After a lot of work, it's live!!!

[kriskd]

I downloaded WebsiteBaker on September 3 and have been working on my site since.  Tonight I finally decided to go live.  Here it is:

http://www.westportsquares.com/

I created this site for my 66-year-old Mom to maintain for her square dance club.  Previously she used FrontPage (yuck!) for her webpage and although it was impressive she could manage a webpage on her own, the content was not organized well.  See the Internet Archive to see how her site used to look.

My Mom seems to have taken to the admin panel, but will still require my support at least in the short term.

I designed the template from scratch and then put the CMS behind it.  I'm using the following addons:

• Bookmarks
• Event Calendar
• Last Update Info
• Another Image Gallery
• Random Image
• Show Menu 2

I struggled with (1) understanding Show Menu and what I wanted to achieve, followed by (2) the technical end of Show Menu 2, and finally (3) styling it.  For that I need to extend thanks to the CSS wizards at Dev Shed.

My other big struggle was the add comments page form.  Works fine in FF, but the whole page got cut off in IE6.  Fixed that with a <p></p> with a clear in it.  (That problem took me all day today!).  I still get some weirdness with that page in IE7, but I can live with it.

Two mods I tried, but didn't work for me was the Google Map and Mass Mail.  The Google Map just wasn't right for this site and Mass Mail would be a good fit for this site, but there didn't seem to be way to review who was on your mailing list.

Along the way I stripped out all the tables in the various mods as I can't stand the site of table tags (personal preference, there are a lot of great looking sites out there that use tables).  However, I might have to bring them back for the two "Dates" pages.  I'm not happy with them now and they are really meant for tables.

Thank you to everyone who has helped me along the way and I welcome any comments you might have on my new design!

[Waldschwein]

Hi!

I like the site quite much, and the "events" page is really nice designed.

But in InternetExplorer7 the background of the page is twice as wide as the page itself. It doesn't really bother, but it isn't really looking that nice. In Opera and Firefox it's ok.

Regards Michael
 

[DGEC]

Couple of comments.

Glad to see you've seen the light & ditched FrontPage - I have yet to convert my wife! 

Urgent fix - The map is not working!

One thought about the design - it might be easier on "tired eyes" if the background was a lighter shade. I find it a bit hard to read and any seniors that are having problems will be worse off. On the same theme, you might want to consider removing the fixed font sizes or at least increasing the base sizes.  Check with the audience to make sure though of course.

About the wide screen size in IE, is there a 3rd column DIV for the pictures or did you delete the third column of a "3 column" template?

[kriskd]

Hi!

I like the site quite much, and the "events" page is really nice designed.

But in InternetExplorer7 the background of the page is twice as wide as the page itself. It doesn't really bother, but it isn't really looking that nice. In Opera and Firefox it's ok.

Regards Michael
 

I struggled with this page which has that huge left-right scroll in IE7 much of the day yesterday.  I don't believe that happens to any other page except for the comments input page.

I would love to fix this problem, but I ended up settling, because the original problem on this page was much worse.  In IE6, the entire page cut off after the 2nd heading (the text after Comment).  What ended up fixing it was a clear in a <p> tag.  Not the most elegant, but at least the page no longer cut off.

What made this even more odd is when I'd copy the generated HTML and view it as a static html page, it was fine.  It only occurred with what WSB generated. 

Are you getting twice as long pages on all the pages?  I don't have IE7 on this computer (I dislike IE and am a Firefox gal all the way) so I'll have to pull out my laptop where I do have IE7 and check it out there.

Couple of comments.

Glad to see you've seen the light & ditched FrontPage - I have yet to convert my wife! 

Urgent fix - The map is not working!

One thought about the design - it might be easier on "tired eyes" if the background was a lighter shade. I find it a bit hard to read and any seniors that are having problems will be worse off. On the same theme, you might want to consider removing the fixed font sizes or at least increasing the base sizes.  Check with the audience to make sure though of course.

About the wide screen size in IE, is there a 3rd column DIV for the pictures or did you delete the third column of a "3 column" template?

Thanks for the alert about the map.  It has been fixed!

All my fonts are percentage based so it would be easy enough to increase them.  My Mom hasn't said anything about the font size or background color although given the amount of work I've put into this, she might be reluctant to ask for anything else!

The template is a 2-column design.  The front page though uses a different, slightly modified template.  I added a div that floats on the right side of the pages for the "strip" of pictures.  That is where I have the random image mod.

[kriskd]

Solved my horizontal scroll problem!  Turned out I needed "overflow-x:hidden;" in my footer due to my <p> being floated to the right.  Can't take credit for figuring this out, got the solution from another message forum.

[DGEC]

Confirmed, works fine in IE7 now. Awesome!
Ah, nested, floated divs. Work lovely, don't they, when they work. Have to look up that scrolling issue fix. I recall seeing something about it but not how it works. If you're not aware of them, but an excellent reference for CSS (and other) quirks is the PIE pages - positioniseverythin g.net
Required reading!!


I know what you mean about the effort required.  Incidentally, I forget where I spied them, but I definitely saw something fixed somewhere, I think "12pt". Some of the modules might generate them, or possibly they were in the CSS. Oh, I think it was the CSS, although maybe not used. Just something to remember. At least IE7 lets you magnify, which doesn't cause any reformatting issues 

[kriskd]

Hmmm.... if you find exactly where there is a declared 12pt font, I'd appreciate it.    I searched my style sheet but didn't find anything.  Also checked the source code of a few of the generated pages, but nothing.  Hmmmm.....

PIE is many of my bookmarked pages.  I refer to it regularly! 

[DGEC]

If you checked your stylesheet & index/html, then I'd check the modules. Other than that, maybe I got confused with another site. I rarely have only one page open 

Yep, PIE is yummy