hi everyone

First I wanted to say thanks to everyone for their support on this forum, I am still learning about all this website building, you have all been great and I appreciate it, hopefully in time I will be able to help others out

ok so I know I have gotten reviewed before but I would really like to know what you all think of the website now, I have changed a few things and added stuff, I think I am getting somewhere, but I know you guys will be honest with me, so if you like or dont like something please let me know

thanks

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www.thechildrenspartyplanner.com

http://a-mother-at-home.blogspot.com/

I like your site. It is great to have something you can have fun with and always be upbeat. I work a lot with financial stuff and especially now not everything is so positive, especially for some folks. Anyway, I wish you lots of success.

For one thing, I like having a lot of color in view of your subject, but I think the text color needs a little adjustment. It does not need to be black. The color does need to be a little deeper tone, though, to help with readability. For example, try #65016B. It is the same color, basically, but darker and easier to read. I would try something like that for the header and body text.

Another thing I would definitely do is remove the underlining of links in the left navigation. That, and I would also change the style so that it is title case rather than all caps. Just making these two changes to the navigation would make the site look much more professional.

Finally, the home page needs broken up a little. On every other page, I think, you have done quite a bit to do that, but the home page is what you call "gray." A lot of text with no images or subtitles, etc. To illustrate what a difference, notice the bold type on this post for the three points. This is not a really good illustration, but it is another example of one simple way to do it.

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Good Success!
James
Douglas County Master Gardeners
"We don't always get what we want, but we always get what we expect."

Thanks

To be honest I wasnt happy with the colours, especially the text colour, and I am not sure how to take the underline off the links,

I am using dreamweaver 4 and it seems stuck on the font colour and I cant seem to change the font style, is there any way to change it on every page instead of doing it manually?

I have changed the colour of the text to the darker shade and I like it, I wanted to change the links text colour but it didnt work?

__________________
www.thechildrenspartyplanner.com

http://a-mother-at-home.blogspot.com/

hmmm... are you sure want to remove the underline from the links? coz underlines helps visitors/users to know if this text is a LINK or NOT a LINK... anyways... here is how you will remove underline from the text:

open your dreamweaver's source code window(windows>>HTML source) then select the link you want to remove the underline from
add tag after the tag of the link you selected
for example: after that.. the underline of the selected link should be gone...


and here's how you will modify/change the font colors for the LINKS...


go to modify>>page properties menu or hit CTRL+J on your keyboard... then a Page Properties dialogue box will prompt.. from there... you can change the Links...Active links.. and Visited links' colours...

hope this helps...
Go0dluck!

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MissANN

I see you already changed the text color and added some <b> tags. It really did make a big difference, didn't it. Good work.

First, a small thing. Using <b> or <i> is not the recommended way to go. Instead use <strong> and <emphasis> which will get the same result. The reason is that the former is using html style, a practice which is going out. It is better to plan on learning to use css for style. In the long run this will save you a lot of work. A lot.

A good example is in changing the text color. You did that in the html and changed the color for the body. Not too bad since one place did it for the whole page but you must still do it on each page. With css you could do it once for your whole site. What if you had 200 pages? And what if it were for some tag that appeared ten times on each page? With css, still just one change on a separate style page.

Now for the links. As MissANN notes, some people like to leave the lines under links. That is why I didn't suggest changing all of them. I do myself, even in the content, and use another color for the links to set them apart. I like that better. Everyone should use their own judgment considering what MissANN points out.

But in the left hand navigation, everyone knows that these are links and they are distinguished by color as well. Your navigation looks a lot better already without the caps. As you look at the navigation of other sites you will notice that there are a lot of ways to do them and some do look a lot better than others. (Some are overdone, as well, in my opinion.)

I am not sure what all Dreamweaver will do for you automatically so I do not know if MissANN's directions will work or not myself. (I am not saying they won't. She obviously knows dreamweaver and I have never looked at it. I code directly with a text editor.) But you may have some difficulty in that your html is not set up now to use css at all.

You need some code in the head to set it up. Also, these instructions will work only on this one page and will affect all links on the page. So if you want to leave the links in the text underlined you need some additional work.

In this case, if you would need to set a "class" or "id" for the navigation and then designate that this navigation alone would be affected by the instruction style="text-decoration:none" by pointing to that class or id.

Perhaps later I can find some time to help a little, or someone else can if you want to do it. But let me recommend that you go to w3schools.com and read a little in the tutors about css. In just a few hours you can get the basics which would help you know how to go about these things yourself. I think you will find it to be pretty easy to do.

In the long run, keeping your style in a single style sheet rather than coding each item throughout the site will really pay off.

__________________
Good Success!
James
Douglas County Master Gardeners
"We don't always get what we want, but we always get what we expect."

james, you were absolutely correct about the underlined links, because those were more like site navigation rather than links

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James

Thank you, I didn't know about css, I knew what I wanted to do (which turned out to be all the things that css can do) but not how to do it and I was going a bit mad editing every page anytime I wanted to change anything, well more than a bit mad.

So this is what I have done now, it may not be right but I was really just playing around with it.

I went into dreamweaver, found anything to do with css and had a go at it.
I have only done the home page and the birthday page so far, it will take a while to sort all the pages and Im not set on the colour scheme or design yet but I can really see how much time this is going to save me when I have it all set up

So thank you very much!

