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This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3
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Topic: Creating a Theatre Website
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 12-24-2003 12:04 AM
White background versus black backgrounds? Text is a lot easier to read on a white or light colored background. You don't have to apply this on all pages. But do be kind and use white backgrounds in fields where you have paragraphs of text to display.
You should test your site with Internet Explorer and Netscape. Opera is also gaining popularity. Other browsers include Mozilla, Safari (Mac), Konqueror (Linux), Amaya (the W3C's browser), Camino (formerly Chimera). ISPs like SBC/Yahoo! are even making their own web browsers. You'll do fine to test in the first two or three mentioned. There's just not enough time in the world to test in many more than that (although you could since most are free).
The Mac versus PC thing is a fairly big issue affecting web design. Macs display colors lighter than PCs, so you may have to balance the look of your images. Applications like Photoshop and Fireworks can simulate both Mac and PC gamma on a single machine. Font handling and choices are different too. This will be a big consideration if you mess around with more advanced things like Cascading Style Sheets ("CSS").
Pay Pal? Well, I'm not a big eBay junkie. And generally I'm just not into doing any Internet-based pay online systems. When I order items online, I prefer to pick up the phone and call in the order. Even with my anti-virus DATs auto-updated, anti-spyware tools running and my computer sitting behind both a hardware firewall (my router) and software firewall (ZoneAlarm) I still don't trust punching in any keystrokes of credit card numbers or any other personal information. I treat my computer as if everyone else in the world can see what I am doing on it. Paranoid perhaps, but safe.
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Scott Jentsch
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1061
From: New Berlin, WI, USA
Registered: Apr 2003
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posted 12-26-2003 01:06 PM
Such welcome screens are also a very good way to make sure that search engines don't rank you very highly. Cut to the chase and don't waste your visitors' time, and you will also be rewarded with valuable search engine ranks that are appropriate to the relevance of your site.
I used to do the colored backgrounds, and BigScreen once had a dark blue background with white text. I even experimented with different colors and/or subtle patterns that varied with the section that you were in, but all-in-all, black text on white is how people have been viewing text for years, and messing with that means that you're going to lose some effectiveness to your site.
Another highly recommmended thing to do, is to follow conventions for coloring of links and allowing the browser to choose whether to underline them or not. I dislike sites that make their links the same color as the body text, since I set my browser to not have links underlined. I'm also annoyed by sites that force all links to be underlined. If I wanted them underlined, I would have set that option in my browser!
Currently, I have movie information on the same page as the showtimes. The movie information is at the top, followed by the showtimes below. I've been using this layout for all nine years (nine years in January anyway), and it has worked well.
Showtimes Page for Cold Mountain
We also have a separate page for printable showtimes, since what works for viewing doesn't necessarily translate well when printed. We also want to make sure that the showtimes print on a single page whenever possible, so only basic movie information is on the printable page.
Printable Showtimes Page for Cold Mountain
This printable page also has the side benefit of being very compatible with AvantGo users and mobile wireless devices.
PayPal is a hit-and-miss situation. I think people who already have PayPal accounts will have no problem paying for tickets with PayPal. Those that don't, however, will probably not want to sign up just to order tickets online. Unfortunately, there's no cheap way to accept Credit Cards online, so your overhead will be high for that option.
I do compatibility testing with IE 6, Mozilla 1.5, and Netscape 4.77. The latter is only when I am doing something that I know will make NS 4.77 a little touchy. This list is a result of knowing how most browsers will display the code that I write, based on the years of experience I have with doing so. If you are new to this, and especially if you are using a program to generate code (like FrontPage), you're going to want to be more vigilant to make sure that you're not insulting those that don't use IE.
I've always said that I would love to do more compatibility testing with the Mac platform, but so far, Apple has ignored my requests for an evaluation sample. ![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
As you can tell by all the issues involved, designing good web sites is not simple and straightforward. Sure, everyone can create a web page, but not everyone should...
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Gunnar Johansson
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 181
From: Gothenburg, Sweden
Registered: Mar 2003
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posted 12-29-2003 12:06 PM
quote:
Running individual pages for each resolution size, or type of browser seems like a real pain in the butt to me, especially when you are updating at least once a week but that's just my opinion and I like keeping things as simple as possible.
But it doesnīt have to be. Without to much work you can do it with databases and asp, or php, to get easy to maintain, entering information once and get it displayed wherever relevant. Notepad isnīt to bad, but updating at least movies, and maybe showtimes, Iīd rather build an interface dynamically, so I can input data by maybe logging in, rather than editing html in notepad and uploading. Especially if you want to delegate so more people can enter information.
Look into MSSQL and ASP (basically what Iīm most familar with and know it works, having tons of trouble getting MSSQL and PHP to work properly on Linux a while back).
Granted Iīm not to sure how this does with slow modems and other browsers... Hope I helped, made sense and Iīm sorry I canīt direct you to a good example.
Iīm expanding on the subject, agreeing with most posts above, but like to add that it should be easy to maintain and look good a while from now. Iīve seen plenty of siteīs which looked good and cool once, and they donīt now. And sites that never get updated with relevant information. Build a good solid structure and foundation that you know will last (HTML will most likely work for a while longer) and as a general advice make sure you comment your code, so you know whatīs what when you go back, or when the next guy is trying to do something (another reason for easy maintanence). This doesnīt negate anything else, just start thinking about before you do anything (as opposed to after). Hope this helped som more, and good luck.
(Edit spelling mistakes and last paragraph)
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Scott Jentsch
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1061
From: New Berlin, WI, USA
Registered: Apr 2003
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posted 12-29-2003 02:18 PM
BigScreen does what you're looking for, Joshua. While the navigation at the top does not go all the way down to 640 wide-browsers (that element lets you get down to 712 wide before scrolling), the content itself does stretch to fit any available width.
It's not difficult to do this, just stay away from manually setting the widths of the tables that contain your content. You can specify widths of certain columns, but if you specify a table width or if you specify the width of every column, you are going to run into trouble where it won't fit a majority of browsers, whether they are wide or narrow.
FrontPage likes to pull crap like that, and it's one of the dead give-aways of an amatuer job when I evaluate sites for customers.
You said that your friend will be using Dreamweaver to create your site. In my experience, DW can be used to create very clean sites, but I've never let it generate a page that was created using just the visual layout tools (affectionately referred to as "web design for dummies").
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