For years, I've been told by a certain portion of people that most of bogleech displays funny and almost unreadably so. Pictures overlap text and text has far too many line breaks.

The whole site is made with Yahoo! sitebuilder, which I know has problems, but it's too late to fix. I'd have to not only get a different program set up but go through hundreds and hundreds of pages, remaking them from scratch.

I can recreate the problem when I zoom in or out in firefox. Anything but the default view looks completely screwy. Other people can't seem to fix it no matter what, and there doesn't seem to be any consistent details....no particular browser, operating system or settings are shared by everyone who experiences this.

I've been stressed about it off and on for years without any explanations or solutions in sight. Can anybody figure anything out here? I complained to the sitebuilder people once or twice, but they just told me "it looks fine to us."

Well, it sounds like its their problem, not yours.

From the sound of it it's just their settings.

I don't think so, since they don't seem able to change it like I can.

Yeah I never had a problem with your site on firefox, IE, or google chrome, but your newest article screwed up for me. (this one http://bogleech.com/bio-parasitoids.html)

Scythe, just type up the pages in HTML. It's ridiculously simple, and won't skew.

On a related subject, have you thought about switching over to a more Web 2.0 format (for example http://www.marchanddetrucs.com/ ), and one that draws more attention to your creative endeavors? I wouldn't be too concerned except that you've indicated before this is your primary means of income, and you could be losing a lot of potential business by not catching a would-be customer's eye.

Actually the site doesn't make me hardly any money at all, I'm living off student loans :P

I positively suck at html. I make so many mistakes trying to make a page in it and get overwhelmed with frustration trying to identify and fix them. Otherwise I definitely would have tried to make the site flashier looking a long time ago...or at least have a background that displays outside of the page margins like most other sites.

The original had been made many years ago in a different software, which sitebuilder came to replace. It probably screwed up from updating it with the new stuff....I just tried to copy all its content into a newly created sitebuilder page, is it working any different now?

Dude, the problem with your site is, and I quote a web developer friend - 'it's old as fucking dirt and works about as well as sand in a vagina'.

You're using a shitty site builder that's been outdated for AT LEAST a decade, you have an inefficient update method, crap pages that don't display properly and a lot of good information, interesting articles and creative endeavors buried under shit and fail.

This is why you haven't taken off yet when other people have.

Solution: Build a new site. Yourself. Or pay someone a flat rate to do it.

That's no excuse. : | (Coming from someone who still messed up coding from time to time after dealing with it for years...)

If I had more time I'd build the damn thing for you just to stop the agony my eyes experience whenever I click over to read an interesting article Rev has linked me.

Really, web 2.0. COME ON. IT LIKES YOU.

..........IN THE BUTT.

They still update yahoo sitebuilder :(

Some of my pages are html, like mortasheen entries and the webcomics, but I had to figure out how to make just one and keep copying it as a template for myself.

What about dreamweaver and junk? What are those other ones? Is dreamweaver a thing? Am I talking about the right thing?

I don't know exactly what web 2.0 means.

Dreamweaver is basically only useful if you have advanced knowledge of html and php otherwise you will stumble into its embrace and promptly have your wallet stolen, your holes raped and every ounce of your self respect dissolved in an acid bath of sperm.

It's a great program, and I like it for some things, but I wouldn't exactly push that towards a beginner. Start with notepad, make little 'Hello World' html pages, work your way up.

Web 1.0 = you. Web 2.0 = everything else in the universe with exclusion of a few, hellish renegades clinging to yahoo and geoshitties and their prefab nonsense.

If I were in your position and not terribly up on html in its current form, I'd probably take a look at things like wordpress and other content apps. There is a bit of fiddling you'd have to do with a template like that but it's very easy. It also allows for a lot of widgets and built in stuff, like twitter etc. that will help with exposure and link backs.

Do you actually OWN your webspace, or are you renting for free?

I started the site on yahoo, I pay for a domain through them and it's impossible to move honestly. No way I could start over from scratch, and yes, sitebuilder enslaves you to a yahoo server.

Ten years ago it was the best option, but there's no going back now and I'm not about to start all over on some other domain when the site is only now really starting to climb and come up high in a lot of relevant searches.

I just got dreamweaver the non-money way, I thought it was ALSO suitable for people who didn't know html? That's what I was always told anyway.

I like my site content and appearance almost just the way it is, I just want to make sure it works properly for everybody, so I'd really have to go through one by one and remake every page in whatever.

