Website

[Martin]

I got a little bored earlier today and after helping Syn with the makings of his site I decided to have a crack at my own. Not done it this way in a while and so far have spent ages designing it, but, I think I need you're opinions! So far it currently looks like this: http://bromo.lancs.ac.uk/~brownm2/rand/Background.jpg.

I'm currently hosting on my university's webspace, it's free so why not! Thing is, with it's design I will slice it up at somepoint ready for html coding but I am unsure on how to make the banner, link and content panes look. Currently they are dark so I would have to use a light coloured font, but I don't know whether to do this the other way around. Also, I feel I may have 'over done' the use of tools on them. Any inputs on it's development stage would be helpful .

http://bromo.lancs.ac.uk/~brownm2/rand/index.htm is just another website of mine that I made once in college and hosted it so I could show Syn the methods of making a website this way. Just thought I'd share this one also.

[alchemistic]

The design is very pretty! It will make a very nice background

What did you create it in, PS? How did you save it? I know it's a .jpg, but wondering how you saved it...
Did you do "save for web"? How big is that image? (since it's a jpg)

A very good way to reduce the size without reducing the quality is to save in "save for web", then when that page loads, go to your presets and choose .jpg, make sure "Optimized" is checked, then you can choose your quality level. You can actually make that quite high (I use 70%) then click save...
I think that even if done way lower, like 40%, you'll lose very, very litlle quality for a design of your type (fewer colors then in a logo like mine for an example)

I tell you this because it will reduce the size of your .jpg to half (or more)
I prefer .jpg over .gif any day, but for rather large pics, you optimize them this way without losing any quality. It's really slick.

On my logo for healthnutzoasis.com, when it was done it was something like 198kb (when Lena sent it to me) I resaved it using this way and it's now only 68kb

This is going to make a huge difference for how fast your site loads...if you're like me and want quality, big designs

[Martin]

Afraid the background wasn't made by me, I'm nowhere near that good! It was just saved standardly in Photoshop as a .jpg, after I'd sliced it up then I would've 'saved for web' as either .jpg's or .png's. As it is it's around 800 KB (I saved it on quality setting 12 - usually just choose this setting either way for any .jpg).

Have learnt the difference file formats can make when used on the web from college, ie, .gif's are useful for transparency, .png's don't lose quality where a .jpg would etc (If I remember rightly anyway).

Fully sliced, that previous website is around 350 KB, but I think that could be partly down to there's less 'going on' in the picture... and hence it wasn't overly big when saved.

I think I'll give slicing it a go and then putting it on the web server and see what it's like. I can always add some dummy text to see how well it works (Or not!).

[Martin]

Sliced it fine, but I am too tired to fix it from splitting the content image away from others when displaying text (When the text should be on top of the image). Sleep for me!

[bee]

dude, you have the same name as my old man! your middle names don't happen to be douglas maleverer do they? lol

[alchemistic]

I grabbed it from the site, the pix dimensions were 2.30mg, I pasted it into a PS canvas, saved it like I said and managed to get it to 120kb and I don't see that it changed at all.
You want it?

[alchemistic]

dude, you have the same name as my old man! your middle names don't happen to be douglas maleverer do they? lol

What if his middle names were maleverer douglas?

[Martin]

dude, you have the same name as my old man! your middle names don't happen to be douglas maleverer do they? lol

What if his middle names were maleverer douglas?

Haha, sorry, but I have no middle name/s. Only Douglas was my grandad.

You want it?

Er, may as well, it'll do no harm! That way I can take a look.

[alchemistic]

K, I emailed it to ya...
Just see if you can see any difference in the quality being optimized

[Martin]

Cheers Alch. There's no real quality difference, but you can notice all the colours as a whole are a little lighter. I like it though .

I'm still unsure if what I've done will work though, I think grey coloured text would maybe work on it but I still think the white areas in the content pane would contrast too much, I'll just have to see.