One more good netizen
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Yeah, I’ve already covered this topic with him, albeit too late. 
Evidently, Rar-kai is a name he regularly goes by in online games, with the hyphen, and he thought it would keep it easy to remember for friends.
Oh well. 
Yeah, I chose the name of the site before i thought about how easy or difficult it would be to explain it to people. I think im going to purchase rarkai.net and link it where it opens Rar-kai.net. I am waaay new to html.. so much so that im looking at people source pages, and sort of copying the html once i understand how it works. Derek has givin me some extremly helpful hints how to use the coding cleanly though. (thanks ~D) ~Greg
Seems My spelling has a long way to go though....
Ok, mini tutorial for you here, until you have time to read through the CSS primers I showed you, Greggo, and a few things I noticed:
You’re missing a closing tag on the last paragraph.
Your banner image isn’t closed properly (remember the “ />").
Speaking of images, you should always have an alt value. This is what shows up while the page is loading in some browsers, but more importantly, if someone has images turned off, they can see what they’re missing. It also gives context to the image which is important for search engines and a plethora of other things. At any rate, it’s easily fixed, by adding the value alt="description of the image” in the tag. You can just drop it behind the height and width if you like. Also important--your code won’t validate if your image tags don’t properly close or have alt values.
Lastly, there is a better way to show a list of links than using multiple paragraphs. As a matter of fact, there’s a tag just for that purpose. OL or “ordered list” and UL or “unordered list”. You can look at the code for the menu links on the right to see how its used. Basically, though:
<ul>
<li>List item or link #1</li>
<li>List item or link #2</li>
...
</ul>
And one other thing that’s more personal to me than correct, but I would wager that the majority would agree with me--use all lowercase for your code. It’s easier to read, and your code doesn’t have any reason to yell at anyone.
> And one other thing that’s more personal to me than correct, but I would wager that the majority would agree with me--use all lowercase for your code.
Actually, for :XHTML: code, all tags and attributes have to be lowercase. For regular :HTML: that isn’t required. Anyway, some other comments/pointers about your current site and code, Greg:
- You should always define a DOCTYPE. That tells your browser what kind of page you’re using (i.e. HTML 3, HTML 4, XHTML, etc.)
- On your page you currently have this code:
<html>
<head>
<title>Rar-Kai.net - Spammers Go To Hell!</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<body bgcolor="#CCCCCC">
<img src="/images/TopLogo.jpg" width="600" height="119"></p> </head>
If you notice, you’re starting your <body> before you close the <head>. Try this instead:
<html>
<head>
<title>Rar-Kai.net - Spammers Go To Hell!</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#CCCCCC">
<img src="/images/TopLogo.jpg" width="600" height="119"></p>
- Don’t hesitate to look around the ”(X)HTML & CSS” and ”Web Development” sections here on the site since there are tons of good resources for people of all skill levels.
Good luck!
Many, Many thanks, i dont have so much time to work on it today, and this weekend im going to see my girlfreind for the first time in like 2-3 weeks… so maybe monday night after i start throwing resumes in Louisville...i can get a good fix on it. Im currently using Dreamweaver… would you recomend anything else? ~Greg
Well, if you do use Dreamweaver when you get to Louisville, please only use it in code mode. You’ll thank me later. It *is* a nice code editor since it’s colored and whatnot, and fairly helpful with command reference.
But, since you are on Windows at home, I think a more robust text editor would be the better option. I think Chris uses UltraEdit.
Oh dear god man...a star background?? I can’t tell you how bad an idea it is to use a dark background with light colored text, even without the space-imagery you’re forcing upon the masses.
OK OK i changed it back.. do you think i can get away with all the buttons i made myself as long as they link to the site for which its made? or is that infringement of some sort..?
I certainly don’t think that any of them would mind a link with a self-made banner, but it’s good practice to have a copyright section for your site. In it’s fledling state, you’d do fine with just putting one in a smaller typeface at the bottom, and credit the sources of your image in that copyright. Look at the bottom of any of the pages here on Chris’s site to see an example of a simple one.
Now would be a good time to introduce you to include files. An [google]include file[/google] lets you put a single line in all of your site’s pages that call in code from a particular file. The benefit is that that one line never changes on your site files individually, but you can make changes to that one file, ergo updating your entire site.
Well, the first tip—and, unfortunately, it appears to be coming too late—is to never choose a domain name with hyphens in it.
My personal test to the “goodness” of a domain name is how easily you can tell it to someone over the phone. If you have to say something like “rar hyphen kai dot net”, then that’s not good. Having to clarify with “all one word” is bad, too.
“chris curtis dot net” is easy to say and understand. My old domain of “lethargynet dot com” is not good because there’s the natural confusion when people don’t really listen and instead hear “lethary.net”.
You can see a bunch of sites (or at least pages) devoted to the art of choosing a good domain name.
By Chris Curtis on October 15, 2003 at 01:07pm link