Thats fine

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/default.asp
the best html refnce on the web

http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/default.asp
good for java


http://www.lynda.com/Dreamweaver-training-...CFWUEQAodG11R6Q
Dream weaver tutorials

what about frontpage?

You know what, forget I said anything.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/frontpage-help/
there this might help


http://www.expression-web.net/
Also give expression a try its just he upgarded verion of fornt page.

I said almost the way it is :(

It would be nice to have some kind of social networking and maybe a prettier layout but I don't think I can come up with something totally new from the ground up or anything.

I always thought the look of my site was presentable by token of being so minimal. That is, I always went for "inoffensive" rather than "impressive." What part is eye-raping?

If you had any specific suggestions I'd at least know what we're talking about exactly :P

Scythe, if you take your website seriously and have half as much free time on your hands as I've heard you claim to you can't feasibly hide behind the "TOO MUCH WORK" excuse :| I know the Mortasheen RPG work is taking time up at the moment, but that will hit an end at some point in the near future.

I figured out HTML at the age of eleven. In my late teens, I went through and methodically transferred a shitload of pages to update a site layout update of my own - at least twice. Besides that, you have a devoted and sizable fanbase - if you need help transferring a bulk of information to new files, you can just ask us for help :P

And, come now. You're an artist. There's no way you can't take a critical look at your current site layout, compare it to the prevailing Internet style of the day, and go "Ooohh yeah, that looks kind of bad."

Also -

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread....9541#post814030

This should take care of your domain transfer problems. (Remember, Google is your all-knowing friend!)

That thread makes it sound like I run the risk of losing everything if I move D: ...I know I'd have to redo all my pages with better software first anyway, because if you transfer things made with sitebuilder to a non-yahoo domain they're fucked up for everybody, on purpose.

I have no idea what the prevailing style is. I thought my site just looked like any run-of-the-mill blog does, which I thought was considered just "adequate."

I know I have to update the technical stuff, but I have no ideas at all for improving the aesthetic. Anyone who does is welcome to submit them :P

That's why we have templates, Scythe.

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

Additionally, to help you understand good design principles:
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/09/25...oming-together/

^I mentioned #15 on that list earlier in this thread, as I think it's a particularly good example of what you should be going for. Something integrating Mortasheen characters (perhaps even animated) into the layout itself would probably be a good idea - it's 2011, Scythe! Think of the possibilities!


Also, start Googling shit. You know how to research.

I honestly don't have a problem with the way the site looks, as I find a lot of 2.0 pages look 'crammed' and busy. Still, if you feel like you're being passively blackmailed to stick with one web developing program, you really don't need to feel that way. Looking at the source code of your site, it's mostly just html tables and the like which would be pretty easy to copy and paste into a new html document. Add that to the fact that your pages are, for the most part, extremely simple and straightforward, and I don't believe transferring things would be that grueling a process.

To give you an example of a purely html, extremely minimalist page, here's mine ( :ooze: ):

http://www.lucidstillness.com/

It may look a bit rubbish, but everything on that entire website took about 2 hours to put together, all told (and I really should devote some time to making it pretty, I know). My site's pages aren't that much simpler than yours, and once you figure out what basic html format you want to use you can polish off dozens of pages in under an hour.

If you're serious about reworking the site, I recommend starting by coding a few pages in html yourself, possibly using templates if you're more comfortable that way.

Here's the site that taught me all about html and javascript back in high school. It holds your hand through all the basic stuff, and gives you a lot of references to work with:

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/introduction/about/

Also, while your advice is valid guys, you could stand to be a tad more polite. Come on, we've talked about this.

Probably your best bet would be maintaining the old site as you build a new one. Move things over bit by bit, as you build the new system. Then ditch the old entirely when you have everything over.

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/smallbusi.../cancel-04.html

Domain transfer help from Yahoo itself.

I thought wordpress was just a blog, like blogger, where people who see it immediately know that you made it in wordpress :(

I don't know anything about all the internets they have now.

I was still thinking of "blogs" and "websites" as two distinctly different things up until recently :(

Yes, exactly (regarding the slow and steady transfer). :maggot:

Really good websites built with a wordpress engine don't look like wordpress, they become their own creature. It's basically just a foolproof way to create a Mysql database with tags and search functions without creating one from scratch on your own. Which even for pros can be dicky and dysfunctional. THIS IS WHY DATABASES ARE FUN.

