My Portfolio Website: rustyjaw.com

[rustyjaw]

Hi everyone,

I've had a website for a number of years, until last month it was just a gallery of photos and nothing else. I decided it was time to make it a little more personal and update the look a bit to make it feel more modern.

www.rustyjaw.com (http://www.rustyjaw.com)

I am specifically interested in how it lays out in various browsers. I have tested it in Firefox and Safari on the Mac, but no Windows browsers yet. I have seen some strange layout behavior on occasion, but haven't been able to reproduce it (which is frustrating).

NOTE: the "Links" section is unfinished, so is an inactive link for now.

Thanks for your time.

[Karl Johnston]

Amazing images, works fine and speedy for me on Gecko (firefox) 3; i'm sure a designer will come along in a minute and tear it to pieces but for the common layman (me) then it looks great :)_

[tracknut]

I looked at it on IE7, and it looks fine from there, except for one thing I can't figure out. On your "about" page, your contact at the bottom shows your email address, then on the following line it has "com". The whole thing is linked to your (correct) email address. That email address is generated in JS, which I'm no expert on, and can't see what would be wrong with it (or why it looks fine in FF).

Dave

[rustyjaw]

Thanks for the feedback and taking a look Karl!

tracknut, thanks! I don't see that on my browsers, I'll have to check the code. I picked up that JS code from the web to try and combat spam.

[tracknut]

I just ran a validation on the site, and notice it has a fair number of errors. My guess is those errors, and not the JS code for your email, are somehow causing the issue. You might fix those up and see if the problem goes away...

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rustyjaw.com%2Fabout.html

Dave

[Hikin Mike]

Looks good Ed! Other than the mentioned issues. I would make you logo clickable to the home page, on all pages. I like your logo too and I would make a 'favicon' too. Google it if you don't know/how.

If your trying to market yourself online, then I suggest adding some metadata. A good Title, Description and Keywords. A good read can be found here:
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=472885

Not the Gospel, but a interesting tool here:
http://www.grader.com/site.php?URL=www.rustyjaw.com

[snyderman]

Site looks good. Works well. Very fast loading and navigation. One nit is the 'flash bulb' treatment between shots in the gallery when you choose next. It was ok for the first 2-3 times then got kind of distracting.

Nice shots, too! You're really good.

dave

[rustyjaw]

Thanks again all, some very helpful advice here.

Site looks good. Works well. Very fast loading and navigation. One nit is the 'flash bulb' treatment between shots in the gallery when you choose next. It was ok for the first 2-3 times then got kind of distracting.

Nice shots, too! You're really good.



I'm curious what you mean by 'flash bulb treatment' -- it should be a fade-in, from black, hopefully it's not flashing.

[jdetmold]

in Safari 4.0.1 the buy and about pages both show up wrong. the text shows up to the right of the background i can post a screen shot if you would like to see what I'm looking at

[rustyjaw]

in Safari 4.0.1 the buy and about pages both show up wrong. the text shows up to the right of the background i can post a screen shot if you would like to see what I'm looking at

Oh thanks for checking and letting me know. I haven't downloaded Safari 4 yet. I wonder if it's easy/possible to have 3.x and 4 on the same machine at once.

[texaskev]

My, I have to take my hat off to you. Nice site and great work. Did you create the site from scratch or use a template of some sort?

[Karl Johnston]

I just ran a validation on the site, and notice it has a fair number of errors. My guess is those errors, and not the JS code for your email, are somehow causing the issue. You might fix those up and see if the problem goes away...

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rustyjaw.com%2Fabout.html

Dave

What is the importance of that validator for a site? What do the warnings and errors refer to? My website had 16 and 10* till i cleaned it of the facebook link. Now it only has 7 errors and 1 warning.

[Hikin Mike]

The 'W3C' (http://www.w3.org/)

If your site doesn't comply with the standards set for a particular website/page, in your case its "XHTML 1.0 Strict", then you and your viewers may have problems using different browsers/platforms (PC, MAC etc).

Having "clean code" (no warnings/errors) may help you with SEO.

[tracknut]

Think of the validator as a syntax parser for your code, Karl. It makes a pass through the code, parsing it against the syntax allowed in the doctype you state at the top, and tells you whether there are any parsing errors. If you don't do this check, then what you're doing is just sending the unchecked code to everyone's browser, and if it doesn't parse right the browser is left to guess what you meant. Better to see and address the issues before your customers are left to deal with them. Unfortunately, having valid code does not guarantee everything will be "look the same" on all browsers (e.g. just like you can't say that if a program compiles, it therefore will run correctly), but it's a good start down that path.

In your case Karl, you're using an iframe, which is not a legal tag in the strict XHTML doctype you're using. See http://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/tag_iframe.asp for the spec. Your easiest option is probably to use a transitional doctype instead of strict.

Dave

[Karl Johnston]

Thanks guys, I'm working hard on learning web design. I've cleaned it up a bit from what I know so far.

[jdetmold]

Oh thanks for checking and letting me know. I haven't downloaded Safari 4 yet. I wonder if it's easy/possible to have 3.x and 4 on the same machine at once.

are you on mac or pc? on mac i would think if you backed up your current Safari package and then update & you could just run the old package when needed