Tuesday, April 15, 2008

More suggestions and another page idea

( note: Please don't view any of these demonstration pages in IE yet. IE eats baby rabbits. ...no actually I was just too lazy to fix the tags )

1. Slimming down news space

The scrolling box I mentioned in my previous post would be a great way to fix more new into less real estate. But what user will ever care to scroll it to look? The news needs to show itself by itself. There are several ways to do that.

Whenever I ask IE to do anything beyond html (or even just html...), it bellyaches about it first, even simple things, so it's hard to add dynamic elements sometimes because of that. But everyone uses it so we have to choose things that it can digest.

I'm really happy with this kind of news box.
http://www.ulm.edu/~niemla/homedemos/ticker2.html
This doesn't seem to bother IE (at least on my computer it doesn't!). I can put links in it and everything, and the XML file that comes with it is really easy to understand. In fact, the text you see inside is from the XML file. You don't even have to touch the html file to change it.
I can probably change the color and size of the box.

Scrolling text would be a lot classier, but it's hard to find one that won't make IE nervous. Here's an example of a scrolling ticker:
http://www.ulm.edu/~niemla/homedemos/ticker.html

2. Another link layout idea

To begin, do not think of this as anything like a final product or even the idea we'll use. I realize everything looks wrong, but we're not even at that part yet anyway.
http://ulm.edu/%7Eniemla/homedemos/homexxx22222.html

Here's an image with "commentary" (click to enlarge):
I also feel as if "tutorials" should be called "learning" or "how to." Although those don't really describe it either. The hours link should maybe be closer together, but that's no big deal right now.

Here's an image of what it looks like at 800x600 resolution also:

There is still some space left. So there's room for a little bit more spacing and other things on the page. No matter what we do, a good rule of thumb ought to be this: if it won't fit into 800x600, there's too much stuff.

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