Scut, you are fucking blind and your site is so horrible no creature on this planet with functioning eyes would ever look at it. Sorry, dude, but if you want to present anything approaching a professional image, design matters.

Scut, I fully support being nice, but not at the expense of failing to give someone a needed kick in the pants.

You'll notice the site has no ads, no paypal links, no blog links, or absolutely anything resembling a professional site. You're calling ME blind? Anybody who knows the smallest thing about web development knows that site is in no way complete!

My point is that it isn't hard to put together the building blocks of a website yourself. Anyone can do it, and once you know the basics you can build whatever you want. Back in my undergraduate, I used to work as a web developer all the time for clients, and I've worked with hundreds of templates that all follow the same basic principles.

Learn the basics, and the rest falls into place.

I'm fiddling in dreamweaver and have no idea what I'm doing. I might try Expression Web, which all these internet reviews say is like a much better, more modern and easier frontpage.

I'm accustomed to having everything dumbly laid out. A button to change the background color, being able to just drag and drop all your crap into the page and so forth.

Did they pay you in monopoly money or rape dollars?

Also when you present something as an example, we assume that's the limit of your technical ability.

WordPress is a better choice, I'd think, given all I've heard about it. (Jill warned you, you should probably listen to her.)

Also if it's something new, don't expect to learn it all at once.

The main page works fine and so do most of the articles. It's just the new ones.

I will help you build a wordpress shell because I am a fucking idiot, but I will help you on my own time. If that's acceptable, let me know.

...Even though I just said I threw it together in two hours as an example of pure, basic html? Okay, whatever.

Scythe: I'm curious, have you used cascading style sheets in the past? Because it sounds like they would solve all of your formatting problems nicely, not to mention take the labour out of manually changing everything.

I already mentioned this stuff, Scythe and I have been carrying on a private conversation for a while now.

I like you Scut, I just think your design skills are shit. Sorry. :wobbuffet:

PHP is great, but I wouldn't recommend it for somebody learning the basics, for the very good reason that the naming conventions are not consistent. Some functions are verb_noun() and others are noun_verb(), some are underscore_separated, etc. And don't get me stated on sort(), arsort(), asort(), ksort(), natsort(), natcasesort(), rsort(), usort(), array_multisort(), and uksort()...In my opinion, for what it's worth, you're better off first learning how all your basic html stuff works before getting too fancy. That way, when something inevitably goes wrong, you'll have some idea of what the Hell just happened.

Of course, if you do hire somebody to redo the entire site using templates, you probably won't have to worry about any of this stuff if you don't want to. That actually isn't that expensive an option at all; I mostly used templates as a web developer, and even back in 2005 it was pretty quick to get the kind of things people were looking for.

(Sigh) I suppose now I'm obligated to go back and finish that site. I was just using it as an image dump, but if I'm going to keep using it I'll HAVE to make it pretty. :pop:

Oh, and one word of caution about Wordpress; if you get a 'cannot delete old posts or pages' error, try disabling certain plug ins. You won't waste nearly the amount of time I did. :ooze:

Also, it was rape dollars, but at the time the exchange rate was pretty good.

You spent probably an hour and a half looking up all the PHP code didn't you? Slowly, every so slowly it trickled in bit by bit as if I wouldn't question your veracity or knowledge on the subject.

Honestly, my blog looks like ass right now and I can't wait to finish it off. It needs some serious work. If you want to see what you can do in wordpress in twenty minutes THAT should tell you. It took me longer to write the first four articles than it did to code the site, outside of a minor explosion when html standards updated across the web and the old code written into the CSS background values shit itself sideways. But that was easy enough to fix. It's not pretty, but I have a search function godammit. And tags. Lots of them.

Actually, as students we were all so poor and in debt that we were paid in nothing BUT rape dollars.

I've only used PHP a few times in the past, and while it's a powerful tool I never really felt comfortable using it. If you still don't believe me though...okay? I honestly have a hard time getting a read on you with this. It's like you want to fight about web formatting, which sounds like the nerdiest fight ever.

If it's no bother I could totally use the help. It's no hurry since the site still seems to work for 80% of people and I'm still supposed to be working on game art stuff anyway for the next few weeks, instead of writing about weird bees or whatever else I do.

That's what's more alarming because logically old pages should have the compatability problems.
:pop:

I sent you a note about it.

It's not trouble. I should be doing more of this stuff anyway, I like coding. A lot. It's soothing. Like the screams of men shitting out babies.