New website for 1257

[Max Lobovsky]

http://ucnj-tech.org (or http://magnetrobotics.com).

• Features: basic content pages, image gallery, forum (some of it is hidden from the public), calendar, news.
• I'm happy to see that my team has begun to use it and it is actually a useful tool.
• It's intended to look very sparse like that. It's definitley functional first, and aesthetics second.
• It's running slower than it will be in final production mode. Once I get page caching worked out, the page rendering times will go from ~1 second to ~.2 seconds
• It's close to html 4.01 compliant, and should be by the time the season rolls around. It's also a good way on its way to having correct semantic use of HTML tags. Tested in both Firefox and Internet Explorer (there are some minor imperfections due to IE's broken box model. I'm working on some fixes)
• The banner (inspired by http://team229.org) and other graphics are the work of our team's artist/engineer/clown Jason Livingston. The rest by me

Comments would be greatly appreciated. Let them come .

[Arefin Bari]

very cool Max...

the most important thing on the website i think is the forum. because that keeps everyone updated about what is going on. also some of the things like the dollar signs on homepage looks cool... at first i thought it was a newspaper.... and then when i looked close i realized it was dollars... great work...

[av11d]

Nice site. It's simple and you can find what you need easily. It's also not bogged down by huge images.

My only suggestion would be to maybe scale down the image on the front page so that the scroll bars don't show up on somewhat smaller resolutions.

Also, I'm using Safari on Mac OS X, and it works great. Good job with cross-platform compatibility

[Max Lobovsky]

Ah, well actually you pointed out a bug in Safari, apparently. It is not recongizing "overflow: crop" apparently... IE 6 and Firefox don't show scroll bars. I can fix it pretty simply by making the image a background image, but I want to investigate this a bit further first.

[av11d]

I tested your site out on Windows (IE and FireFox) and behaves exactly like Safari. I was trying to say make the image smaller, so that the scollbars won't show on resolutions smaller than 1024x768

[aaronbr28040]

I didnt have any problems with the site on firefox 1.0 running at 1280x1024. It worked fine for me. It actually looked great at that resolution but you might need to make it smaller if people are having trouble seeing it because I know most people run at lower resolutions.
-Aaron

[Max Lobovsky]

Ah, I thought you were referring to the banner creating scroll bars (the banner is 1600 pixels wide). I had not checked the page at 1024 width since adding that front page image. I will resize it a bit so there are no scroll bars at 1024. Below that, I don't think its worth tailoring the site for.

[Roland]

Originally Posted by Max Lobovsky

Ah, I thought you were referring to the banner creating scroll bars (the banner is 1600 pixels wide). I had not checked the page at 1024 width since adding that front page image. I will resize it a bit so there are no scroll bars at 1024. Below that, I don't think its worth tailoring the site for.

You don't need to resize the image. Just add this line to your CSS file:

div div img {width: 90%;}

Or you could add a class to the wide image, like insanelywide, and then:

img.insanelywide {width: 90%;}

Then there'll be no horizontal scrolling at any resolution, people at higher resolutions see the image at full size, and everyone's happy.

Edit: Oh and it's really annoying when people design sites that only display right maximized at 1024x768 or larger. Sure, most people are at that resolution, but I tend to only have my browser window at about 800px wide so I can see other stuff and not have my entire workspace taken up by the browser. Yes, I am a Mac user.

[Max Lobovsky]

But there is a problem with that. It will stretch the image to be 90%. I don't want an ugly, pixelated image at high resolutions. There has to be a limit to how low resolution the site should look good. Even w3c.org starts to breakdown at low resolutions.

Anyway, your suggestion would work in combination with a max-width property. Of course, IE does not support max-width, but after some quick research, there is an IE hack to do the trick: http://www.svendtofte.com/code/max_width_in_ie/ Thanks, you got me thinking on the right track.

[DCA Fan]

Great job, very clean and useful.

O/t, Roland, your sig is incredibly irritating. Good job.

[av11d]

Just checked your site again, it works great. The image resizing works perfect in Safari. Best of luck with the site!

[Joe Matt]

Grood site... great... and good... grood.

Anyway, the ONLY thing I would do would be to reduce the size of the news images by half or so.

[Max Lobovsky]

Originally Posted by JosephM

Grood site... great... and good... grood.

Anyway, the ONLY thing I would do would be to reduce the size of the news images by half or so.

I think I will apply that width/max-width style combination to the news images, too. CSS2/3 are really awesome... And thanks, btw

Anyway, give me some more negative comments. Don't tell me its good, I won't improve if its good....

[Max Lobovsky]

Hey, thanks, really. But just a tip, don't do that to anyone else on this site. I bet you have already got about 125 private messages and negative reputations from people who don't even know me...

I know about the nested boxes. I just never got to fixing them (its a bit harder than you think because I am trying to keep good semantic code, and IE's lack of the child selector in CSS is making it a real pain...)

I only have the page render time displayed because the site isn't in final production mode. I need it for my own reference as I work on it. It will be displayed silently in an HTML comment in the future.

As for the icon, I am kind of aesthetics and creativity blind. I asked some freshman to make an icon and just put up whatever he made. (I'm pretty sure he didn't even make that cause it seems offaly familiar.)

You are right about the reads in the news posts, I'm removing them now.

As for your last, and most important comment, its for internal communication and for communication with the public. I really would appreciate it if you elaborate on the confusing and hostile part.

[edit]I am opposed to the deletion of Roland's post. It was very useful to me, and the only person it could have affected negatively was me. I have told David Kelly and Roland that.[/edit]

[Roland]

Originally Posted by Max Lobovsky

Hey, thanks, really. But just a tip, don't do that to anyone else on this site. I bet you have already got about 125 private messages and negative reputations from people who don't even know me...

I know about the nested boxes. I just never got to fixing them (its a bit harder than you think because I am trying to keep good semantic code, and IE's lack of the child selector in CSS is making it a real pain...)

I only have the page render time displayed because the site isn't in final production mode. I need it for my own reference as I work on it. It will be displayed silently in an HTML comment in the future.

As for the icon, I am kind of aesthetics and creativity blind. I asked some freshman to make an icon and just put up whatever he made. (I'm pretty sure he didn't even make that cause it seems offaly familiar.)

You are right about the reads in the news posts, I'm removing them now.

As for your last, and most important comment, its for internal communication and for communication with the public. I really would appreciate it if you elaborate on the confusing and hostile part.

I really appreciate that you didn't take my post the wrong way. I know that a lot of people on this site would be greatly offended by that, but I'm glad you weren't. Anyway, on the confusing and hostile bit: what I meant by that is that it doesn't seem to be very welcoming to a new visitor. If you look at it at 800x600 you see a big photo, two lines of very basic description of the team, and a bunch of news posts. Scaling down the image seems to have helped make the page look a lot more balanced, but there's still very little background on the main page. Even a couple more sentences about what FIRST is would probably help. Something roughly like this, borrowing liberally from your existing description and FIRST's site:

Parallel Universe is a joint effort of the Union County Magnet and Vocational-Technical High Schools. We participate as team 1257 in the FIRST Robotics Competition, a hands-on science and technology program that teams professionals with young people to solve an engineering design problem in an intense and competitive way. Learn more about our team, or read background on FIRST Robotics.

It's been my experience that things like that engage visitors more instead of making them wonder where they are and what's going on. Feel free to PM me if you want to talk to me more about this - my inbox isn't completely full yet