What do you think?

[BalloonzForU]

I'm working on my site, got board with the old look. I've been working on the colors of the text and having a hard time, with the main text. I've tried, white, black, orange, even changing the font, bold, size, etc. Is it just me or is hard to read? Or can I get away with it the way it is?

http://www.leopardgeckobreeder.com/index2.html

 

[brandy101010]

It is pretty hard to read. I think orange would look good. Orange always looks good!

 

[Milwaukee Reptiles]

Very hard to read... especially on firefox on a widescreen. I think the problem you're having is that the background has too much variation between bright and dark, so you can't get a text color that's easy to read on both. I would either considerably darken the bright spots in the background and stick with a light text color (like your bright orange), or lighten the dark parts of the background and go with a dark font color.

The attachment shows what it looks like on my monitor.

 

[BalloonzForU]

WOW that's helps a lot. I don't have firefox and I don't have a wide screen, so I couldn't see it like that. The orange in the background is supposed to be in the middle. I'm going to try something else.

 

[BalloonzForU]

I changed some settings and cropped the back, does it still split the background image on your browser Brian?

 

[BalloonzForU]

It is pretty hard to read. I think orange would look good. Orange always looks good!

Brandy did it look the same as what Brian shows?

 

[Milwaukee Reptiles]

Here's what I have now (linked due to the fact that it's a 1900x1200 pixel image):
http://brianskibinski.com/Untitled-1.gif

 

[Milwaukee Reptiles]

And try http://brianskibinski.com/Untitled-2.gif for the background, change the main text to a lighter color (orange, maybe white). I still think the major readability issue is just the large variance in background brightness

 

[BalloonzForU]

LOL Brian I want your monitor!!!! Wow that is one big widescreen. My site 850 pix wide and you would fit a little over twice that!

Thank you for darkening up my image. I was having a hard time trying to do that. I think it looks much better. Still need to play around with the orange/yellow color on the page before I change all the pages.

Here's where it's at now. http://www.leopardgeckobreeder.com/index3.html

 

[Milwaukee Reptiles]

That's a lot easier to read. The other thing I would suggest is adding the following to your <Style> section of your header (or your .css file if you're using one) "body{background-repeat:none; background-color:#000000;}". That should give you only one image for the background instead of repeating, with the rest of the page being black. It's really only for large-monitor dorks like myself, but I think it'll look slightly more polished. And for the record, my monitor is only 15.4 inch (laptop), but everything is set really, really small

As for the image, all I did was draw a huge black rectangle that covered the image, and then set the transparency of the rectangle to approx 50%. I'm not sure what app you're using for image editing but most of the good image editing ones should be able to do this. Good luck and let me know if you need me to test it again

 

[BalloonzForU]

That's a lot easier to read. The other thing I would suggest is adding the following to your section of your header (or your .css file if you're using one) "body{background-repeat:none; background-color:#000000;}". That should give you only one image for the background instead of repeating, with the rest of the page being black. It's really only for large-monitor dorks like myself, but I think it'll look slightly more polished. And for the record, my monitor is only 15.4 inch (laptop), but everything is set really, really small

As for the image, all I did was draw a huge black rectangle that covered the image, and then set the transparency of the rectangle to approx 50%. I'm not sure what app you're using for image editing but most of the good image editing ones should be able to do this. Good luck and let me know if you need me to test it again

Thanks for your help Brian. The program I'm using is a site builder from Homestead.com I have access to add code to the header, but I don't think that worked when I placed it in. When I changed the size of my browser I could still see the image tile, so I removed the code.. Do you have an idea how I can get around it?

I have a 17" inch and my res is set at 1280x960, I can't imagine how small you have it to fit like that and still be able to read. LOL I want your eyes!!!

I'm using PaintShop Pro 8..... lol I'm sure I would have figured it out sooner or later, but I was practically cross eyed last night after updating my other website all day, (which I'm still not done with).

Well, I'm off to figure out how I want the rest of the layout to be. I'm going to play round with navigation now. fun fun fun.

 

[Milwaukee Reptiles]

Thanks for your help Brian. The program I'm using is a site builder from Homestead.com I have access to add code to the header, but I don't think that worked when I placed it in. When I changed the size of my browser I could still see the image tile, so I removed the code.. Do you have an idea how I can get around it?

