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jonnymac1979
regular
Reg'd: Tue
Posts: 521
Loc: Liverpool
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Hello
As you can see from my signature, I am making a fansite on Liverpool Football Club. It's probably about 70% complete. They are my favourite football team and a major part of my everyday life. I don't know what I would spend my time thinking about without them.
Anyway, part of the site will be a dedicated offshoot 'mini-site' for Liverpool Football Club forum users, specifically avatar uploads.
I have made a site dedicated specifically to avatars. This site was actually uploaded to the net back in early February, but I had about 25 avatars per page, spread over three pages, and I was getting e-mails from irate dial-up users about it, because they were all animating at the same time.
I thought if they were moaning, I wasn't going to risk the wrath of you lot on here, so I hesitated from posting it on here, until now!  The Fat Controller has seen it before in its earlier state, as he offered me some advice as I was building it.
So I have reduced the animations to static GIF's, which link to the Animated GIF URL, and a little background information on the file size etc...
An acknowledgements page is planned already, to be uploaded in the next week or so, as some of the files are not my work and I don't intend to take credit for them
Anyway, it is an ongoing project, it is a 30MB maximum capacity webspace (as you may have noticed it is hosted on my free ISP space) and I am very proud of it.
So the question is what do you all think about it?
www.liverpoolfc-avatars.co.uk
Thanks very much in advance.
John
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Nanook
regular
Reg'd: Tue
Posts: 995
Loc: South East England
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Cool idea.
Instead of having "Page x" and then on the next page "Page y" have at the bottom "Page 1 | 2 | 3" so that you can choose to go to the last ones, this would be especially helpful if you added more.
Consider hosting your images somewhere like Imageshack (http://www.imageshack.us) which offers unlimited image hosting (up to 1mb per file) for free, this way your bandwidth would be kept smaller by people not linking of you.
The text at the top seems to keep going bast the background grid effect so maybe increasing the size of that to make it fit.
Although a black background can look good it is accepted that where people spend a long time looking at a page it tires the eyes quicker than a light background (say white) so consider changing that.
Consider having the images appear in a new window (_blank) or even in a custom pop-up window ( http://www.whytehouse.com/custom-popup-win.asp ) so that you can keep the original page.
Also you could make a "forum image" so that people can link back to you (88x31) is the standard size (an example here: http://fml.m-hosting.biz/buttons/fml.gif ) which means people can put that in their sig and recommend other people).
Good luck with your new site
*Nanook
http://www.bains007.co.uk
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jonnymac1979
regular
Reg'd: Tue
Posts: 521
Loc: Liverpool
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Hi Nanook, thanks for the reply, I noticed you had an idea to do a similar site yourself, good luck with that.
Your comments have been helpful. I was toying with the idea of a series of navigation buttons in the style of the existing red ones down the left hand side of the page rather than text links at the bottom. I have managed to build excellent animated rollovers for them which are not uploaded yet and I think it will look awesome. Trial and error I suppose.
The Imageshack idea is excellent as that will leave me a lot more room to get more images in there, so the database of avatars will one day theoretically run into the hundreds. I will consider that very carefully. Remember I only have 30MB of space, even though I can use my 750MB I use from Fasthosts for another website I have.
The text at the top looks fine in IE, but you are right, when using Firefox it is hanging over the background. Firefox seems to do that with <div> tags. It annoys me somewhat. It just moves the layer a few pixels or so. I know the official line is to build for all browsers and accessibility, but as a beginner at web design, I am sticking to designing for Internet Explorer as unfortunately for some people, as much as they want it to go away, it’s not going to in reality is it? The majority of the viewers will look at my site in IE, so for now until I find a way around it, I’m sticking to that.
Websites with black backgrounds have always seemed aesthetically pleasing to me. At first, I did have a white background, but I preferred black. It’s just down to my taste. Again, the w3 school consortium and official web standards agencies would have every site white if it was up to them, but not everybody feels the same. I am using a basic colour palette of Black, Red, Grey and White. I think it looks great. 
Having the images appear in a pop-up was my original intention, but I don’t know how to program Dreamweaver to do it. When I find out how I am intending on using that as my method. Thank you for the link to that.
The forum image is also something I was thinking of and your suggestion clarified it in my mind that it is a good and worthwhile idea.
Thank you again.
John
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jonnymac1979
regular
Reg'd: Tue
Posts: 521
Loc: Liverpool
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Since I uploaded it nearly 60 hours ago, it's had 681 hits. I think that's acceptable for a website with very little promotion. I'm very pleased.
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Nanook
regular
Reg'd: Tue
Posts: 995
Loc: South East England
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Glad some of my suggestion have helped.
If you look at my original post you will see a link for a custom pop up, this enabled me to create pop-ups for my site ( Click - Click one of the links at the bottom).
I have just had another look and I think it needs a bit of padding from the left (maybe even center the entire page)
Also just a thought, having your email address like that leaves it wide open to abuse from spam robots, you might like to have an image with your email on it or use a form (if your server has PHP or CGI)
Congratulations on all the hits.
Have you thought about splitting the site into different sections, such as "Animated" "Static" and "General Football", and possibly adding a search function.
*Nanook
http://www.bains007.co.uk
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jonnymac1979
regular
Reg'd: Tue
Posts: 521
Loc: Liverpool
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In reply to:
Instead of having "Page x" and then on the next page "Page y" have at the bottom "Page 1 | 2 | 3" so that you can choose to go to the last ones, this would be especially helpful if you added more.
Done, except down the left-hand side as there are only seven pages at the moment. When there are more, there will be some down the right-hand side also.
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Whizwrinkly
regular
Reg'd: Thu
Posts: 483
Loc: East London, England
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Dont want to put the damper on it, but a 'hit' is recorded every time a button, link, or photo etc. is clicked. So 1 visitor could clock up 100 hits easily. Also, I looked at the file size of some of your animations, and shudder to think how much bandwidth you will use if people start hot linking to them.
On the positive side though, it's a very neat site. Well done.
Barryoneoff. - The East End Forum.
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jonnymac1979
regular
Reg'd: Tue
Posts: 521
Loc: Liverpool
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I know about the hit counter issue, it’s not perfect, but the Blueyonder control panel is simply God-awful, you can’t tell anything from it. Unfortunately, this is the best I could manage as the website is in a frame.
I am going to offshore the Images to Imageshack over the next couple of weeks or so, as suggested above.
What does bandwidth mean? For example, on the site I will be publishing over the next month or two in my signature, I want to host a 15MB mpeg taken from Anfield when Liverpool played Everton earlier this season.
If 20 people download it, what does that mean for bandwidth? Do I pay extra for that?
Thanks.
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Whizwrinkly
regular
Reg'd: Thu
Posts: 483
Loc: East London, England
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Find out how much bandwidth your host supplies, you should have a monthly allowance. Once you exeed this,you either pay extra, or the site doesn't show.
This shouldn't affest the average site, but if a 1000 people look at a megabyte of site features over a period, that's a gig of bandwidth gone already.
Checkout how much you get with your package.
Barryoneoff. - The East End Forum.
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softeis
new user
Reg'd: Thu
Posts: 21
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its ok, but I dont like football, but your sitehas a clear arrangement which is good
hm, brilliant!
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