Slashdot Mirror

Wow, http://copwatch.com/AAAindex.html looks like the TimeCube site.

A little bit of Information Architecture would make that site look a little less, well, crazy.

Less giant fonts. Check out http://oswd.org/ for some templates!

Hello,

You can find free open source www-page templates from here:

http://www.oswd.org/

Those might help you :)

If it is just templates you want then no need to buy, the open source web design site has a huge number of templates.

Sure some of them have strings attached, but I've used them a lot in the past when I needed a quick-start at designing a new site.

I use this often.
http://www.oswd.org/
http://www.mezzoblue.com/zengarden/alldesigns/
or
http://www.csszengarden.com/

You're better off using an open source template. There's a big collection at http://www.oswd.org/

I'm a good geek of all arts. But when I try to dabble in graphical design, I always fail spectacularly. Get someone with actual talent to do it.

Geek 2:

You want a Marketing Pro, who can deliver the rain, handling the "Vision", while you can concentrate on the implementation

And they're both absolutely right. I would suggest starting with a free template and modifying the CSS / graphics. That saves you the initial legwork of choosing a design layout, colors, etc. Here are some sites with some really awesome templates and liberal licensing (CC for most I think): Free CSS Templates.org and Open source web design.

Could try out Open Source Web Design.

My first recommendation would be to try Blueprint -- a set of reasonable CSS styles that make building grid-based layouts much easier. It's open source, designed by some great people and actively supported.

If you're looking for full designs, try Open Source Web Designs. There are also other free template sites out there, so search around.

Open source web designs like http://www.oswd.org/ will allow you to build your site for "free" or at least give you usable contribution to work from.

You might want to take a look at Open Source Web Design, even if they do not have exactly what you want their templates will give you a good starting point for your layout and design.

I would build the site on some simple CMS like CMS Made Simple, http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/ Then, I would add a ready-made CSS template from a site like http://www.oswd.org/ Also, you could just suggest to your boss that you buy the design along with the CSS. There are tons of freelance designers on the web with excellent references available. Our company has bought some amazing designs for as little as 200$. Try a site like http://www.elance.com/ for starters.

For design help, I used to us "the non-designers design book" by robin williams.
Her books are quite good (amazon has a bunch). The help with design in general.

That and spend some time looking at designs. Why they work/dont.

http://www.oswd.org/

has lots of designs that work or don't

For CSS I find the oreilly head first book the best for putting css and html together.

A customized CMS system is what you're looking for, or if you have the knowledge (or people who do) using a web framework like django to build your own isn't as painful as it may first seem.

I'd like to second google video/uTube as another option to the internet archive, either way, the space for the documentaries shouldn't be a problem.

As for the design, I'd like to recommend looking at Open Source Web Design. There are a number of great designs on there.

I thought I'd seen their web site design somewhere before ... I was using that for a bit, too.

http://www.andyrutledge.com/slashdot-hates-designe rs.php

I agree, 110%. I'm a programmer, not a designer, but I see how this hurts everyone who makes a living in software - design or programming. I always thought a "work for hire" meant you were hired and payed for the job, not entereing a contest. I expect this from most companies, but I would have thought this one among all others would understand designers are not cheap whores on a street corner who turn tricks just to eat.

If you're so cheap, just go to http://www.oswd.org/ - or is the catch of "give credit to the designer" too much strain on the company?

Is pulling from www.oswd.org ruled out? :-)

They have a ton of nice looking XHTML-Strict complaint website templates there, all free for use!

The irony is that the featured templates on http://www.oswd.org are the exact same as the featured templates on http://www.templatemonster.com/

lol speaking of copying sites... At first I thought "well maybe that these sites were submitted by the same user to multiple sites". Then I thought " What are the odds that the featured templates appear the same on both sites?"

Do I smell a conspiracy, or do I have my ass hat on?

There's a similiar site like this called Open Source Web Design which gives away basic HTML and CSS template. They have a strict rule of no images (which I'm fine with) and even require all designs be W3C X/HTML/CSS validated.

With these requirements they're usually pretty light and basic, you can find some good designs to start you off with

All most ask is if you use their design, let 'em know.