I have a 17" inch and my res is set at 1280x960, I can't imagine how small you have it to fit like that and still be able to read. LOL I want your eyes!!!

I'm using PaintShop Pro 8..... lol I'm sure I would have figured it out sooner or later, but I was practically cross eyed last night after updating my other website all day, (which I'm still not done with).

Well, I'm off to figure out how I want the rest of the layout to be. I'm going to play round with navigation now. fun fun fun.

I noticed you had some style code already in there, although if you're using a builder you may not be able to edit it directly. If you can switch to HTML view at all find the section that looks like the following:

<STYLE type="text/css">
<!--
.navBackgroundNavigation1 { background-image:url('http://www.homestead.com/~media/elements/LayoutClipart/../LayoutClipart/NavTabs/Basic_Tab_White_Unselected.gif'); background-position: right; background-repeat:no-repeat }
.navBackgroundSelectedNavigation1 { background-image:url('http://www.homestead.com/~media/elements/LayoutClipart/../LayoutClipart/NavTabs/Basic_Tab_White_Selected.gif'); background-position: right; background-repeat:no-repeat }
-->
</STYLE>

and make it this instead:

<STYLE type="text/css">
<!--
body{background-repeat:no-repeat; background-color:Black;}

.navBackgroundNavigation1 { background-image:url('http://www.homestead.com/~media/elements/LayoutClipart/../LayoutClipart/NavTabs/Basic_Tab_White_Unselected.gif');
background-position: right; background-repeat:no-repeat
}
.navBackgroundSelectedNavigation1 { background-image:url('http://www.homestead.com/~media/elements/LayoutClipart/../LayoutClipart/NavTabs/Basic_Tab_White_Selected.gif'); background-position: right; background-repeat:no-repeat }
-->
</STYLE>

And as for my monitor... a good set of contacts and sitting really closely I like it really small because I can see many lines of code at the same time, which makes my job a little bit easier.

 

[BalloonzForU]

Wow that was easy! It worked. I can't change the format to HTML, I can add HTML. I just added that to the header, and it works! Yippy

The site builders is all point and click, I don't see any of the html except what I add to it, in a box. I'm trying to find a nav menu with drop down features that I can use with my site. Can you recommend one? Maybe a wizard type that just gives me the html when I'm done....lol.

 

[Milwaukee Reptiles]

There's a number of ways to get a drop down menu.
-CSS is preferred because it wil degrade well for people on alternative/old browsers. A little tricky to get the formatting working through, and probably not a great way to go until more people go to IE7.

-Javascript. There's a number of javascript solutions out there, some free and easy, and some not. I used DHTML Menu Builder because it compresses everything for you making it load faster, and on a large menu (see geckolist.com or milwaukeereptiles.com for the menu's using it). I know it costs like $50 though. I haven't used any of the free ones (mainly because I found they were kind of difficult to set up), but if you do a few google searches you should be able to find one that you can use. Not being able to raw-edit the HTML might narrow down your options though.

-Another alternative is flash... but in a word.. 'NO'. Don't use it for a menu.\

The site looks a lot cleaner now with the darker background. I noticed that you should also change the hover color of your links as well, they are really dark when hovered. Looks good.

 

[BalloonzForU]

http://software.xfx.net/utilities/dmbuilder/ This one? I downloaded the trial, before, and couldn't figure out how to get the code out of it. Yes I'm blonde!

 

[Golden Gate Geckos]

It look great exzcept for the font color on the main page. Since you have white photos showing there, why not try just a white font? Don't feel bad, my website doesn't look the same on Firefox, either...

 

[Milwaukee Reptiles]

You have to do the 'publish' task (I think that's what it's called), and it dumps out a couple of .js files (one for IE, mozilla, etc), and it will spit out some HTML to load the appropriate one. It's a little tricky.

And I agree with Marcia about the orange font. It looks great on the menu but the color is too close to the background orange for the main text. Marcia, a quick glance through some of your pages indicates your site looks the same to me (at least Firefox 2.0 vs IE7).

 

[BalloonzForU]

I gave up on the menus. LOL

I've got some other ideas. I did change the layout a bit and changed the font color to yellow.

http://www.leopardgeckobreeder.com/index2.html Better?

 

[Milwaukee Reptiles]

much

 

[brandy101010]

Lookin good Felicia!