Hey guys, this site has grown!!

Im just putting this up to see if anyone with 5 mins to spare can check and give me advice on my site?

Its not fully built, but the forum, pages and tutorial 1 are available.

Its totally free, no membership, ads and im not selling anything.

The website is a help site for students and intends to teach the basics of problem solving and programming to help students (or people who just want to program) how-to!

Computing Student Site

- whoops, can someone move me!

This post has been edited by comanighttrain: Oct 26 2008, 02:34 PM

OK, here goes:

1) No character encoding listed
2) tables used for layout of pages yet you set DocType for XHTML 1.0 which is a cut above table tag coders. Tables went out in late 1990s when CSS and use of div tags came in.
3) Image of you on pages looks a little distorted.
4) On contact page I suggest you "munge" your email address to hide it from spam bots. Might just do the entire address bit.
5) Should code semantically as well as syntactically.
6) Need to add some meta tags for Search Engines.
7) Could center entire pages and header/logo.

Overall a clean site with very few coding errors. Came close to passing validation for HTML coding. CSS did.

Thanks

Did you notice why my tutorial 1 doesnt work with firefox? the Javascript is fine on Opera and IE but not firefox

Just what are you seeing in IE that you don't see in Firefox? Got to your Tut 1 page in FF and IE 8 the same one. Page layout is slightly cramped for the input boxes in IE as compared to FF. On Tutorial 1 you have this: which may be confusing some browsers. Might check the other pages of tuts to see if you have the DocType after the opening body tag.

This post has been edited by Major Payne: Oct 26 2008, 06:43 PM

If you click submit you should get a pop telling you if you have successfully completed the questionnaire. In FF nothing appears and i get an error saying

"Error: questionOne is not defined
Source File: http://www.davidbattersby.net/students/Tutorial1.htm
Line: 16"

However in both opera and IE7 the submit button works fine

for anyone else reading, i found this on XHTML Layouts http://joey101.net/2006/06/tutorial-how-ma...d-xhtml-layout/

And they might want to read: Why tables for layout is stupid

Additional Sources

This post has been edited by Major Payne: Oct 26 2008, 08:43 PM

You are not using any <form></form> tags is probably the problem. Firefox is the only compliant browsers to HTML 4.01/CSS 2.1 standards. IE and others are just too sloppy to care how your code is and will parse your page and usually function ok. Doesn't mean they are right, but it does make them very popular with people who write sloppy code.

I started recoding my site, its going pretty well, it even looks better!

but uhh....what about the tutorials page? is that an acceptable table or can it be arranged in a similar way using CSS and XHTML

Content text that goes full width is hard on a readers eyes. Should keep eye span within around 12% from left to right. Form could be laid out a little more orderly. Not sure what you meant about tables, but congrats on getting yout page to validate XHTML 1.0 Strict. Just one CSS error.

12% you say? ill fire that in tommorrow.

My Quiz now works on ze firefox browser:D

just had to use

document.getElementById()

instead of just referencing the Element directly (which makes more sense to a Java dev! *shakes fist at firefox*)

thanks for the help:)

meh...i didnt go to sleep and did that instead...

12% is just a ballpark figure. The less a reader's eyes has to scan from left to right or vice-versa, the easier it is on the eyes and more likely they'll spend more time reading the content. This goes hand-in-hand with proper contrasting of font color versus background color and font family/size.

know any good resources on that stuff?

I always wondered why some tutorials were better than others. . .

I'm sure some one has tutorials online, but I've just picked up the knowledge in all the time I've been coding pages. Even my own site gets hit with criticism at times, but I just never seem to find time to correct a lot of things that should be corrected.