Site layout

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Mike Everman
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Re: Site layout

Post by Mike Everman » Fri Sep 25, 2009 4:01 pm

cheap and easy to use is key for me. I'm maxed out on idiosyncratic software. If you have a better suggestion, lay it on me!
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Viv
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Re: Site layout

Post by Viv » Fri Sep 25, 2009 4:17 pm

Mike Everman wrote:cheap and easy to use is key for me. I'm maxed out on idiosyncratic software. If you have a better suggestion, lay it on me!
Hi Mike

I can understand that ;-) personally I use wordpress to manage my sites as its open source and works with out issue but I don't think its the solution for this site as the front end is simpler and never really changes, in the past Simon has done some sterling work for me in css to produce a standards compliant site but you will have to chat to him about that ;-)

With PHPBB I have never actually seen a nice integration of the front end landing pages and the forum BB pages, it always seems a you are in one design style then jump in to the basic BB layout.

Viv
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Re: Site layout

Post by tufty » Fri Sep 25, 2009 6:20 pm

Viv wrote:With PHPBB I have never actually seen a nice integration of the front end landing pages and the forum BB pages, it always seems a you are in one design style then jump in to the basic BB layout.
Yep, that's pretty much it, although there are some relatively integrated schemes that tie wordpress and phpbb together, "onepress" springs to mind. Not relevant here unless mike wants to pull all the rest of the site into a wordpress system, though.

As far as I can tell, about the best thing to do would be to remove the frame stuff from the landing page entirely, at least for the forum. it could probably be done simply by changing the "target" attribute of the link to the forum, either to go to a totally new window / tab using target="_blank", or by blowing away the frameset and staying in the same window, using target="_top". The file to modify (assuming it's not dynamically generated) would be "top.htm".

Personally, I'd lose the big image in the phpbb header as well. It's pretty, and all, but it's HUGE. Images of its ilk are part of the reason why I browse all phpbb sites with adblock plus enabled and a filter on *site_logo.gif :)

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Re: Site layout

Post by Mike Everman » Fri Sep 25, 2009 6:41 pm

Hi Simon, OK, I'll make the pic smaller at least!
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Re: Site layout

Post by Viv » Fri Sep 25, 2009 7:49 pm

Hi Simon

Simpler is better I think from a security point of view as this site gets a lot of traffic so is a target for miscreants if a hole opened up some how in a CMS, with that said maybe just a basic re-write of what is on the landing pages to a more up to date standard would suffice?

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Re: Site layout

Post by tufty » Fri Sep 25, 2009 9:55 pm

Most of the HTML problems, such as they are, with the landing page, can be summed up by this :)

Code: Select all

<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=us-ascii">
<meta name=ProgId content=FrontPage.Editor.Document>
<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0">
<meta name=Originator content="Microsoft Word 10">

The main problem, though, is that the frameset hangs around when you come in from the landing page, and takes up a massive amount of space. Christ knows what it'd look like on a netbook. This is, however very easy to fix. In top.htm, change this:

Code: Select all

<a href="http://www.pulse-jets.com/phpbb3/" target=2><span style='color:black'>Forum</span></a>
to this:

Code: Select all

<a href="http://www.pulse-jets.com/phpbb3/" target="_blank"><span style='color:black'>Forum</span></a>
and the job's a good 'un. Leave the standards compliance stuff for another day.

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Re: Site layout

Post by Mike Everman » Tue Sep 29, 2009 5:02 pm

Cool, I'll make that change when I get back from fishing north of Toronto!
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