Yes. I was looking at http://oswd.org/ last night and saw some interesting templates for use with a current client. I also feel weird about it. But time is money and if I can meet both our goals in a fast manner, everyone wins. Not to mention, it's not like I would use the site exactly as is.

Have you seen the Open Source Web Design site?

I've used a few of their templates on my sites and it helped me a lot, both in terms of getting a good design, and in letting me look at a lot of sites all together and view their source.

For example this Debian site was put together by combining elements from two designed I liked, whilst this one was pretty much a stock copy.

I wish I'd seen the archive before I put together my homepage ;)

Agreed. People tend to bash the tools like Dreamweaver and FrontPage, but once you've played around with pure HTML, you rarely want to go back, you just want to build sites quicker and get better handle on site management, which DW and FP are excellent at.

Open source site engines are also proliferating, and so is open source Web design, and frequently one can launch a complete Web site by just going through the install manual or performing a few clicks in Fantastico, which many Web hosters provide.

Building simplistic Web pages with HTML is part of the required curriculum in Washington state, and is attached to the CPLA (Computer Literacy) exam that each college graduate has to take before getting Bachelor's. So it's considered a part of basic skills now, just like word processing and electronic spreadsheet knowledge is.

For those who like borrowing other sites layouts, or using them for "inspiration" the following site is perfect:

• Open Source Web Designs

I've used a few of their layouts for different sites and there are a lot of good sites there - sure some dross, but suprisingly little.

"Open Source Web Design is a community of designers and site owners sharing free web design templates as well as web design information. Helping to make the internet a prettier place!"

I put up a tiny resized version of the finished project, since that was really all I wanted to see (and all I can afford to host). HERE

I know that a lot of people are posting their stats that show ~30% Moz these days. I think mine is a little more extreme: I was getting 45% Mozilla in December of 2000 . It then leveled off to about 20% when my site started getting a little more traffic from different sources. It's still around 20% with the 1mil pages/month traffic I get now.

So getting large percentages of Gecko based browsers on your tech website is not even a recent trend. I'd go with big sites like thecounter.com. Their stats are a little behind, but they record a hell of lot more stats than any of us and have a broader range. They also show around 2% for September this year, so Firefox has a long way to go.

Except it's still trivial to do a download counter with that method despite the IE change. Just have your PHP script start the binary stream or (if it's 3rd party) give a real redirect instead of outputting an html redirect page. I do it all the time on my website (cheap plug: OSWD.org).

I always thought it was an excuse for download.com or whatever to put another banner ad in your face. They give the mirror thing even when there's only one download source available. Download.com doesn't need to care about leeching because they're just a collection of links to 3rd party servers.

who saw their web site and was transported back to 1996? I half expected a looping MIDI background song, and a request for some obscure, obsolete plugin, or maybe a Netscape 3 Now! button.

Seriously, if anyone from there is reading this, ditch the ugly background image, and get some up to date design!. Sheesh. Just like a Welshman to have an ugly webpage.

Here is some HTML Art:

1

2

Here is some HTML Art:

1

2

The content on the site is too important and interesting to be presented in such a bland looking layout and color scheme. I damn near did a faceplant into my keyboard reading the front page.

I highly recommend Open Source Web Design. Give this cause some Fizzle Shizzle!

I agree with most of your points, but I just want to follow up on some of your uncertainties. I'm the only one on the design team that works almost exclusively in CSS. The current design on the site wasn't made by me, the old one wasn't either. I just got the old one and got rid of all the redundant font tags and made pretty classes out of them, I also made it external so hopefully those few KBs would be cached. You can get a better idea of my CSS style by going to a css layout version of our current design or my not close to being done SVG site. Which has a very clean body.

You're right about the switch to CSS not really being a problem with older browsers. The change was to pretty basic CSS and worked fine in all browsers. Although it still wasn't *exactly* what the old version looked like (text a couple points off here and there).

I won't argue that 3-4% is not bad if you're paying very large sums of money. But as I pointed out 3-4% is only 40megs. We pay $10 for 10 gigs of transfer and the account on the machine. So 40 megs is less than 5 cents. Hardly anything compared to the 400% difference of having gzip turned off. And Yahoo probably has no more than 100 times the traffic we do, and they probably get better deals on bulk bandwidth. So less than $4 a day for 3-4% saved on bandwidth. Less than the cost of a very good web designer. The difference in costs for both of our sites is still negligible I think.