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www.thechildrenspartyplanner.com

http://a-mother-at-home.blogspot.com/

Glad to see you making this move. You are making some real progress in your ability to work with your site.

I see a couple of things I think you will want to deal with.

First you really need to set a doctype for your site files. Again, w3schools.com explains this so I won't go into too much detail, but this is just a statement that goes into your code at the top so that browsers know what kind of html you are using.

Without it each browser guesses at a lot of stuff and you cannot depend on how your site is going to look in various browsers. You don't have to understand much about it, just follow a consistent practice of having it pasted at the top of your pages.

I am sure (without knowing from experience) that dreamweaver has a setting for you to choose among the program options and it will insert it every time you want to create a new page.

Another thing I noticed is that in your head code you are now setting up and referencing a different css file for each part of your page. While you can have more than one for a variety of reasons in a more complex site, you really only want one for now and will use the same one for all of your pages. You can put the content of all the ones you have now into one called style.css or default.css or whatever.

__________________
Good Success!
James
Douglas County Master Gardeners
"We don't always get what we want, but we always get what we expect."

If you are going to take the underlines away from your link you should have it come back when people hover over your links.

<style>
a {
text-decoration: none;
}

a :HOVER{
text-decoration: underline;
}
</style>

alana your progress is great, you have improved lots of things
but still a few more I can see:

1. in the body table your width is <<table width="1142">> which makes you have to scroll right and left to see the whole content, it should be =1024 which is the default most users use
2. the links on the left are now ordinaty text not links, I don't no if that is for a purpose or you forgot to link them
3. I'm not sure if this one is correct or not but I think that the Google ad ai the end of the pages should be above the copyrights and contact link

but an overall great improvemet,
for the best
yours, amr

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check out my Blog Marketing Tips Series , "Part 9" Other Forms Of Content

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Thanks everyone for all your help and suggestions, am a bit confused with it all!

The things that have been bothering me with my site are the very things you all mentioned only I had no idea how to go about changing them so thanks for the information, I will have to work at it bit by bit

There is one big thing that kinda drives me crazy though, so maybe someone could advise me?

As you know until a couple of months ago I had never done anything with my computer except surf and shop, email and the basics really that most people do, so when I decided I wanted to try and build a website, I looked up how on the net

I started a free website and within a few weeks I realised that it was never going to be the website I wanted it to be so I bought my domain name and host.

Heres part of the problem. I had no idea what to do then! none at all. I asked a friend who said I needed a html editor, so I downloaded the free coffeecup one and couldn't make any sense out of it, so he gave me his old version of dreamweaver which I now use

So I opened up dreamweaver for the first time, set up the site info, opened a new page, designed it as best I could, saved it as the first page, deleted the content on that page, put in new content saved it as a different name and so on until I had the amount of pages I now have. So when it comes to changing the width of my site, or adding a new link to the navigation on the left, I have to go and change it on every page.

So have I started it completely wrong?, I have learned a bit since then, but this is driving me mad, what should I have done? and mostly will I have to start the site from scratch and do it right

sorry about the long post, hope its not too confusing

__________________
www.thechildrenspartyplanner.com

http://a-mother-at-home.blogspot.com/

alana,

You need to setup includes. Here's a thread about that...

http://www.websitebabble.com/html-ph...-all-once.html

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Thanks lisa

I just tried it there and it worked it will save me weeks of updating that I was planning to do

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www.thechildrenspartyplanner.com

http://a-mother-at-home.blogspot.com/

I never heard about includes before but I read the thread lisa proposed and it's a good solution, but just for the next time you wanna design a website

you should use something in dreamweaver called "templates"


anyway about Templates

when you design a new site in dream weaver open an html page
and design your main web theme that will be constant on every page . o.k

when you finish that
insert editable regions in the places that you will want to change according to the page such as your main content and sub links.
how that's done
Insert/template objects/editable region/

then when you're done press File/save as template

close it and when you want to design a new page with the same template
press File/new
then press the Template tab and select the site mane then the template you designed

of course you can make many templates for different parts of your site

and there is a post I made before that tells you how to set up a site properly in dreamweaver so you could apply this template method the link is
http://www.websitebabble.com/web-des...html#post26749

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check out my Blog Marketing Tips Series , "Part 9" Other Forms Of Content

A Guide To Egypt Learn about the Egyptian Climate and more!

Alana,

First relax. You have done some great work. You have a nice looking site because you have good visual and design capabilities. A lot of technical people would like to have the skills you have.

The technical adjustments are potentially frustrating because they are unknowns to you. But they will not be that difficult. The time consuming part is the content and none of that time has been wasted.

If you want I will try to help you step by step to deal with getting the basics into order. It should not be too hard. You can learn to use includes, but actually most of what you need first (for example the width) can be set by one change in your css as soon as it is arranged a little.

Unfortunately (for this situation), I do not use Dreamweaver. But if you want to use Dreamweaver you could use the code view to make changes. If you don't mind doing this here, beginners may learn how to make a few changes. And the real experts like TechieGuy can keep me from leading you astray.

I can post up the actual code and show the changes. I would only do a few basics to show how it is done. I am sure you will take off quickly.

[An aside to mirage2009, using templates is certainly OK. It is only what you put in them that matters. And even if you do things the older way it is no crime. Mostly it is that you create lots of unnecessary work later on and make it difficult for accessibility, especially for the blind, etc.]

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Good Success!
James
Douglas County Master Gardeners
"We don't always get what we want, but we always get what we expect."