.
In other words if I might want to re-use a certain style with some completely different content, then I would be a dumbass to give it a "content" name.

In the end it all comes down to what YOU feel works best for YOU. 

... an attribute :P