Feel free to email me at monkeyman at oswd.org if you want to discuss it more.

I agree with most of your points, but I just want to follow up on some of your uncertainties. I'm the only one on the design team that works almost exclusively in CSS. The current design on the site wasn't made by me, the old one wasn't either. I just got the old one and got rid of all the redundant font tags and made pretty classes out of them, I also made it external so hopefully those few KBs would be cached. You can get a better idea of my CSS style by going to a css layout version of our current design or my not close to being done SVG site. Which has a very clean body.

You're right about the switch to CSS not really being a problem with older browsers. The change was to pretty basic CSS and worked fine in all browsers. Although it still wasn't *exactly* what the old version looked like (text a couple points off here and there).

I won't argue that 3-4% is not bad if you're paying very large sums of money. But as I pointed out 3-4% is only 40megs. We pay $10 for 10 gigs of transfer and the account on the machine. So 40 megs is less than 5 cents. Hardly anything compared to the 400% difference of having gzip turned off. And Yahoo probably has no more than 100 times the traffic we do, and they probably get better deals on bulk bandwidth. So less than $4 a day for 3-4% saved on bandwidth. Less than the cost of a very good web designer. The difference in costs for both of our sites is still negligible I think.

Feel free to email me at monkeyman at oswd.org if you want to discuss it more.

It's ironic that you post a link to your stats, and then go on to say that "40 megs is a very small difference for possibly breaking browsers that don't support CSS!"

Read the stats page that you posted again. Your top 14 user agents are all either IE5+ or Mozilla 1.0, which make up almost 60% of your users. Assuming your site is like most others, almost all of that other 40% is either other IE user agents, other Mozilla user agents, or Netscape 4.x.

Therefore, you have no reason NOT to use CSS instead of font tags. Even the lowly Netscape 4 supports basic CSS. What browsers are you trying to support, anyway? How far do you go? Netscape 3? IE2?

Seriously. Use common sense. Design to standards and use CSS where possible. You have an edge becuase your page is geared to web designers and open-source advocates. These people are likely more aware of browser technologies and thus less likely to use outdated browsers.

(The final thing I would recommend is to get a better stats package that would actually show you what percentage of your users use a certain browser. Webalizer is not a good choice for this.)

--SlashChick

I got browser stats from TheCounter. Although if you take a look at some of my older stats that have browser grouping, it shows the same thing. 76% IE and 16% mozilla. But my site is somewhat open source oriented and likewise have higher mozilla stats. TheCounter serves up a hell of a lot more stats than you or I though. Somewhere around 372,889,422 pages. Or about what slashdot gets in 6-10 months.

I don't know where you get your stats, but it's 8% that don't use IE. I agree the book looks like a joke though. Take this quote for example:

The irony is that no one beside Yahoo's management cares what Yahoo looks like. The site's tremendous success is due to the service it provides, not to the beauty of its visual design (which is non-existent).

I just want to know, what part of this makes it obsolete? That it uses html work arounds, looks right, or is a great service?

Then he goes on to complain about this extra html causes huge bandwidth charges, which I can assure you are negligible, even over millions of page views. If you take a look at my August statistics, on the 22nd you can see the sysadmin disabling mod_gzip. On the 28th, you can see me panicking about bandwidth and switching our old font tags to CSS. You can see the page views are about the same as the 27th, but the bandwidth goes from 871megs to 838megs. 40 megs is a very small difference for possibly breaking browsers that don't support CSS! Seeing as the bandwidth for a site like Yahoo is bought in bulk, even a gig of difference a day wouldn't be that much. And this is with mod_gzip turned off, that 40 meg gap would be turned to nothing if it was on. With yahoo, most of their bandwidth is in news images and content anyway, not their design. So I wouldn't recommend taking the time to read his book, or even the sample chapter, it's bogus for sure.

On my web design site we don't let designers upload designs with images because we want users to be able to use designs without an image editor. People that couldn't break from the images started some pretty interesting alternatives.

Face (IE Only)

Blueish (Ascii pron, all browsers)

Some Impressive CSS Design

2176lines (in emacs, crashes NS4)

C64 (all browsers)

And the list goes on, here's an ascii solution to flash while I'm at it. The web would be just fine without images and flash.

On my web design site we don't let designers upload designs with images because we want users to be able to use designs without an image editor. People that couldn't break from the images started some pretty interesting alternatives.

Face (IE Only)

Blueish (Ascii pron, all browsers)

Some Impressive CSS Design

2176lines (in emacs, crashes NS4)

C64 (all browsers)

And the list goes on, here's an ascii solution to flash while I'm at it. The web would be just fine without images and flash.

On my web design site we don't let designers upload designs with images because we want users to be able to use designs without an image editor. People that couldn't break from the images started some pretty interesting alternatives.

Face (IE Only)

Blueish (Ascii pron, all browsers)

Some Impressive CSS Design

2176lines (in emacs, crashes NS4)

C64 (all browsers)

And the list goes on, here's an ascii solution to flash while I'm at it. The web would be just fine without images and flash.

On my web design site we don't let designers upload designs with images because we want users to be able to use designs without an image editor. People that couldn't break from the images started some pretty interesting alternatives.

Face (IE Only)

Blueish (Ascii pron, all browsers)

Some Impressive CSS Design

2176lines (in emacs, crashes NS4)

C64 (all browsers)

And the list goes on, here's an ascii solution to flash while I'm at it. The web would be just fine without images and flash.

On my web design site we don't let designers upload designs with images because we want users to be able to use designs without an image editor. People that couldn't break from the images started some pretty interesting alternatives.

Face (IE Only)

Blueish (Ascii pron, all browsers)

Some Impressive CSS Design

2176lines (in emacs, crashes NS4)

C64 (all browsers)

And the list goes on, here's an ascii solution to flash while I'm at it. The web would be just fine without images and flash.

On my web design site we don't let designers upload designs with images because we want users to be able to use designs without an image editor. People that couldn't break from the images started some pretty interesting alternatives.

Face (IE Only)

Blueish (Ascii pron, all browsers)

Some Impressive CSS Design

2176lines (in emacs, crashes NS4)

C64 (all browsers)

And the list goes on, here's an ascii solution to flash while I'm at it. The web would be just fine without images and flash.

You can find layouts like that , and my special super

If you're looking for good web designs, you might check out OSWD. It is a great place for designers or webmasters to go to submit their web designs they have made or to download a web design for their site. Whether you're just too lazy to make your own design or if you have no creative talent, you can use the design templates on the site as a solution to your problem. I hope this doesn't seem too much like shameless promotion. ;-) I'm just saying that we're here in case you need inspiration or a place to vent the designs you've created yourself.

OSWD.org

Welp, I won't spend much time defending our design that we're about to get rid of, but we do have some very good designs from users. I mean, with 450+, there have to be a few that look good. Take a look at this page for some of the better ones. Really, hundreds of sites use designs from OSWD, it's not that bad.

Oh wait, duh, I think we're done. Luckily someone remembered to take pictures, I don't think any of them feature our booth, but I could be wrong. Anyway: Pictures.

I couldn't make it to LWCE (still waiting for one in Seattle), but the rest of the Open Source Web Design crew is out there. I don't know what exactly we're showing off, except our really cool site. I hear we're across from an IBM booth and on a corner, somewhere in the .org pavillion. And the booth number is less than 10 ... like .. 4. We have some pictures of the setting up on Skatters homepage. Anyway, check it out!

Here are the stats for my site (Open Source Web Design). We push toward open source, but here are our webalizer stats, keep in mind they group the browsers:

1 76.73% MSIE
2 35.68% MSIE 6.0
3 22.40% MSIE 5.0
4 17.83% MSIE 5.5
5 15.27% Mozilla
6 10.37% Mozilla/5.0
7 3.18% Mozilla/4.7
8 2.36% Konqueror
9 2.19% Wget/1.6
10 1.94% Opera
11 1.52% Konqueror/2.2
12 0.82% Konqueror/2.1
13 0.77% Mozilla/3.01 (compatible;)
14 0.54% MSIE 4.0
15 0.52% Mozilla/4.5